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Peas with Pork
1 tablespoon butter cup water 2 small white onions teaspoon pepper Cut pork into small bits. Put butter in stewpan, cover and place over the fire. When butter is melted, add pork and cook gently until a light brown, then add water, peas, onion and pepper. This is a good way to cook peas when they are a little old and hard. 1 quart peas 2 tablespoons butter
A simple braise of old peas with salt pork, from the era when peas were shelled by the quart and toughened fast in the pod. The ingredient list as printed has lost several of its fractions, so treat the amounts below as guidance rather than gospel.
- The porkThe recipe never says what cut or how much. "Pork" in a vegetable dish of this period is often salt pork or fat back rather than a fresh cut, though the added butter here may point to something leaner. Figure 2 to 4 oz, diced small; if it is heavily salted, blanch it briefly or expect no added salt in the dish.
- Render, don't fryThe hinge is the covered pan. Melting the butter under a lid and cooking the pork gently draws out the fat without scorching it, so the browning stays light and the peas taste of pork rather than of burnt drippings.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe water and pepper are given as "cup" and "teaspoon" with the fractions missing. A half cup of water is right for a quart of peas in a covered pan, and a quarter teaspoon of pepper is a plausible reading; both are inferences, not the original figures.
- A quart of peasAlmost certainly shelled peas, which is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, or about 4 cups. That is a large amount of shelling: some 3 lb of pods. Frozen peas substitute directly by volume, but see the note on timing.
- StewpanAny heavy saucepan or small Dutch oven with a tight lid. The point is a vessel that holds steam, since the half cup of water has to do the work of braising four cups of peas.
- Timing for old peasThis is a recipe for starchy end-of-season peas, which want 20 to 30 minutes covered over low heat until tender. Young or frozen peas collapse in that time; add them in the last 5 minutes, after the pork and onion have flavoured the liquid.
- The onions"Two small white onions" most likely means small whole onions, peeled and left whole or halved rather than diced, though the recipe does not say. They soften alongside the peas and are served with them.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. It needs no thickening: the peas break down enough to bind the small amount of liquid.
Peas cooked with a scrap of salt pork is one of the oldest and most widespread ways of handling the vegetable in English and American kitchens, and it survives in everything from pease pottage to Southern field peas with a piece of fatback. What dates this version is its stated purpose: it is a recipe for peas that are "a little old and hard." Before year-round freezing and air freight, peas were a fleeting crop that turned starchy within days of picking, and some cookbooks offered separate treatments for the tender first pickings and for what came later. The pork does double duty, adding fat that coats the starchy skins and a slow braise that softens them.