Whenever I want to time-travel back to my early 20s, to my 150-square-foot studio apartment where I cosplayed being an adult, all I have to do is put on a Girls’ Generation record and thumb through the yellowed paperbacks on my bookshelf. Years in the making, the bulging shelves are precariously loaded and destabilizing by the minute, but they reflect a life well lived in New York City, where moving books from apartment to apartment is no easy feat. That early era was also when, during a graduate program in literature, I first learned to cook for myself in a proper way.
I had many teachers then, but my culinary guide was the doyenne of frozen peas, Nigella Lawson. As her voice emanated to my left from a laptop that played episodes of her first show, “Nigella Bites” (bootlegged to YouTube at the time), and her first book, “How to Eat,” balanced on a music stand to my right, I became the cook I am today. In that kitchenette, I roasted my first chicken, assembled my first trifle and learned for the first time that, if you boil a bag of frozen peas, then drain and blend them, you’ll have a near-instant side dish that goes down pretty easily.
Recipe: Mushy Peas
Classically a dull-green accompaniment to fish and chips, mushy peas are the unsung hero of English “comfort sludge,” as the food writer Ruby Tandoh calls it. You might not always appreciate their presence, but if they were missing from the plate, you would notice. For my friend Joanna Goddard, the writer, who is both English and American, it’s not unlike the role of coleslaw in a basket of fried things. “Mushy peas are the virtuous moment of a platter of fish and chips,” she texted me recently, emphasizing their many merits. “I like that they’re mushy, but there’s still texture; they’re bright but still comfort food.
“Even the name is perfect!” she said. “Mushy peas! Like a 5-year-old named them.”
The original chip-house mushy peas come from dried marrowfat peas, which mature and even dry out on the plant. Indelibly savory, with scents of buttered popcorn and umami incarnate, they’re hard to come by outside Britain (though you can certainly order them online). “There’s something very confusing about the fact that they are described as ‘peas,’ even though they are essentially a dried legume,” my British friend Bee Wilson, the food writer, wrote to me by email. They are “more like Britain’s answer to dal,” she said, “but without the spice or joy.”
An even sparser seasoning lets you taste the legume as it is.
Or the color. “Food coloring is usually added to the tinned variety to keep them green because the peas turn gray when they go through the canning process,” said Samuel Goldsmith, the author of “The Frozen Peas Cookbook.”
Modern iterations of mushy peas — as popularized by writers like Goldsmith — necessarily call for the dried marrowfat pea’s much-hotter little cousin-slash-archnemesis: frozen garden peas. I usually enrich a mash of these with butter, cream and cheese, as I learned from “How to Eat,” but, as Tandoh later taught me, an even sparser seasoning lets you taste the legume as it is. In “Cook as You Are,” Tandoh’s proportions mimic the delicious green gunk that tops many a crusty bread in Australia, California and beyond. “Think avocado toast,” she writes, “but peas.”
“Upmarket mushy peas,” Lawson called her minty green mixture on “Nigella Bites,” glooped onto the plate alongside a gorgeously seared salmon fillet dotted with crispy bacon. A great period of my life involved that salmon and mushy pea combo at many a dinner party I hosted. And, more often than not, the peas became a go-to trimming for other meals as well, requiring just 10 minutes of brain power to go with, say, trout en papillote or butter-seared scallops. Leftovers can be refrigerated and transformed, at a later date, into fried salmon-pea cakes, a creamy dip for crudites, a luscious panel of pea soup.
And that just scratches the surface of its versatility. Do as Lawson does and boil garlic cloves with the peas for a backbone of mellow savoriness; you could even stir in a dab of Thai green curry paste for electricity; a little olive oil lends rich glossiness as well as that butter; and, if you really want to taste the peas as they are, just use a generous pinch of salt. Whatever you do, don’t skip the fresh mint — its cooling, blue-green sweetness brings out the legume’s most elemental qualities. Just because something looks like baby food doesn’t mean it has to taste like it.
Eric Kim has been a food and cooking columnist for The Times since 2021. You can find his recipes on New York Times Cooking.
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