Category: Side dishes

Jerri’s Green Pea Salad

Lady Plumberton and her husband were on a voyage to the United States when she suffered an attack of nausea. Accordingly, she visited the ship’s physician who suggested that it was probably a mild attack of seasickness and gave her some tablets to soothe her stomach.

As she was leaving, she mentioned that she was rarely ill and suffered only from an allergy to green peas. It had been discovered when she was only a child, she told him, and she had often wished that God had given her a different allergy, since she loved the appearance and fragrance of lightly steamed peas.

The doctor, who had only a few years earlier finished medical school, told her that recent studies had confirmed that people sometimes outgrew such childhood allergies. Tests had been developed to detect allergic reactions safely, and he could test whether she was still allergic to peas in his office in less than half an hour.

She agreed and he called the chief cook who sent a steward with a small bowl of freshly steamed peas to the doctor’s office. Thirty minutes later, the doctor announced that the skin prick test showed no allergic reaction. Since the test sometimes missed a mild allergy, he suggested that she begin slowly with only a very small serving of green peas if she were so inclined.

After lunch she explained to the head waiter that she would appreciate having a small dish of steamed green peas with her dinner. He informed the chief cook who added the vegetable to Lady Plumberton’s dinner.

As usual the Plumberton’s were seated at the captain’s table. When all the diners were seated and the plates served, he rose from his chair to offer the evening’s toast. Instead of the usual toast honoring the leaders of Great Britain and the United States, he raised his glass of champagne and said, “Let us drink tonight to Lady Plumberton, who with the professional help of our ship’s doctor, is tonight taking her first pea in over fifty years.”

As the glasses were raised, a grizzled retired navy officer shouted, “Good God! Man the lifeboats! Women and children first!”

Only Lady Plumberton left the dining room. She retired to her cabin and developed a strong aversion to old men in navy uniforms.

Many green pea salad recipes call for using frozen or lightly steamed fresh green peas instead of canned peas. Perhaps this is because a lot of people have developed an aversion to canned peas. When I was a kid, we grew a lot of peas, picked a lot of peas, Mom canned a lot of peas and we all ate a lot of canned peas. I still really like them, especially in this delicious pea salad.

Jerri can’t remember when she first made this salad. My guess is that it was shortly after we were married and living in Charlottesville, Virginia. There was a Safeway store nearby that always had canned peas at low prices.

INGREDIENTS:

1 can green peas (about 2 cups)
2 large eggs
1/2 cup chopped Cheddar cheese
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/4 cup sweet pickle relish
1/4 cup minced onion
1/3 cup mayonnaise

PROCEDURE:

Drain the peas and put them in a mixing bowl. Boil the eggs for five minutes, turn off the heat and allow them to finish cooking in the hot water for eight or nine minutes. Then cool them in cold water and remove the shells. Chop the eggs to the same size dice as the peas.

While the eggs are cooking, clean the celery and chop it and the cheese into the same size dice as the eggs. Mince the onion. Put all the ingredients into the mixing bowl and stir them gently but thoroughly. Allow the salad to rest for five minutes, then stir again and taste.

Add a bit more mayonnaise if necessary or even a little salt.

NOTES: Jerri prefers fresh or frozen green peas cooked until barely tender except in her green pea salad where she loves the taste of canned peas. Even if you also prefer fresh or frozen peas, you really need to try this salad.

You can substitute finely chopped sweet or bread and butter pickles for the pickle relish.

Dan’s Wild Rice Dressing

Our friend Dan is a gourmet cook. While I don’t aspire to such heights, I can follow a gourmet recipe if I have to. While Dan and I were talking food and politics one day, he asked for a piece of paper and jotted down a recipe for wild rice dressing that his father taught him. Like most experienced cooks Dan doesn’t work from a fixed list of quantities. Instead he starts with how much dressing he needs and adjusts everything to fit.

When I pleaded, he gave me some guidance. “Use about seventy percent wild rice to thirty percent brown. Cover the rice with a quarter inch of stock to start with and add more as needed. The sautéd meat and vegetables, walnuts and cranberries should total about a quarter to a third of the dressing. Use enough salt and spices to give you the flavor you want.”

