One hundred ways with a freezer staple

Samuel Goldsmith’s debut cookbook was an ode to tinned tomatoes – an ingredient everyone knows to be versatile, and which he proved by providing classic recipes and more. So for his second book, you might think he’d go for a similar ingredient, one that is a common base for so many recipes. Chicken stock? Double cream? Maybe something tinned like chickpeas or a storecupboard staple such as rice?

No. As you can see from this review’s title, this book is all about frozen peas. I can’t imagine how you would squeeze 100 dishes out of such an ingredient, yet somehow he manages it. Of course, there are many recipes that do include peas where you could just as easily leave them out, but Goldsmith strikes gold with the little green vegetable in more unusual formats.

Take the tomato and pea galette, where the peas are a little more hidden than in other recipes, but add nutritious fortification to the meal. Or the pea, pistachio and matcha cake, which takes three of life’s most verdant ingredients and combines them into confectionary that works surprisingly well.

The more you explore the book the more you realise peas are simply the vehicle to collect and share recipes that could easily become staples in a home cook’s household, or provide chefs with easy meals to make in their downtime. Any recipe in this book would make an excellent staff meal.

There’s a chicken ‘Peasar’ salad, with its titular pun leaving nothing to the imagination, and Goldsmith borrows a simple carbonara recipe from a friend, making it work for the book, saying “Rosie’s version doesn’t usually have peas in, but she’s given me permission to slip some in”. And you have to appreciate that throwing some readily-accessible peas into a meal adds nutrition in an easy and budget-friendly way.

The Tinned Tomatoes Cookbook will always be a staple in my collection, while the Frozen Peas Cookbook has had to prove its merit. Nevertheless, I’m excited to see what ingredient Goldsmith chooses next, as his grasp on home cooking is immaculate – and as his day job is creating recipes for BBC Good Food, it’s no surprise.

The Frozen Peas Cookbook by Samuel Goldsmith (£18.99, Murdoch Books. Cook the matcha, pea and pistachio cake from the book here