plus
Robin Hood’s Revenge,
Thor’s Dragons, An Early American
Pea Contest, Thomas Knight’s
Pocket-Knife Plant, and
Winston Churchill’s
Bare Necessities
How luscious lies the pea within the pod.
EMILY DICKINSON
King John of England, the uncongenial monarch under whom Robin Hood wreaked so much havoc on the rich, died on October 19, 1216. According to the encyclopedia, death was due to dysentery and fever, but according to food historians, it was due to overindulgence in peas, seven bowlfuls at a single sitting. (Alternatively, the fatal dish was lampreys, unripe peaches, or toad’s blood in the royal ale.)
If peas, King John could have done better for himself in the way of last meals. The thirteenth-century pea was tough, starchy, and unpalatable compared to the sweet tender varieties grown today. Even under a heap of feather mattresses, it would have given the sensitive heroine of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea (1835) a lousy night’s sleep and turned her black and blue.
According to Norse legend, peas arrived on earth as a punishment sent by the god Thor who, in a fit of pique, dispatched a flight of dragons with peas in their talons to fill up the wells of his unsatisfactory worshippers. Some of the peas missed the mark and fell on the ground, where they sprouted and developed into pea plants. The new vegetable was placatingly dedicated to Thor and thereafter eaten only on his day, Thursday — and from then on, Thor, when peeved, sent dwarves to pick the pea vines clean. The Chinese claimed that peas were found on journeys through the countryside by the (probably mythological) Emperor Shen Nung, known as the “Divine Farmer,” who also taught the Chinese people to grow wheat and rice, invented the rake and the plow, and discovered tea.
Actually the origin of the pea is a mystery. It’s a food plant so ancient that nobody knows, botanically or geographically, just where it came from. Hedging their bets, plant scientists propose somewhere in a broad swath from the Near East to central Asia — possibly Afghanistan or northern India. Annoyingly, the oldest pea to date turned up outside the hypothetical primal pea zone. Excavated at the Spirit Cave site on the Myanmar (Burma)-Thailand border, the world’s oldest peas — probably gathered wild rather than cultivated — were radiocarbon-dated to 9750 BCE.
Ancient pea remains, however, are ubiquitous. Peas have been recovered from Swiss lake dwellings and from Neolithic farming villages scattered across Europe, and carbonized leftovers from Near Eastern pea feasts — likely domesticated peas — have been dated to 7000 BCE. All these early peas, archaeologists guess, were far tougher propositions than Pisum sativum, the edible peas of today. In order to choke them down, our ancestors probably roasted them and then peeled them like chestnuts.
Peas, both wild and tame, are legumes, members of the family Fabaceae, which bear their fleshy proteinaceous seeds in a protective pod. The third largest of the flowering plant families, trailing only Orchids (Orchidaceae) and Daisies (Asteraceae), the legumes include some 700 genera and 20,000 species worldwide, popping up everywhere from rain forests to deserts. Pea relatives range from minuscule herbs to massive trees, and include lentils, broad beans, chickpeas, soybeans, peanuts, lima beans, kidney beans, carob, licorice, clover, wisteria, mimosa, rosewood, indigo, and kudzu.
The Greeks and Romans grew peas. Hot pea soup was peddled in the streets of Athens; fried peas — or perhaps fried chickpeas or garbanzo beans (Cicer arietinum) — were sold to spectators in lieu of popcorn at the Roman circus and in theaters. Apicius lists fourteen recipes for peas, including basic peas (with leeks and herbs), peas “Supreme Style” (with thrushes, Lucanian sausage, bacon, and white sauce), and peas à la Vitellius (with hard-boiled eggs and honey). According to the fourth-century Historia Augusta, the extravagant teenaged emperor Elagabalus, whose brief reign ended in an assassination arranged by his grandmother, served peas with gold pieces at his banquets, as well as lentils with onyx, beans with amber, and rice with pearls.
Most peas in the ancient world were consumed dried, the drying process being considered essential to cure the pea of its “noxious and stomach-destroying” qualities. Uncured peas were occasionally left on the vines by farmers, with the intention of poisoning pestiferous rabbits, who thus may have gotten the most out of the classical pea. For the next several centuries dried peas remained the rule, convenient because peas thus treated could be stored almost indefinitely for winter use, as ships’ stores, or as a bulwark against famine.
