Too Many Cooks: give peas a chance

Are frozen peas the ultimate convenience vegetable or sad eugenicised sacs of wet chlorophyll?

Carruthers Purple Podded Peas
Carruthers purple podded peas - an old English variety. Photograph: David Sillitoe

Tolerance is a wonderful thing in a relationship. I have unashamed respect for couples who co-exist happily in spite of vastly differing cultural or religious roots. It's a great thing to be able to sustain love for another human being even when they hold to a belief system that you find, at best absurd - well someone has to marry Tories - and at worst, heretical. I speak from bitter experience, maintaining as I do an almost superhuman level of tolerance of the Baker's ludicrous belief in frozen peas.

Depending on which delusional, swivel-eyed legume evangelist you speak to, peas are either unharmed or, in extreme cases of quasi religious mania, actually enhanced by the freezing process. They will give you chapter and verse on the vast fields of peas harvested in Norfolk before the dew has dried on them and frozen before they realise they've been picked. They'll speak of the millions rejected like superannuated boy band members for being minutes too old or slightly too leathery, and why will they do this?

Because they've drunk the Kool-Aid, they've bought into the programme, they've attended the seminar and recruited 10 friends. Frozen food companies have been banging on about peas "as fresh as the moment when the pod went pop" since Patsy Kensit was young enough to be in the ads and it's become received wisdom.

I fervently disagree. Even if frozen peas are 'fresh' then, as Alan Davidson has pointed out, they are varieties bred for freezing that bear little resemblance to the garden pea. But I'll go further. Frozen peas are picked immature - ripped untimely from the pod before they've had time to develop from depressing little sacs of wet chlorophyll to majestic carby pulses. A proper pea shouldn't be dew-fresh and finished by a light steaming it should be soaked overnight and boiled to a magnificent, stomach-filling pottage. You can't make pease pudding from frozen bloody petit pois.

Somehow these revolting, eugenicised, mass-produced travesties have become the default vegetable for the British, from the green bullets at the greasiest spoon to Nigella's nauseatingly 'witty take' on 'mushy peas'. Whether piled in a disheartening heap next to your child's turkey dinosaur or tarted up with garlic, mint and shreds of lettuce in a posh restaurant, frozen peas defile our plates.

The Baker, with the loopy zeal of the born-again loves the fresh, healthy, lo-carb convenience of frozen peas and will strew them with abandon around any dish I'm stupid enough to leave lying on the counter: I wouldn't use a bag of the filthy things to soothe a broken ankle.