One March morning I ran into Geraldine at New York’s Union Square Greenmarket. She operates a well-reviewed, universally adored restaurant in lower Manhattan. She was chomping down on a tamale, strolling through the park, not buying anything. Just making the rounds. In my peripheral vision, I witnessed multiple fists being bumped and hugs getting doled out but few of the unwieldy blue shopping bags full of produce that are the badge of honor for us market-trolling restaurant cooks. Her visit seemed purely social. No criticism here, as I wasn’t buying anything, either. The market in March has a grimness that can be crushing. You can fondle only so many rutabagas; stemless, leafless, sad kohlrabies; and storage apples before the depression lacquers itself to you.
But now—like right now, right as you read this—man oh man, the market is quite good. If you want strawberries, peas, and favas, this is the moment. (You may have even missed the window.) The peaches, tomatoes, and hot peppers are still readying themselves for their spots at the folding tables. The impermanence of seasonal produce is one of the joys of cooking. It gets the blood pumping. It triggers the good anxiety. It’s one of my awfully favorite things.
That said, I gotta be honest with you: Sometimes peak spring and summer produce ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Let’s chat for a minute about English peas. Don’t pretend they’re worth it. Too much shelling for a very low payoff—in a restaurant situation or in your apartment kitchen. Sugar snap peas, on the other hand, I love. You do too. Sugar snap peas have a monstrous payoff. An enormous, Godzilla-Rodan-Mothra combined kind of jackpot. Sure, you have to rip out the stringy thing, but once that’s torn off and disposed of, you can eat the whole thing. They’re sweet (swoon), pea-y-er than those inedibly encased daft bloke peas, and downright enchanting.
Sugar snap peas, the really fresh market ones—the erect, curly specimens that have never once felt the chill of a vegetable crisper—are pricey, though. I don’t recommend doing anything with these other than tossing some torn shreds of basil on them, maybe a flicker of salt, possibly the tiniest dribble of fancy olive oil, and just eating them like a bagful of candy (if you dared purchase a whole bag’s worth).
They’re so precious that even though it might seem like a crazy thing to do during sugar snap pea season, I’m recommending that you make soup using frozen ones. That’s right. The kind that’s always available. The kind we can all afford. It’s okay, even right now, in the heat of market season, to use what we call frozens.
This recipe utilizes frozen sugar snap peas in a mutated, phony vignarola, a Roman spring vegetable stew. It’s one of the coolest (and kind of weirdest) vegetable dishes ever. Google it. Make it for fun next week. Now’s the time. In this absolutely inauthentic version, you are going to blend a bunch of sugar snap peas into creamy submission, but the soup is still going to have, as Fonzie would say, “a snap in its trunks,” and it’s going to be very delicious. Save the museum-quality fresh ones for careful introspection. Maybe even serve a few alongside, like the ultimate french fries.
Are you grilling your salads yet?
