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Peas Porridge
(England.) Cook 1 quart of peas in a quart of water, with a tablespoonful of dried mint, and a tablespoonful of butter. Boil, covered, slowly for 2 hours, add salt and pepper, and some butter rolled in flour. Stir, add a pint of hot milk, and press through a sieve. It should be thick. Serve hot. ASPARAGUS (as cooked in France.).
Wash the heads and boil in salted water for 20 minutes. Drain, cut off the green or tender parts, mince it finely, with an onion to each bundle, chopped fine, salt, pepper, and the beaten yolk of an egg. Stir until hot, and pour over slices of toast.
ASPARAGUS (as cooked in Spain.).
Boil the asparagus in salted water, drain it, and cut into equal lengths, discarding the tough parts. Arrange on a dish, and edge it with 1 dozen freshly poached eggs, cooked in vinegar and water. Pour over all a good sauce, Hollandaise or Bechamel or caper. Serve hot.
SPINACH (as cooked in France and Germany.).
Plunge the spinach into boiling salted water; when tender, drain it and chop very fine. Add to each pint, 1 ounce of butter, 1 ounce of flour, and 1 gill of cream or white stock. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Press through a sieve, and arrange on a dish in a mound. Garnish with sliced hard-boiled eggs. STRING BEANS (as cooked in Brittany.). a String and cut into dice 1 quart of nice young beans, boil in salted water; when tender, drain them and put in a saucepan with an ounce of butter, a tablespoonful of finely chopped onion, and fry them lightly. Add parsley, pepper, and salt, 1 cup of white broth or hot milk, and the juice of a lemon. Serve at once.
WHITE BEANS (as cooked in Brittany.).
These are often served with roast lamb or leg of mutton. Boil 1 pound of dried beans, drain them,--they should have been soaked overnight,--add 2 ounces butter, a tablespoonful of lemon juice or tarragon vinegar, and salt, pepper, and a cupful of a consomme. Press through a sieve, and arrange in a mound.
A page of six vegetable dishes, each attributed to a different country, in the compressed style of turn-of-the-century cookbooks that assumed the cook already knew the basics. Several of the timings are far longer than modern practice, and one measurement in the porridge is genuinely unworkable as printed.
- The peas are dried, not freshA quart of peas boiled two hours and pressed through a sieve can only mean dried peas — split green or yellow peas, the "pease" of English tradition. Fresh peas treated this way would be grey mush in twenty minutes.
- The water is shortA quart of dried peas to a quart of water is not enough liquid; dried peas absorb roughly two to three times their volume. Expect to add water during the two hours, or start with about three quarts. The recipe's own instruction, "it should be thick," is the target to cook toward.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié — equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste, dropped in to thicken at the end. About a tablespoon of each is right for this quantity.
- A gillIn the spinach dish, a gill is a quarter-pint: 4 fl oz (half a cup) by US measure, 5 fl oz if the book is reckoning in imperial. "White stock" and "white broth" both mean a pale unbrowned chicken or veal stock; light chicken stock is the modern equivalent.
- Asparagus for 20 minutesTwenty minutes in boiling water is common in cookbooks of this period and produces grey, collapsed spears. Modern spears need 3-5 minutes for thin, 5-7 for thick. The French version minces the asparagus anyway, so it is more forgiving than the Spanish one, where the drained lengths are arranged on the dish and their condition shows.
- Poaching in vinegar and waterA dozen poached eggs edging one dish of asparagus points to a large table. The vinegar helps the whites set; a tablespoon or two per quart of water is plenty, more than that and the eggs taste of it.
- Pressing through a sieveThree of these dishes end with a sieve, the standard purée tool of the period. A food mill or a short pulse in a blender does the same work; avoid over-processing the bean and pea purées, which turn gluey.
- YieldThe peas porridge makes something over 2 quarts of thick purée once the milk goes in, enough for a large table. The pound of white beans is a side dish alongside roast lamb, as the recipe suggests.
"Peas porridge" is the dish behind the nursery rhyme — "Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old" — and the older spelling, pease, was a mass noun, like rice, long before English speakers back-formed a singular "pea" from it. Dried field peas were a staple of the English poor for centuries because they keep well and cook into something filling with almost no fat or meat; the rhyme's nine-day-old pot is often taken to suggest that the dish was kept and reheated over several days, though that is an inference from the rhyme itself. Mint with peas is a long-standing English pairing, and using it dried here rather than fresh points to a winter dish made from the store cupboard rather than the garden. This page belongs to a genre popular around 1900, the collection of national dishes gathered for the home cook: each recipe is labelled with a country and pared to a few lines, less a faithful record of French or Breton practice than an invitation to cook something that sounded foreign.