Buttered Garden Peas with Mint

June is the month you wait for if you grow peas. The plants have been climbing their canes since April, all leaf and tendril and quiet purpose, and then one morning you part the foliage and find the first fat pods hanging there, cool to the touch. You pick a handful. You eat one standing in the garden. The rest make it to the kitchen.

There's nothing to this recipe. That's the point. Fresh peas need butter, a scattering of mint, two minutes in a warm pan, and the good sense to leave them alone. The sweetness is already there. The colour is already there. Your job is to not get in the way. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, and this one is a short conversation. Three ingredients. One pan. Less than a quarter of an hour from garden to table.

I put a bowl of these in front of someone last summer and they ate the lot before the lamb had even been carved. Nobody apologised. I wrote it down in the notebook: peas, butter, mint, gone. There are few better feelings than putting a warm plate in front of someone and watching it empty without a word.