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Green Peas, Canned
Thoroughly drain a pint of canned green peas; then plunge them into a small saucepan with a pint of boiling water for two minutes. Drain well through a strainer and replace them in the saucepan; add one tablespoon good butter, half teaspoon salt, one teaspoon powdered sugar and one saltspoon white pepper. Shuffle or toss them well in the pan without cooking again. Pour them into a hot, deep dish and serve.
A two-minute refresh and a butter toss, which is still the best treatment for canned peas. The whole point is that they are already cooked; anything beyond warming turns them grey and mealy.
- Do not cook them againThe blanch is to rinse away the tinny, starchy canning liquor and heat the peas through, nothing more. Once the butter and seasonings go in, the pan comes off the heat and the peas are tossed only until coated.
- A pint of peasA pint is two cups. Drained, that is roughly a can and a half of the standard 15-ounce size. Enough for about four as a side.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. It was a real piece of Victorian flatware, the smallest spoon in the caddy.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period this usually means finely granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary granulated sugar dissolves fine in the hot butter; use the same teaspoon.
- "Shuffle" the panAn old kitchen term for the jerking motion that tosses food without a spoon. It matters here because stirring canned peas breaks their skins and leaves mush at the bottom of the dish.
- Serve hot and fastThe dish is warmed for a reason: a pint of peas in a cold bowl loses its heat almost immediately, and the butter congeals. Have the dish in a low oven while the peas drain.
Canned peas were one of the earliest commercial successes of the tinning industry, and by the time this book appeared they were a year-round staple in American and European households that would once have seen fresh peas for only a few weeks in early summer. The quality was uneven, and the metallic, over-salted brine was a standing complaint, which is why cookbooks of the era often prescribe the same corrective: drain, plunge into fresh boiling water, drain again, then rebuild the flavour with butter, a pinch of sugar to restore the sweetness lost in processing, and white pepper, conventionally preferred so the finished dish shows no dark specks. The sugar is not a modern sweet tooth but a repair. That this bare-bones entry earns a place in a book called The International Cook Book says a good deal about how the pantry tin had become a genuine part of the everyday kitchen rather than an emergency measure.