This recipe has roots in, believe it or not, homemade baby food. When my kids were babies, I'd puree whatever we were eating to feed them, which yielded exciting flavor combinations such as chicken with yam and pear with spinach and edamame. The only problem with cultivating a palate for freshly made baby food was what to do when we traveled and did not have access to a kitchen. When my older daughter was about 9 months old and already a good 3 or 4 months into enjoying the pleasures of homemade food, we went to London. She was still nursing then, but also supplemented with purees. I thought, she’s a baby, if she’s hungry she’ll eat any baby food. I guessed wrong (and probably should have test driven my theory before the trip; live and learn). Despite the tantalizing array of organic, fair trade baby food available in Tesco, with such exoticized ingredients as courgette (zucchini) and aubergine (eggplant), she would have none of it. It still looked like earth colored mush, and I didn’t even want to taste it myself, to be honest. So for a while, all she got was milk. That was fine, but not ideal. So whenever we had a meal, I looked for food suitable for a toothless infant. We ate a lot of curries, which met the pureéd requirement, but were far too spicy for a little babe. So we were relieved when we were eating fish and chips, and ordered a side of mushy peas for her, despite concerns about the salt. Not the same as mama’s, but she ate it. Mushy peas to the rescue!
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<br />A modern and sophisticated interpretation of the classic English mushy peas that saved our daughter from starving on that trip to London is a lovely chilled minted pea soup from Daniel Patterson, the chef at Coi in San Francisco Its sweetness is tempered by the tang of buttermilk, which gives it both a richness and silkiness that elevate it from its simple origins.
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<br />Inspired by the inventive Anglo-Indian cuisine I ate in London, I’ve adapted his recipe (published in The New York Times July 1, 2007) by garnishing with a swirl of an Indian spice-infused oil, with a nod to the mint chutneys that I love with samosas, pappadums, and kebabs.
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