Fresh Peas Are Not a Pain
Enjoy them à la française, subbing tomatoes for lettuce
Our favorite way to eat peas — the kind you have to pop out of their pods, not those eat-the-whole-thing varieties — is to cook them à la française: with bacon, juicy young onions, lots of shredded lettuce, and butter and maybe some herbs to finish. Other people typically serve this as a side dish, perhaps with something like roast chicken, but Jackie and I eat it, lots of it, as our whole dinner, with buttered grilled bread and a big spoon.
The other day we had the onions, we had the bacon, we had the butter and herbs, we had the bread for grilling, and we had the peas, which we shelled together to share the pleasure: This really is one of the nicest of repetitive kitchen tasks, unlike, say, peeling chestnuts, which is beyond tedious.
What we didn’t have was the lettuce. The dish is perfectly good without it, but its distinctive mild bitterness adds interest, and its leaves — even thoroughly…