Dried peas were used to piece out wheat flour, or were boiled to make the ubiquitous pease porridge that, as an ever-present staple on the medieval hearth, was served daily, hot, cold, and in the pot nine days old. Not always a simple dish, one recipe of the early eighteenth century began with beef broth in which was boiled a chunk of bacon and a sheep’s head, then added nutmeg, cloves, ginger root, pepper, mint, marjoram, thyme, leeks, spinach, lettuce, beets, onions, old Cheshire cheese (grated), “sallery,” turnips, and “a good quantity” of peas. To obtain a “high taste,” the cook recommended tossing an old pigeon in with the bacon.
Garden peas — grown in kitchen gardens and eaten fresh and green — began to make a hesitant debut in the fourteenth century; and by the fifteenth, English pea fanciers were growing the Hastings, the first English pea thought worthy of a proper name. They were popular enough to be hawked through the streets of London as “Fresh gathered peas, young Hastings!”
The even more popular — perhaps sweeter — Rouncival pea seems to have been developed sometime in the late fifteenth century in the London gardens of the Hospital of St. Mary of Rouncevalles. (Both names come from Roncevaux, the famous pass in the French Pyrenees where Roland trounced the Saracens.) Thomas Tusser, the English farmer-poet who wrote 500 Pointes of Good Husbandrie (1557) — an agricultural instruction manual in which activities for each month of the year are described in rhyming couplets — mentions Rouncival peas in the tasks allotted to January: “Dig garden, stroy mallow, now may at ease / And set (as a dainte) thy runcivall pease.”
That it was grown “as a dainte” indicates that the Rouncival was eaten green, rather than dried and stored. The Rouncival may also have been the first white-flowered garden pea — field pea flowers were a gaudier pink and purple.
By the seventeenth century, the garden or “greene” pea was the pea of choice for the dinner table; the field pea, now designated as “mean,” was the stuff of porridge, pig feed, and the poor. The French were famed for their passion for green peas, a habit they may have picked up from Italy, when Catherine de Medici, who married France’s future King Henry II in 1533, introduced “pisella novelli” from Florence.
By the next century, green pea eating was an obsession at the court of Louis XIV. A May 1695 letter of Madame de Maintenon, last and most successful of the king’s many mistresses (he married her) reads:
“The subject of peas is being treated at great length: impatience to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them, and the longing to eat them again are the three points about which our princes have been talking for four days. There are some ladies who, after having supped with the king, and well supped too, help themselves to peas at home before going to bed at the risk of indigestion. It is a fad, a fury.”
The peas were dunked, pod and all, into a dish of sauce, and then eaten out of the shell. The king himself frequently overdid it in the matter of peas; the royal doctors recommended billiards to alleviate his subsequent digestive woes.
The pea arrived in the Caribbean with Christopher Columbus, who planted some in 1493 in a garden on Hispaniola. It first reached New England in 1602 when Captain Bartholomew Gosnold paused to put in a few rows on the Maine island of Cuttyhunk. The first colonists arrived well equipped with peas. The Pilgrim crop failed the first year (as did the barley, optimistically intended for English beer), but by 1629 the governor’s garden at Massachusetts Bay, according to the Reverend Francis Higginson, was growing green peas “as good as I ever eat in England.” John Smith gloated over the pea crop at Jamestown (“Pease dry everywhere”), and peas figured routinely in the lists of supplies recommended for newcomers by seasoned settlers. One such, dated 1635, calls for “three paire of Stockings, six paire of Shooes, one gallon of Aquavitae, one bushel of Pease.”
Peas were a favorite of Thomas Jefferson, who planted some thirty different kinds in the Monticello gardens. Jefferson was a convivial gardener, known for sharing seeds and plants and delighting in dialogue about the triumphs and tragedies of gardening. Jefferson family history holds that he originated the Charlottesville neighborhood pea contest, a competition among local gardeners to see who could produce the very first peas of the year. The winner hosted a community dinner in which a featured dish was a serving — or at least a teaspoonful — of the season’s new peas. Jefferson’s peas rarely came in first; the invariable winner seems to have been George Divers of Farmington, a close personal friend, to whom the defeated Jefferson wrote cheerfully and challengingly in 1807: “We had strawberries yesterday — when had you them?”
