Perfect Peas

Pick a peck of petit pois

By Bruce Cole - Published 05.26.04

May is almost over and June is just around the corner, which means that in my home town, the season known as "the coldest winter I ever spent was the summer in San Francisco", is here. Basically, and this is a hint for those of you about to make your first trip to San Francisco this summer, it means that the weather sucks. Cold, fog, cold and fog, and cold foggy fog. Pack a sweater and leave your shorts at home.

Meanwhile, down south in So Cal, the weather is hot, shorts are mandatory, and the melons mingle with the movie stars, all of this in the land of the plenty - also known as the Santa Monica Farmers Market. It's where you'll probably find Russ Parsons, James Beard Award Winning Food Writer for the LA Times. He's eating bing cherries, fava beans, and sugar snaps. He's waiting for the Blenheim apricots, Santa Rosa plums and Harry's Berries green beans. He's passing on the melons though. But he's committing the biggest sin of all, buying fresh English peas.

If you've bought your English peas at the farmers market they are already past their prime. You may as well toss them on the compost pile. Sorry. The only way to eat peas, and this is according to the ultimate authority, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, so when I say the only way, I think you know what I mean, is to pluck those waxy green pods straight from the vine, and run with them, don't walk, directly into your kitchen where you will quickly shell, and then toss them into a pot with a pat of butter, a pinch of salt and pepper, plunk the lid down, and count to 60. "while the peas came off their stems and into the baskets with a small sound audible in that still high air, so many hundred feet above the distant and completely silent Léman...We raced through the rest of the shelling, and then...I dashed like an eighteenth-century courier on a secret mission of utmost military importance, the pot cautiously braced in front of me, to the little hearth...when the scant half-inch of water boiled, I tossed in the peas...and slapped on the heavy lid as if a devil might get out...the minute steam showed I shook the whole like mad...after one more shake I whipped off the lid and threw in the big pat of butter...I shook in salt and pepper...then I ran like hell...to the table."

Only then is it ok to eat them. You can double your pleasure if the view from your dinner table happens to be of the Swiss Alps reflected in Lac Léman, or Lake Geneva, as it’s known to us tourists, and the wine in your glass is a crisp cold Dezelay. "But what really mattered, what piped the high unforgettable tune of perfection, were the peas, which came from their hot pot onto our thick china plates in a cloud, a kind of miasma, of everything that anyone could ever want from them, even in a dream." (MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating, Vintage Books Edition, © 1976)

Personally, I look over my shoulder practically every single time I buy some petit pois, because I imagine MFK Fisher frowning in disgust at the thought of purchasing such imperfect pods. Talk about pea paranoia. I imagine her sneaking up behind me in the kitchen as I'm shelling the peas and pulling, no, yanking on my ear, just like Mrs. Garlinger, my second grade teacher did, when I wasn't paying attention in class. Only after she'd dragged me by the ear to the blackboard and I finished writing "I will only eat freshly plucked peas from my garden", 100 hundred times, would I be allowed back into the kitchen.

On the other hand though, the Sylvia Thompson method for cooking peas that you mention in your column Russ, sounds awfully damn good. "Put whole peas, in their pod, in a skillet with about an inch of water. Add a little butter and cook until the pods just soften, only 2 to 3 minutes. Sprinkle generously with coarse salt and serve. Eat these by sticking the whole pod in your mouth and pulling it between your teeth, stripping off some of the green covering and popping free all of the peas. It's addictive." I'm gonna try it next time I buy some peas, but first I'll make sure that I'm alone in the kitchen.

Russ Parson's column in the LA Times, Spring into Summer.

Previously:

Red Indian Ice Cream