Healthy, delicious but mostly underrated The pea

The pea: Not just for kings and princesses

(aid) Special features: None! The pea is a solid average type, reliable, healthy and sympathetic. Nevertheless, she has never quite managed to get beyond the supplement status.

While other old types of vegetables such as parsnip or beetroot are constantly being rediscovered and reinterpreted by the modern kitchen, the pea persistently pursues the reputation of the somewhat colorless saddler. This may also have something to do with the best-known pea-based dishes that sound more like emergency food than culinary highlights: pea soup, peas with fish fingers and mashed potato, or even worse - pea pudding.

Maybe the pea just too long accompanied the people, as one would appreciate their true value yet. After all, they have been eaten for over 9,000 years, as finds in today's Syria show. In Central Europe, it was from the 13th century to the meat of the little man, because it was a cheap protein supplier and dried to store well. As a plant that took its own nitrogen from the air, it also fit perfectly into the three-field farming of the farmers and was a welcome addition to the daily cereal porridge, albeit as a boring mus.

After all, it shines today with an impressive variety and variety richness, which includes more than 100 species or subspecies. The list ranges from field peas as high-quality protein feed for animals on peas, which are usually offered as a preserve, to the sugar pea, in which one eats the fleshy sweet pod with the undeveloped grains.

In this form she was even granted a short flight as a distinguished delicacy. The French Sun King Louis XIV made sure of this at the end of the 17th century. He loved the unripe peas and the sweet pods above all else and even had them grown and grown in glasshouses to enjoy the trendiest vegetables from Italy all year round. But the fame faded after a few years, the pea was ultimately a vegetable for everyone. New preserving processes such as canning and later freezing, in which she even retains her bright green color and almost all important ingredients, also contributed to this.

Although not in top-class restaurants, the pea is currently experiencing a comeback on German fields. After decades of decline in cultivated land, farmers have been increasingly turning to peas as a protein-rich feed in recent years. The cultivation of fresh peas for trade has also increased significantly since 2013. Obviously the Germans are more attached to their favorite average vegetables than they admit. And that's what the sympathetic pea really deserves. Jürgen Beckhoff, aid