SIMPLY PEAS

I might as well admit it right now. I felt a bit guilty serving frozen peas at the dinner party. I once heard my daughter say that the food in our house was simple. She was marinating chicken in double mustard sauce at the time. She was more stating a fact than aiming a criticism, observing how I’d picked up my mother’s legacy of meal planning—meat, potatoes and vegetables. Gravy as an accent. My mother was an excellent but simple cook. My father preferred it that way. He praised the simple and discouraged anything fancy. We all liked peas.

The peas seemed a little out of step with the larger plan for our dinner party. Perusing the menu, one might have expected Green Beans almandine, or Something Florentine. But by the time we’d envisioned Mediterranean Chicken and Rice With Garbanzos and Raisins and a huge Greek salad with three kinds of appetizers and a raspberry cream cheese dessert to top it off, one more fancy thing was just too much. And maybe I would have paid double for the top-of-the-line brand instead of choosing the low-budget store brand peas had my head not been bursting and my sinuses not been so plugged as to make it impossible for me to distinguish by tasting between tuna, artichokes and chocolate. So we chose the low-cost peas, partly because they were less than half the price, and partly because we were certain that nobody would really notice them, served amongst these other flavours. .

Fourteen people sat down to dinner, chatting, laughing, telling tales of Christmas shopping. The evening slid past, carols on the stereo, candles burning, a little wine, a little punch. The guests may or may not have noticed that dinner was ten minutes later than it ought to have been because I inadvertently turned off the burner before the rice was done.

And when, on Monday, a thank-you note arrived, this is what it said: Richard and I had a really nice time on Saturday night. The dinner was really lovely. Several times on Sunday I thought back on your peas – everything was really great, and I know you probably worked much harder on everything else -- but few people can cook peas really well.”

Perhaps, I mused, reading the note a second time to be sure I had understood, perhaps I am one of those people who will never be anything but simple. And I really think I ought to introduce my father to the guest who wrote the thank-you note. They’d get along like gangbusters.