Home › Game › Lettuce, with Green Peas
Lettuce, with Green Peas
Anyone who tries cooking lettuce with green peas, will be sure to admit the dish to her regular culinary list of good things. The coarse leaves of the head can be used, and the proportion should be one cupful of peas to three of lettuce. Put the lettuce in the bottom of the saucepan, add a half cupful of water, let cook very slowly in order to draw the water from the lettuce, drain and season with the peas.
A four-line vegetable dish that assumes more than it states: the peas are cooked separately, and the lettuce is meant to stew in its own moisture rather than boil.
- The hinge: no boiling waterThe recipe says to cook very slowly "in order to draw the water from the lettuce," so the half cupful appears to be there only to keep the pan from scorching until the leaves release their own liquid. Keep the heat very low and cover the pan; the leaves should collapse in roughly ten minutes into something silky rather than grey and waterlogged.
- Proportions by volumeThree parts lettuce to one part peas, as the recipe states. Lettuce shrinks a great deal in the pan, so three cups raw will cook down to a small fraction of that, which is roughly what brings the two vegetables into balance on the plate.
- "Coarse leaves of the head"This is a thrift recipe for the tough outer leaves of a head lettuce, the ones normally discarded. Any firm-leaved head will do; the outer leaves stand up to slow cooking better than the tenderest inner ones.
- The peas are already cookedThe peas are probably already cooked -- "Season with the peas" most likely means folding in hot cooked peas at the end. Fresh shelled peas need 3 to 5 minutes in salted water; frozen need about 2. There is unlikely to be enough liquid left in the lettuce pan to cook raw peas.
- Seasoning is left to youThe book says only "season." A tablespoon of butter, salt and pepper is period-appropriate; a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream suits the dish as well.
- Drain wellPress the cooked lettuce gently in the sieve. Any liquid left behind will pool and dilute the butter.
- YieldThree cups of raw lettuce and one of peas serves two as a side dish. Scale up freely, but use a wide pan so the lettuce wilts in a shallow layer instead of steaming in a heap.
Cooked lettuce startles modern readers, but it was unremarkable in nineteenth-century kitchens on both sides of the Atlantic, where salad greens were seasonal, often gritty, and too valuable to throw away when they bolted or coarsened. The pairing with peas is generally traced to the French petits pois à la française, in which shelled peas are braised with shredded lettuce, spring onions and butter in barely any liquid at all; American household books simplified it into a plain two-vegetable side. The defensive opening line, promising that anyone who tries it "will be sure to admit the dish," suggests the author already expected resistance from cooks who thought of lettuce as a raw salad and nothing else.