Peas in a pod - and out of it

A recipe for summer pea soup

Find more newsletters with opinions and recipes here. If you want to take issue, please Comment.

This an ode to one of my favourite fruits: the pea.

Yes indeed. Because it develops from a flower into a pod which contains its seeds, botanically speaking the pea does not qualify as a vegetable. 

It was a ritual of childhood summers that my sister and I were not released to disappear on all-day adventures until we had picked a dish of peas for supper and podded them. If I’d known then that like other members of the Fabaceae or Leguminosae family of peas and beans - along with sweetcorn, that member of the grass family - they begin to starch up the moment they’ve been picked, we might have left the podding till the end of day and escaped sooner. Only once a basinful of jade beads was delivered to the kitchen could we retrieve our bicycles from their tangle in the shed and vanish. Back then, no-one had any idea of and even less interest in where, helmet-less, we had pedalled nor how long we would be gone. We were only instructed to be back in time to lay the table. 
 
Lovingly tended by our father, the peas grew up sticks that spread like stretched hands. Their inventive country name was ‘pea sticks’, and we culled them from leafless copses on winter woodland walks.

In Wellingtons as green as the pea pods would become, father planted peas in the bald days of barren winter all the way through to leafy early summer. The first crop emerging in late June heralded heat and the promise of school holidays. 

If you don’t have them growing in your backyard or on your balcony (don’t snort - the bush variety grows well in flowerpots), it’s only fair to say fresh peas are probably not worth buying. They are likely to be hard as bullets and starchy, not those bursts of sweetness nestling inside a pea pod pinched open with a satisfying pop. Anyway, they are about the one vegetable that is just as good - some might say even better - cooked from frozen.

For some reason, they feel very Northern European as vegetables. English, even. But evidence has been found of them growing in Georgia (ex-USSR, not USA) in 5000 BC. Not long after, relatively speaking, around 4800 BC, they appear to have been grown in the Nile Delta. Two thousand years after that they were found in Afghanistan, then, creeping ever southwards, in what is now Pakistan, and later in north-west India. 

Peas were grown for drying to eat as a porridge or potage back in the Middle Ages, as now in the North of England - which if you attend to some members of the current British government they appear to think that area still is in. Dried marrow-fat peas provide the famous mushy peas slump that is the essential partner to fish-and-chips. 

Do not make the mistake of dismissing the pea as merely a fruit (go back to paragraph 2 if you’re puzzled) which has never improved on its success as a bruiser of sleeping princesses.

In the latest iteration of the yellow pea, which is simply a dried and skinned variation of the green pea, you can drink it. Not as soup (though cooked with a ham hock it makes a deeply soothing winter one) but as milk to add to coffee or cornflakes, in case you feel oat, almond, cashew, walnut, macadamia, coconut, peanut, pistachio and soy milk don’t give you enough choice in the ‘alt milk’ department. 

Berlin-based start up Vly is developing what they call ‘The dairy of the future’ from yellow split pea protein. Apparently it’s neutral in taste, high in nutrients and protein, low in sugars, and nut and oat allergy free. Also turning yellow peas into milk are Nestlé with ‘Wunda’, launching first in France, the Netherlands and Portugal ahead of the rest of Europe. And Swedish pea milk ‘Sproud’ is already on shelves in northern England supermarket chain Booths. Personally, if I’m going to be slurping yellow peas, I’d prefer an honest dhal. (For a recipe, see Turmeric - the yellow peril.)

In my view, this soup is a better liquid, and one which, if you grow peas, you can make in summer from pea pods instead of peas, using the peas as a separate course. If you don’t grow your own, make this soup from frozen peas.

1kg/2lbs pea pods or 500g/1lbs frozen peas
1 generous tablespoon butter
1 large shallot, peeled and finely chopped
¾ litre/25 fl oz chicken stock or water
Salt, and white pepper to taste (avoids black speckles)
Single/table cream
Small bunch of chives, finely chopped
Pea shoots (very optional)

Top and tail the washed pods. Melt the butter in a pan and sweat the shallot. Add the pods or the frozen peas and boiling stock or water. Boil gently till soft. Puree in a blender using a little of the cooking liquid to loosen, then press through a sieve and season. 

Reheat with remaining chicken stock or water if necessary to thin to a single/table cream consistency. Ladle into warm bowls, swirl in enough cream to show, scatter over some chopped chives, and a pea shoot if you’re feeling Instagram-y. Personally, I wouldn’t bother. With either.

Otherwise, quickly boil 250g frozen peas, drain, cool to tepid, season with sea salt and generous grinds of black pepper, and mix with a tablespoonful of finely minced mint leaves and a couple of handfuls of lamb’s lettuce (mache). Turn in a lemony vinaigrette then pour into a wide dish and blob over 100g fresh ricotta here and there, for a starter salad to eat with warm crusty bread. Push in torn strips of Parma ham here and there before adding the ricotta, if you want something more substantial and fancy.