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A Salad of Fresh Peas
A delicious salad is made of one pint of fresh peas which have been cooked, drained and chilled, and an equal quantity of English walnuts, blanched and cut the size of the peas. These are mixed, seasoned with salt and mayonnaise dressing, served on lettuce or cress.
A three-ingredient salad that depends entirely on the peas being young and barely cooked. Nothing here is difficult; everything here is easy to overcook.
- The hinge: cook the peas brieflyFresh shelled peas need 2-3 minutes in salted boiling water, then an immediate plunge into ice water to set the color and stop the cooking. Nineteenth-century instructions to boil peas twenty minutes or more assumed older, starchier peas; a modern sweet pea boiled that long turns grey and mealy and the salad collapses.
- A pint is two cupsOne pint of shelled peas is about 2 cups, roughly 10 oz, which means 2 to 2.5 lb of peas in the pod. If pods are out of season, frozen petite peas thawed and briefly blanched are closer to the intent here than canned.
- An equal quantity of walnuts is a lotTwo cups of walnut halves against two cups of peas gives a very rich, nut-forward salad. Half that quantity of nuts is more palatable to most modern tastes, though the original proportion is what makes it read as a substantial dish rather than a garnish.
- English walnuts, blanched"English walnut" is simply the common walnut, as distinguished from the American black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the peas. Blanching means pouring boiling water over the shelled nuts, letting them stand a few minutes, then rubbing off the papery skin; this removes the bitter tannin. Expect it to be fiddly and imperfect.
- Cut the size of the peasThis is not decorative. Nuts chopped to pea size distribute evenly and let a spoonful pick up both at once; larger pieces separate out and sit at the bottom of the bowl.
- Mayonnaise dressingPeriod mayonnaise was made to order with raw yolk and oil and was looser than jarred mayonnaise today. Thinning commercial mayonnaise with a little lemon juice or cream gives something closer to what the book means, and about 1/3 to 1/2 cup will dress this quantity. Dress it just before serving or the peas weep.
- ServingAs a first course or a side, this makes about four servings. Cress here means garden or watercress, used as a bed rather than tossed through.
Composed salads of this kind — a cooked vegetable, a nut, mayonnaise, and a lettuce leaf underneath — were the fashionable middle of American entertaining around 1900, when the salad course moved from a plain dressed green to something arranged and slightly showy. Mayonnaise was central to that shift: it was made by hand in the kitchen. The particular pairing of green peas with walnuts belongs to a broad turn-of-the-century habit of adding nuts to almost everything savory, and English walnuts were the usual choice, mild enough not to fight the other ingredients.