Forgotten Fruits by Christopher Stocks

Author:Christopher Stocks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409061977
Publisher: Random House

Peas

Pease porridge hot,

Pease porridge cold,

Pease porridge in the pot

Nine days old.

Nursery rhyme, c. 1797

MODERN PEAS SHARE the industrial advantages of many other popular crops: their pods all ripen at precisely the same time on dwarf-sized plants that can be harvested easily by machine, so avoiding the necessity for labour-intensive supports. The result? Cheap and tasty frozen peas: uniform in size and dependable in flavour but, dare one say it, bland. Yet peas come in all shapes and sizes, and they may well be the oldest vegetable growing in our gardens. Archaeological evidence suggests that peas were among the earliest cultivated crops, and they were certainly widely used in the ancient world: there are nine recipes for pea dishes in the Apicius, a fifth-century Roman cookery book. Today we tend to think of peas as a fresh vegetable, but until surprisingly recently they were treated more like chickpeas or lentils, almost always being cooked in soups and stews. Dried peas, like their frozen descendants today, were plentiful and easy to transport. They were also nutritous and cheap, qualities that were much appreciated by the poor, who boiled them up to make pea porridge (or ‘pease pottage’), a dreary dish whose memory lives on in the nursery rhyme and also, interestingly, in the form of mushy peas, whose lowly gastronomic standing offers a remarkable example of how social associations can outlive their origins, sometimes by several centuries.

The taste for fresh or garden peas, those sweet little morsels that are so delicious straight from the pod, seems to have developed first in Italy in the late 1300s, where they were known as piselli novelli. So why are we more familiar with their French name, petit pois? And why did so many old varieties of garden peas come from France? The answer might have something to do with that most scheming of French queens, the Italian-born Catherine de Medici, who married Henri II in 1533 and is said to have brought her favourite foods with her from Italy, including piselli novelli. (Her greatest passion, apparently, was artichokes, although her obsessive consumption of them gave her appalling indigestion.) Whatever the truth of the stories about Catherine de Medici – and documentary evidence is admittedly thin to non-existent – court and aristocratic patronage undoubtedly turned piselli novelli into a high-fashion food, and dried peas began to decline in status. The introduction of garden peas to Britain may also have a royal connection. During his long exile in France, Charles II would have become familiar with petit pois, and their popularity seems to post-date his Restoration in 1660, as John Worlidge implied in his Systema Horticulturae of 1677, when he wrote that ‘the meaner sort of [peas] have been long acquainted … but the sweet and delicate sorts of them have been introduced to our gardens only in this latter age.’

Of course dried peas never went away; they were simply joined by garden peas and, later still, by sugar peas, or mange tout, with their edible pods – another French innovation.

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