PEAS

I’D LIKE TO MAKE AN ARGUMENT for cooking with garden fresh peas. I know that’s not always easy-peasy. Frozen peas are frequently sweeter and available year-round, but I’m not excited about supporting the industrialized systems that facilitate their harvest. If you’re lucky enough to find tiny, fresh-picked peas from the garden—anybody’s garden or at a local farmers’ market—cherish them. Those peas are beautiful, a rare luxury, and require next to no cooking or seasoning. As peas mature in the field, however, and as hours pass from their moment of harvest, they lose their sweetness. But the complexity of their flavor increases. They become different, not less interesting. Let’s embrace the true nature of later peas, and cook them with different techniques and seasonings.

For example, eat them with rice and pickled vegetables to show off their vegetal crunch. We need to celebrate the natural life cycle of the pea—it is short and fleeting, just like ours. Amazingly, some pea breeders are focusing on flavor rather than just pest resistance and production. Sugar snaps—a wonderful variety—did not even exist before 1968, when Dr. Calvin Lamborn recognized a mutation in his field studies of Idaho snow peas and created a brand-new delicious variety. His sugar snaps are now grown around the world. In fact, Dr. Lamborn’s son, Rod, hand-delivered his father’s pea shoots, left, for us to photograph.