Of the Street-Sellers of Hot Green Peas.
The sale of hot green peas in the streets is of great antiquity, that is to say, if the cry of “hot peas-cod,” recorded by Lydgate (and formerly alluded to), may be taken as having intimated the sale of the same article. In many parts of the country it is, or was, customary to have “scaldings of peas,” often held as a sort of rustic feast. The peas were not shelled, but boiled in the pod, and eaten by the pod being dipped in melted butter, with a little pepper, salt, and vinegar, and then drawn through the teeth to extract the peas, the pod being thrown away. The mention of peas-cod (or pea-shell) by Lydgate renders it probable that the “scalding” method was that then in use in the streets. None of the street-sellers, however, whom I saw, remembered the peas being vended in any other form than shelled and boiled as at present.
The sellers of green peas have no stands, but carry a round or oval tin pot or pan, with a swing handle; the pan being wrapped round with a thick cloth, to retain the heat. The peas are served out with a ladle, and eaten by the customers, if eaten in the street, out of basins, provided with spoons, by the pea-man. Salt, vinegar, and pepper, are applied from the vendor’s store, at the customer’s discretion.
There are now four men carrying on this trade. They wear no particular dress, “just what clothes we can get,” said one of them. One, who has been in the trade twenty-five years, was formerly an inn-porter; the other three are ladies’ shoemakers in the day-time, and pea-sellers in the evening, or at early morning, in any market. Their average sale is three gallons daily, with a receipt of 7s. per man. Seven gallons a day is accounted a large sale; but the largest of all is at Greenwich fair, when each pea-man will take 35s. in a day. Each vendor has his district. One takes Billingsgate, Rosemary-lane, and its vicinity; another, the Old Clothes Exchange, Bishopsgate, Shoreditch, and Bethnal-green; a third, Mile-end and Stepney; and a fourth, Ratcliffe-highway, Limehouse, and Poplar. Each man resides in his “round,” for the convenience of boiling his peas, and introducing them to his customers “hot and hot.”
The peas used in this traffic are all the dried field pea, but dried green and whole, and not split, or prepared, as are the yellow peas for soup or puddings. They are purchased at the corn-chandlers’ or the seed-shops, the price being 2s. the peck (or two gallons.) The peas are soaked before they are boiled, and swell considerably, so that one gallon of the dried peas makes rather more than two gallons of the boiled. The hot green peas are sold in halfpennyworths; a halfpennyworth being about a quarter of a pint. The cry of the sellers is, “Hot green peas! all hot, all hot! Here’s your peas hot, hot, hot!”