No. 2747

Green Peas with Shredded Lettuces

Petits Pois aux Laitues Ciselees

Put a pound and a half of fresh green peas, recently shelled, into a saucepan with two tender lettuce heads shredded up coarsely, one small onion, a bunch of parsley, salt, a pinch of sugar and sufficient cold water to reach to about their height; cover the saucepan and cook for twenty to twenty-five minutes on a hot fire. Suppress the parsley and onion, thicken the liquid with a small piece of butter kneaded with flour (No. 579), and finish off the fire with a lump of fresh butter divided in small pats.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic petits pois à la française in miniature: peas stewed in barely enough water with shredded lettuce, then bound with butter. Nearly everything here is fine as written except the cooking time, which was set for the peas of Ranhofer's day.

The timing is the hingeTwenty to twenty-five minutes will reduce modern garden or frozen peas to grey mush. Fresh young peas need 6-10 minutes, frozen peas 3-4; judge by tenderness, not the clock, and let the lettuce go in for the last few minutes so it wilts rather than dissolves.
How much pea"A pound and a half of fresh green peas, recently shelled" reads as shelled weight, which is roughly 4 to 4.5 lb of peas in the pod. If you are working from pods, weigh after shelling. Two 1 lb bags of frozen petits pois are a fair stand-in and are often sweeter than what a market sells shelled.
CiseléesCiselees -- Ranhofer's own instruction is 'shredded up coarsely', so cut wide rather than fine, whatever the French term usually implies: quarter the lettuce heads through the core, then cut across into wide ribbons. Butterhead or a firm romaine heart holds up best; loose-leaf types collapse to nothing.
Water level"Sufficient cold water to reach to about their height" means just level with the peas, not covering them. The liquid is meant to reduce to a few spoonfuls of sauce, so start with less than you think and add a splash only if the pan goes dry.
Onion and parsleyBoth go in whole and are lifted out before serving -- "suppress" here simply means remove. A small peeled onion and a tied bundle of parsley stems are easiest to fish out.
No. 579 is beurre maniéEqual weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked in off the boil to thicken. For this quantity, about 2 teaspoons of each is plenty; more will make the liquid pasty.
Finishing off the fireThe final butter is monter au beurre: pull the pan from the heat and swirl in 2-3 tablespoons of cold butter in small pieces, a few at a time, so it emulsifies into the liquid instead of splitting into an oil slick.
Seasoning and yieldThe pinch of sugar is there to prop up the sweetness of peas that have sat; skip it with frozen petits pois, which are already sweet. Serves six as a vegetable alongside a roast, four if it stands more or less on its own.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete manual of the French kitchen as it was practised in New York, and this recipe sits alongside a numbered preparation of braised lettuces, all descending from the French household dish petits pois à la française. Cooking peas with lettuce is generally traced to French kitchen practice of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the young green pea arrived as a luxury at the court of Louis XIV and was treated with a delicacy that older, drier field peas never earned; the lettuce contributes moisture and a faint bitterness, and in some versions its leaves were also used as a lid to trap steam over the peas. That the book numbers such closely related preparations separately says a good deal about how a Gilded Age restaurant kitchen worked: a repertoire built from small, precisely differentiated permutations that a cook was expected to execute on call.