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Puree of Peas
(French.) This puree of peas, or of any other vegetable, can be served as a separate course or for the foundation of an entree, chops, or sweetbreads, or to fill an omelette, or garnish a roast. Boil 1 quart of green or dried peas with a bunch of parsley, an onion sliced, salt, and a little butter, using only enough water to moisten. Drain, when tender, press through a sieve, add some more butter, a pinch of sugar, and some pepper. Smooth into a neat mound, if used for a garnish.
A French purée in the older sense: cooked vegetable pressed through a sieve and enriched with butter, stiff enough to hold a shape. The instructions assume you know how much butter to use and when to stop cooking, so a few numbers help.
- A quart of peasMeasured by volume, not weight. A quart of shelled fresh peas is about 4 cups, roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, and yields close to 3 cups of puree. A quart of dried split peas is a much larger quantity of food once cooked and will feed eight or more.
- Fresh or dried is not interchangeableFresh or frozen peas are tender in 5 to 10 minutes. Dried split peas need 45 minutes to an hour and enough liquid to stay covered; whole dried peas want an overnight soak first. The recipe's "only enough water to moisten" applies to the fresh version.
- Watch the panCooking in barely any water is the point — it keeps the flavour in the peas rather than the cooking liquid — but it scorches easily. Use a heavy pan with a tight lid over low heat and check every few minutes.
- Pull the parsley outThe bunch is there for flavour, tied or left whole so it can be lifted away before the peas go through the sieve. Stalks will otherwise leave threads in the purée.
- Sieve or machineA food mill or drum sieve gives the smoothest result and leaves the skins behind. A blender or processor is faster but the skins stay in; pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards if you want it fine enough to pipe.
- How much butterUnspecified in both places. Reckon on a tablespoon in the pan and 2 to 4 tablespoons worked in at the end, to taste. Add it off the heat, in pieces, so it emulsifies rather than oiling out.
- Consistency for a moundTo hold a shape beside a roast the purée must be dry — return it to the pan over low heat and stir until it pulls away from the sides before adding the finishing butter. For filling an omelette or a bed under chops it can be looser.
- YieldAbout 3 cups from fresh peas: four servings as a vegetable course, six to eight as a garnish or base.
Purées of this kind belong to the classical French kitchen's system of foundations rather than to any single dish — the same method, given here for peas, was applied to carrots, turnips, chestnuts, lentils and dried beans, and the results were named after the vegetable (purée Saint-Germain is the pea version, the name generally traced to the market gardens west of Paris). The instruction to boil in almost no water and then press through a sieve is the older technique, from long before food mills or blenders; the sieve did the work of removing skins that a machine cannot. Its appearance in an English-language book, flagged plainly as "(French.)", reflects how thoroughly Anglo-American household cookery had come to treat French practice as the mark of a good table, and how useful a cook found one preparation that could serve as a course, a bed for chops or sweetbreads, an omelette filling, and a garnish.