Jerri’s grandmother’s recipe for pfeffernüsse has instructions Dan would understand: “Mix in enough flour so the dough is stiff but not too stiff, sticky but not too sticky.” You might ask, “How do you know you have it right?” The answer is, of course, make it a few times and you will know. And if you have baked a lot, you will have a better idea of when the dough is the right consistency.

Once we were all beginners in everything. We had to learn to walk, talk, read, write and calculate. The same is true for eating and cooking. As babies we were ignorant of any food except milk, but we learned to enjoy different foods as they were offered to us, many in the form of strained vegetables developed by Daniel Gerber in 1928.

Our ignorance of cooking lasted longer, since our parents kept us away from hot stoves and sharp knives until they felt we could be trusted with them. Eventually we learned to cook at least a few things, even if it was only mixing water with cans of condensed soup heated in a microwave oven.

The Christian apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians talked about how we grow up and learn new things when he wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” I doubt that he was thinking about cooking when he wrote those sentences, but I’m pretty sure there were times when he had to fend for himself in the kitchen or camped out around a fire on one of his journeys along the Mediterranean.

There is no shame in ignorance. We are all born ignorant, but as Benjamin Franklin and others have said, the shame is in being unwilling to learn. So, if you have your parents’ permission or have left the parental nest, grab your pots, knives and other kitchen tools and tackle this recipe.

We are never too old to learn something new. And if you have never tasted good wild rice dressing, you are in for a double treat: learning how to make a particularly good recipe and discovering a delicious new food.

Here is what I did, and Dan approved of the result.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup wild rice
1/2 cup brown rice
3 cups chicken stock or broth
2 T butter
1/2 cup diced smoked pork shoulder or lean bacon
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup chopped celery
1/2 cup chopped red bell pepper
1/4 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup chopped cranberries
1/2 tsp. rubbed sage
1/4 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
1/8 tsp. powdered garlic
1/8 tsp. dried marjoram
1/3 tsp. sea salt
1/4 tsp. celery salt
1/4 tsp. powdered onion
1/8 tsp. paprika

PROCEDURE:

Rinse the wild rice and put it in a one and one and a half-quart covered saucepan with two cups of stock. Rinse the brown rice and put it in a one-quart covered saucepan with a cup of stock. Bring each pan to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer until the wild rice grains pop open and the brown rice is tender. Stir occasionally and add a little more water or stock if the rice appears to be drying out before it is done. It will take the brown rice about forty-five minutes and the wild rice up to an hour and a half to cook.

Make sure the wild rice is fully cooked. As Dan puts it, “When wild rice is fully cooked it will split the husk, the ends will curl and the rice will be about twice the volume of uncooked rice.  The most important thing is that the wild rice is tender when you taste it.  It must not be crunchy.” Set the rice aside and prepare the sauté. You can cook the rice ahead of time and transfer it to a storage container until you need it.

To make the sauté, melt two tablespoons of butter over medium heat in a small frying pan. Cut the meat into a quarter to half-inch dice and add it to the pan. Clean and chop the onion, celery and pepper into a quarter inch dice and add them to the meat in the pan. Sauté the meat and vegetables until they are slightly browned, remove the pan from heat and set it aside.

Chop the cranberries and walnuts medium fine.

Put the rice into a large mixing bowl. Stir the sautéed vegetables and meat along with the walnuts and cranberries into the rice. Add the salt and spices and mix thoroughly. Stuff your bird or bake the dressing separately in a lightly greased casserole at 350º for about thirty minutes to blend the flavors.

NOTES: Dan says that you can feel free to adjust the seasonings to suit your taste and that “you can’t screw it up.” My advice is to follow the recipe the first time and go from there.

He also told me that this dressing is delicious with smoked pork chops as well as poultry.

If you don’t have sea salt, you can substitute ordinary table salt, but I like to use sea salt in most recipes.