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Green Peas, Basquaise
Place in a small saucepan one chopped, seedless green pepper, four chopped shallots, and one ounce ham cut in quarter-inch-square pieces, add one tablespoon good leaf lard, then cook on fire for five minutes; add one chopped bean garlic and one finely sliced leek, stir well, then add one pint shelled, fresh peas. Moisten with one pint broth, season with a light teaspoon each salt and sugar and two saltspoons pepper, stir well, cover pan, cook on range for ten minutes and set in oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove, add one ounce good butter, toss till well thickened, dress peas in a vegetable dish and serve.
A Basque-style braise of peas with ham, pepper and alliums. Everything here is workable in a modern kitchen except the cooking time, which belongs to an era of larger, starchier peas.
- Timing is the hingeTen minutes on the range plus thirty-five in the oven will reduce today's peas to grey mush. Garden peas picked young, or frozen ones, want 8-12 minutes total in the simmering broth; add them after the ham, pepper, garlic and leek have softened, and stop when they are tender but still round.
- "One chopped bean garlic"A bean of garlic is a clove. The phrasing probably reflects a literal-minded rendering of the French gousse (a pod or husk).
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is a half teaspoon: assertive but correct for a pint of peas in broth.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book supplies no oven-heat term to work from. If you want to finish the dish in the oven at all, a moderate oven, covered, is a reasonable guess; a shorter covered braise on the stovetop gives you more control over the peas.
- Leaf lardThe fat from around the pig's kidneys, mild and very white. Any good rendered lard works, or use the fat rendered from a fattier piece of the ham; butter or olive oil will do without much loss since an ounce of butter is finished into the dish anyway.
- The green pepper"Seedless" simply means deseeded. In a Basquaise the pepper would traditionally be a sweet green frying type rather than a thick-walled bell; a cubanelle or Anaheim is closer in flavour and cooks down faster.
- The pint of brothThat is a great deal of liquid for a pint of peas, and it assumes a long braise and heavy reduction. With shorter cooking, use enough broth to barely cover, then reduce it hard before mounting the butter.
- FinishingThe butter tossed in at the end is a monter au beurre; the pan should be off direct heat and the liquid glossy, not boiling, or the sauce will break rather than thicken.
- YieldA pint of shelled peas serves four as a side.
Basquaise on a menu signals the cooking of the French and Spanish Basque country, and in practice it means the presence of peppers, garlic, onion or shallot, and cured pork -- the same trio that underpins piperade and poulet basquaise. Peppers reached the Basque provinces from the Americas by way of Spain and were absorbed into the local kitchen so thoroughly that by the nineteenth century French chefs treated them as a regional signature. The book's ham, chopped fine and used as seasoning rather than as meat, is the other half of that signature. Peas braised with pork fat and aromatics rather than boiled plain appears to have been common enough in French cooking of the period, and the long oven time may well reflect field peas that were older and starchier than anything sold shelled or frozen today.