SC - Pea soup sugar peas question

[Anne-Marie Rousseau]

Hi all from Anne-Marie

Ras sez that one should use whole snap peas instead of shelled ones for le
menagiers cretonnee. 

I disagree, for several reasons...(what, me and Ras disagree???? Heeaven
forfend! :))

1. the same source contatins a recipe for "new peas in the pod". These
definately call for whole peas. If the cretonnee recipe meant to use the
same items, wouldnt it have said so? I mean, the "peas in the pod" were to
be different enough that he felt he needed to mention that they were in the
pod.

2. There are other cretonnee type recipes in the French corpus, including
Taillevent.  Taillevent specifies to "cook them to mush and drain them".
This doenst work if you're thinking of using the mange tout type peas..you
never get the mush, and theres no squishing step to make them mush.

3. My logic says that both the New PEas and the Cretonne PEas are the same
ones, just that one is in the pod and the other shelled. I could be wrong,
of course. Now, if you're trying to approximate a taste and think that the
modern frozen peas taste radically different, I could see using mange tout
peas, but the texture would be so different I would be hesitant to do so.
I've grown modnern mange touts large enough to shell and eat and they dont
taste really siginifantly differnt from the frozen ones. The skins are
tougher, but that's about it (according to my memory, anyway).

Again, each of us has to decide for ourselves how we choose to interpret
such things...we can never really know, until they find a stash of peas in
a medieval midden and do some DNA fingerprinting on them...:)_

- --AM
PS< I'm glad you liked the recipe Ras! :)

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