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Green Peas
Shell and put into boiling water, cook from thirty to thirty-five minutes; drain and season with rich milk or cream, butter, pepper, and salt; some cooks also add a little flour or corn starch to thicken the gravy, but which should be used very sparingly, not more than a teaspoon. Be sure the peas are young; old peas are fit for nothing but soup.
A plain buttered-pea recipe of the sort that filled the vegetable chapter of every late-nineteenth-century American household book. Only one instruction needs overturning, and it is the timing.
- Thirty-five minutes is the wrong numberShelled young peas are done in 3 to 5 minutes in boiling water; frozen peas need 2 to 3. At half an hour they turn khaki, split their skins and lose their sugar. The long time probably reflects garden peas of mixed maturity, some of which would already have starched up before they reached the pot.
- Why the book insists on young peasPeas convert sugar to starch rapidly after picking, which is why the note about old peas being fit only for soup is sound. Market peas today are usually days old; if you cannot get them same-day from a garden or farm stand, frozen peas are genuinely sweeter.
- "Rich milk or cream"Rich milk meant milk that had not been skimmed, with its cream still in it. Half-and-half is the nearest equivalent; heavy cream will read as heavier than intended.
- The flour or cornstarchThe warning to use it sparingly is worth keeping. A teaspoon of flour whisked into the cream, or half a teaspoon of cornstarch slaked in cold milk, is enough to coat a pound of peas. More than that gives you creamed peas of the school-cafeteria kind.
- Salt the water, not just the peasThe recipe seasons only at the end. A well-salted cooking water seasons the peas from within; a pinch of sugar in it compensates for peas past their best.
- DrainingDrain thoroughly and return the peas to the dry hot pan for a few seconds before adding butter and cream, or the sauce will be watery.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon 1 lb of peas in the pod per two people, which yields roughly a cup of shelled peas; 2 to 3 lb makes a side dish for a family.
Green peas held a particular place in the nineteenth-century American calendar: they were an early-summer vegetable, arrived in a short glut, and were shelled at home rather than bought ready. Cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s gave them long boiling by modern standards, a habit inherited from the period's general approach to vegetables and from the practical fact that a basket of pods rarely held peas of one age. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in 1874 from recipes contributed by local women, and pages like this one carry the marks of that origin: no quantities, no yield, but a firm opinion about ingredients and a passing note on what other cooks do. The verdict that old peas are "fit for nothing but soup" reflects the split treatment peas received in kitchens of the period, where mature or dried peas went into the split-pea soups and purees while only the young sweet ones were served buttered as a vegetable in their own right.