Peas, please

Here’s a puzzle: Where have all the peas gone? By peas, I mean old-fashioned garden peas, the kind that our fathers (or my father) grew and were proud of when their own peas came in before anyone else’s. Peas like these are now, apparently, called English peas but they have disappeared from my local farmer’s markets where the only peas on offer are sugar-snaps or edible pod peas. I have no complaints about these tasty, crunchy additions to a summer salad (they’re also good for snacking) but any time I want what my mother called “a mess of peas,” I want the old-fashioned kind. I did manage to find them at Beth’s Market at White Oak Corner in Warren, but elsewhere? Not a one!

Why? I asked the farmers in the weekly market.

Absurdly, they answered, “too difficult to harvest.” More difficult than sugar snaps? I don’t think so.

I suspect the problem is the market: people don’t buy “English” peas because of the perceived tedium involved in shucking them. These are the same people who think nothing of peeling individual fava beans, yet shucking peas is considered intolerably boring. In actual fact, like many traditional women’s tasks (ironing is another one), the repetition leads to a peaceful kind of meditation that’s the exact opposite of mindlessness. The mind drifts, the imagination soars, the peas get shucked, and problems somehow get solved and resolved while the colander fills with little green orbs of sweetness.

And then what?