Peas and bread

Peas go back a long way in these parts. Long before Sir Walter Raleigh returned from across the pond with the fabled potato, the English based a lot of their meals around various pulses and it's a pity that these seem to have been sidelined by the noble spud, into the fringes of our cuisine, of interest mainly to those looking for protein sources in lieu of meat.

A while ago I got myself some black badger peas from Hodmedod's. These fellas have been farmed here since at least Tudor times - a low-carb, high protein staple to fill your belly, with a long native pedigree! They're sometimes known as Carlin peas in Northumberland, where they're traditionally eaten "parched" (roasted and fried), or boiled and drowned in vinegar, on Passion Sunday, in memory of a shipment of them coming from Scandinavia to the rescue of a besieged town many centuries ago.

The other night I decided to do like our ancestors did, and make a meal of them by bunging them in a pot with anything else I had to hand! After soaking them overnight in water, I set them on the hob to boil and simmer for about half an hour - as suggested on the box they came in, I used a teaspoonful of baking soda to help them soften. While they were simmering, I poured boiling water on some shredded cabbage in a bowl, and left that to one side.

Once the peas were done, I drained most of the (now pretty thick) liquid off, added a bit of seasoning and then threw in 200g of beef mince that I had in the fridge that needed using up. When that had been mixed in and gone nice and brown, in went the cabbage. As a nod to Northumbria (an area that, along with the Percy family, has a special place in my heart) I poured in two or three tablespoonsful of vinegar and that was it - we ate it just like this:

I know it doesn't look like much, but it was tasty and satisfying. I used 200g (dried weight) of peas between two of us and I can tell you we didn't need any dessert. In fact it kept us feeling satisfied all evening long, well past the point where I'm usually going to the kitchen in search of toast. We agreed that I'm probably going to have to buy one of their catering sacks of these, as they're pretty much full of about as much "win" as anything can be.

I've  subsequently discovered this website, which was a bad idea when it was close to bedtime as I ended up browsing round it for ages and got hardly any sleep that night. On their list of "endangered" recipes was something about making patties or "Carlin fries" out of these peas, which I'm eager to have a try at.

In other news, I figured out how to stop my bread going wonky - in fact, I've just about perfected it I think! I adapted the recipe I posted before  by adding a couple of tablespoons each of powdered milk and sunflower oil, which has significantly lightened and improved the texture of the bread. The wonky loaf issue has been solved by adjusting the feet on my cooker so it's level, and leaving the shaped dough to prove (expand) on the tray for half an hour before baking. Then you get a loaf like this:

...which I think you'll agree is a vast improvement on the previous one.