George Washington noted the appearance of the first peas at Mount Vernon — “Had Peas for the first time in the season at Dinner,” he writes on May 25, 1785 — and, at least according to legend, narrowly escaped death by pea in the Revolutionary War. The story goes that in 1776 Thomas Hickey, a Loyalist sympathizer, had conspired to kill Washington by putting poison in a dish of peas, to be served to him while dining with his fellow officers at New York’s popular Fraunces Tavern. Luckily Fraunces’s young daughter Phoebe learned of the plot and intercepted the fatal dish in time. Hickey was arrested and executed by hanging before an audience of 20,000 outraged patriots.
“The cooking of pease with mint,” wrote Mary Henderson in 1882, “is a good way of utterly destroying the delicious natural flavor of the pea.”
To have peas “in perfection,” Mary Randolph writes in The Virginia Housewife (1824), “they must be quite young, gathered early in the morning, kept in a cool place, and not shelled until they are to be dressed” — after which she recommends boiling for half an hour and serving them up with chopped mint and butter. Actually better yet is to pick them just before popping in the pot, since peas, like corn, deteriorate rapidly after picking. The modern pea, 25 percent sucrose by weight, once picked loses nearly half of its sugar in six hours at room temperature.
The practice of cooking peas with mint may have originated to disguise the starchy taste of early varieties of peas. Hannah Glasse’s Peas-Porridge recipe in The Art of Cooking Made Plain and Easy, Which far Exceeds any thing of the Kind ever yet Published (1747) calls for “a bunch of dry’d Mint,” and Amelia Simmons’s instructions “To boil green Peas” (1796) recommend adding to the water a few leaves of mint, salt, and a chunk of butter the size of a walnut.
The mint custom became so entrenched that it persisted, despite the development of newer, sweeter, and less starchy cultivars of peas. By the nineteenth century progressive pea cooks were urging that it be abandoned. Instead, they suggested, peas should be prepared in the “American mode” — that is, boiled in plain mintless water. “The cooking of pease with mint,” wrote Mary Henderson in Practical Dinner Giving (1882) “is a good way of utterly destroying the delicious natural flavor of the pea.”
The nineteenth-century garden pea was delicious and rapidly becoming more so. Perhaps more than any other vegetable, the pea is a study in obsolescence: as breeders developed increasingly sweeter peas, older and less satisfactory varieties vanished. The Hastings pea seems to have disappeared by the early eighteenth century; the Rouncival was all but gone by the early nineteenth. The 1807 edition of Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary reports dismally that “Rose, Rouncival, sickle, tufted and hotspur peas are lost.”
The culling of the starch-heavy, smooth-seeded, old-time peas was largely the fault of Thomas Andrew Knight, who, sometime prior to 1787, discovered a peculiar wrinkle-seeded pea. Knight, who served as president of the Royal Horticultural Society from 1811 until his death in 1838, is arguably the father of horticultural science. One story holds that he became fascinated with plants as a small boy, watching a gardener plant what he thought were sticks and being told that they’d grow up to be beans. They did, upon which the awed young Knight planted his pocketknife, hoping to grow a tree of knives. When the knife tree failed to materialize, Knight there and then determined to figure out why. He was to spend his life elucidating the mysteries of plant growth and development.
At the age of 29, upon the death of his older brother, Knight inherited a castle, a substantial bank balance, and a 10,000-acre estate, upon which he was able to pursue his wide-ranging interests in plant physiology and breeding. His true love seems to have been the apple, although he investigated and improved upon a wide range of plants, among them strawberries, pears, cabbages, and potatoes, as well as peas. Knight crossed his serendipitous wrinkle-seeded pea to produce a series of wrinkled cultivars known as “marrowfats” for their superlative tastiness. By 1787, “Knight’s wrinkled Marrow peas” were a prime pick for British gardens.
Knight’s experiments with wrinkle- and smooth- (or round-) seeded peas preceded the famous pea-plant experiments of Gregor Mendel by some fifty years and established some of the same principles, although Knight never made the intellectual leap that allowed Mendel to formulate the laws of inheritance and infer the existence of the gene. Both studied pea crosses using the same reliably reproducible characteristics in peas — height (tall or dwarf), flower color (white or red), seed color (green or yellow), and seed shape (round or wrinkled) — and both achieved the same results. Mendel, however, had the better interpretation of the evidence, which is why today we speak of Mendelian rather than Knightian genetics.
