Braised Peas with Lettuce and Spring Onions

The first proper peas of the year arrived at the market on Saturday. Small, bright, tightly packed in their pods. I stood there shelling one into my hand and eating it raw, which is the only honest way to test a pea. Sweet. Green in the way that only things picked that morning taste green. I bought a bag and walked home with no plan beyond butter and a pan.

This is a very old way of cooking peas. French, originally, though it has lived in English kitchens for so long it feels like ours. The idea is simple: braise the peas with butter, a few spring onions, and some shredded lettuce, which melts into the dish and gives it a silky, almost savoury sweetness. The lettuce sounds strange until you try it. Then it sounds obvious. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract. This one has been saying the same thing for centuries: good peas, some butter, a little patience. That's all.

I make this when the evenings are long enough to eat with the back door open and the light still warm. It wants to sit beside a piece of fish, or some cold roast chicken, or honestly nothing at all. A bowl of these peas with good bread and a glass of something cold is a meal I'd be happy to eat three nights running. I wrote it down in the notebook last May: peas, lettuce, butter, first warm evening. That was enough.