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Blanks and Prizes
1/2 peck green peas ½ peck beans 1 lb. bacon Salt and pepper to taste Shell the peas and beans and boil them separately in boiling salted water till tender; cut the bacon into dice and fry it; drain the peas and beans and place them in a hot vegetable dish, Salmagundi" of alternate layers of cooked ham, eggs, olives, parsley and dressing "Hen's-Nest Eggs" are tasty for luncheon, utilizing cold chicken with hard-cooked eggs. The whites are used as a garnish 66 Bedspreads" is the odd name of a savory that may be made in a chafing dish. It is easily and quickly made, then spread over anchovy toast and served hot
What survives here is a plain market-garden dish: two kinds of shelled legume boiled separately, dressed with fried bacon dice and its fat. The quantities are given in dry measure for produce still in the pod, so the finished volume is far smaller than the numbers suggest.
- A peck in the podA peck is 8 dry quarts of pods, on the order of 7-8 lb of peas in the pod. Half a peck probably shells out to something like 1 to 1 1/2 lb of peas -- four to six servings, not a banquet.
- The bean quantity is out of proportionAs printed, the beans outweigh the peas threefold, which does not match the single pound of bacon or a normal family dish. Half a peck of each, cooked and combined in roughly equal parts, is the sensible reading.
- Cook them apart, and whyPeas need 3-5 minutes in boiling salted water; shelled beans want 10-20 minutes depending on type and age. Boiling them together guarantees one is grey and the other chalky.
- "Beans" hereIn a household book of this kind this most likely means broad beans or shelled runner beans rather than dried haricots, though the page does not say which. Frozen broad beans or edamame stand in well; if you use dried beans they must be soaked and simmered until tender before anything else happens.
- The bacon does double dutyFry the dice slowly so the fat renders out. The text breaks off before it says what becomes of the fat, but pouring fat and all over the drained vegetables gives the dish its only dressing. Salt cautiously afterwards, since the bacon and the cooking water have both salted the peas already.
- Season and serve at oncePeas dressed in bacon fat lose their gloss as they cool and the fat sets on the plate. Have the vegetable dish genuinely hot and take it straight to the table.
Boiled peas and beans finished with diced fried bacon is a long-standing pattern in kitchen cookery -- a garden crop stretched with a little cured pork, cheap when peas were in glut. Measuring the produce by the peck, a dry measure of eight quarts, suggests a period when vegetables were bought by volume in the pod from a market or brought in from a kitchen garden, rather than trimmed and weighed. The other dishes named on this page belong to the same repertoire of thrift: salmagundi, a layered salad of cold cooked meat, hard-boiled egg, olives and parsley, was already an old English name by the eighteenth century, and chafing-dish savouries spread on anchovy toast were a common late-Victorian and Edwardian way of ending a meal or filling out a luncheon.