Only in the 1990s, however, did geneticists discover just what makes Knight’s wrinkled-seeded peas pucker up. As the round pea matures it converts its youthful sugar into starch, a more durable and stable storage form of carbohydrate. It does so by means of a starch-branching enzyme — SBE1 or starch-branching enzyme 1 — essential in the synthesis of the snarly branched-chain starch molecule called amylopectin. The wrinkled pea, on the other hand, has a mutant nonfunctional SBE1 and therefore is sugar-heavy and starch-deprived. High-sugar peas accumulate more water during development, due to osmosis — ripe, they’re generally fatter than starchy peas — but upon drying, they’ve got more water to lose, which causes them to wrinkle like deflated balloons.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, dozens of garden pea varieties were available. William Cobbett, peevish author of The English Gardener (1833), lists seven, adding somewhat snappily, “There are several others, but here are quite enough for any garden in the world.” By 1885, Vilmon-Andrieux’s The Vegetable Garden described 170 different varieties, categorized as either shelling peas or sugar peas.
Shelling peas, which can be either smooth- or wrinkle-seeded, develop within inedible pods, rendered unchewably indigestible by their fibrous parchment lining. Parchment-less edible-podded peas of the sort commonly known as Chinese or snow peas seem to have been developed not by the Chinese, but by the Dutch. The earliest European mention dates to 1536. It is likely that these are the peas, expensively imported from Holland, that were considered such a treat at the court of Elizabeth I, and that were eaten as mange-tout, meaning “eat all,” in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France.
The classic snow pea must be picked on cue, at what breeders call the “slab-pod” stage, before the inner peas begin to bulge out and stringiness develops. A snow pea past its prime tends to twist arthritically due to the lack of supportive parchment — the “bones” of the pod — and concomitantly develops an unpleasant taste. The eighteenth-century “sickle” pea was likely an edible-podded pea.
These problems have been eliminated for spoiled modern gardeners by the advent of the Sugar Snap pea, a hybrid developed in the 1950s by breeder Calvin Lamborn of the Gallatin Valley Seed Company in Twin Falls, Idaho. Lamborn’s pea is the result of a cross between a variant of a tough-podded processing pea called Dark Skilled Perfection and a conventional snow pea. His original intent was to solve the snow-pea twisting problem by adding genetic material from the strong-podded mutant strain; the unexpected outcome, a tasty sugar pea with a round (not flat, like the snow pea) pod, juicily edible into full maturity, is now touted as a serendipitous triumph for pea breeding. The “snap” designation comes from the pea’s breaking characteristics: it cracks neatly in two, like a green bean.
Sugar Snap peas, though best fresh off the vine, are also suitable for freezing, a fate that has overtaken 90 percent of the national pea crop since Clarence Birdseye came up with his commercial freezing procedure in 1929. Birdseye, who began his commercial career selling frogs to the Bronx Zoo, reputedly developed his fast-freeze process while working as a field naturalist for the U.S. government in Labrador, where he observed the local Eskimos’ technique for freezing fish. Prior to Birdseye’s rapidly “frosted foods,” green peas didn’t keep all that well. Amelia Simmons claimed that peas, drained and stored in bottles sealed with mutton fat, would last “till Christmas,” but frankly it sounds iffy to me.
A reliable bottling technique for preserving food was devised in 1809 by French confectioner Nicholas Appert, who was attempting to win the 12,000 franc prize offered by Napoleon — known for his canny insistence that an army marches on its stomach — for the better provisioning of his troops. Appert’s fragile glass bottles, the forerunner of today’s ubiquitous Mason jars, were replaced in 1810 by tin canisters (soon abbreviated to cans), pioneered by British merchant Peter Durand. Peas can be canned, but not prettily: the necessary heating process destroys the chlorophyll that gives peas their characteristic pea green, and turns them instead a dispiriting military olive shade.
Better by far to pick them from the garden. “All the essentials of life,” according to Winston Churchill, are a mere four: hot baths, cold champagne, old brandy, and new peas.