Home › The World's Kitchen › Fresh Peas with Tarragon
Fresh Peas with Tarragon
Prepare peas adding a teaspoon freshly chopped fresh tarragon leaves, toss well while heating for two minutes, pour into a hot deep dish and serve.
A fragment of a recipe that assumes you have already read the page above it: "prepare peas" means cook them plainly by whatever method the book has just described, usually boiled or stewed briefly in salted water with a lump of butter. Everything that matters here happens in the last two minutes.
- The basePresumably cooked buttered peas, though the recipe itself specifies nothing: allow about 3 lb peas in the pod for 1 lb (roughly 3 cups) shelled, simmered in lightly salted water until just tender, drained, then returned to the pan with butter. Fresh peas at their best need 3-5 minutes; older, starchier ones a few minutes more.
- The two minutes are the pointTarragon's anise note is volatile and it turns hay-like with long heat. Adding it off the boil and tossing over low heat for two minutes warms the leaf enough to release its oil without cooking it out.
- Quantity of tarragonA teaspoon of chopped fresh leaves is modest for a pound of peas and can be doubled. If substituting dried, use a scant third of the amount, and expect a flatter flavour; French tarragon rather than the near-flavourless Russian is the better choice here, though the recipe does not specify.
- Frozen peasPetits pois work well and need only to be heated through, which effectively merges the cooking and the tossing into a single two-minute step.
- The hot deep dishNot decoration. Peas dressed in butter cool fast and the butter congeals; warming the serving bowl keeps the sauce fluid to the table.
- YieldA pound of shelled peas serves four as a side dish.
Peas and tarragon is a French pairing. Tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus) was among the herbs often said to signal a French hand in the kitchen to English-speaking cooks of the period, along with chervil and shallot, and it appears again and again in these books attached to eggs, chicken and fresh vegetables. The instruction to "prepare peas" and then vary them suggests how such volumes may have been organised: a plain method is given once, and a run of one-line variations follows, each changing a single herb or garnish. It reflects a kitchen where fresh green peas were strictly seasonal and briefly abundant, and where a cook needed several ways to serve them across the few weeks they lasted.