The Way to Cut a Sugar Snap Pea

Last week we had the pleasure of eating a remarkable salad at Tavolata. Composed of sugar snap peas, almonds, white anchovies, and mint, this simple salad was the highlight of our meal. The snap peas were radiant green and still crunchy, the almonds were perfectly cooked to a dark golden brown, and everything was dressed and seasoned just enough. However, the salad’s most beguiling feature was the way the peas were cut: longways, right down the middle.

When cut so, sugar snap peas reveal a naturally beautiful cross section that has the added benefit of allowing some of the peas to spill out of their shells and congregate with bits of almond and pools of olive oil at the bottom of the bowl. We ate every last morsel and realized that one of the great revelations of our adult life has been that a bright crunchy salad often has nothing whatsoever to do with lettuce.

When we made our version at home, the only major change was to use sheep’s milk feta instead of white anchovies. (This was in part because our grocery store doesn’t stock them, and because we can only eat anchovies, even the milder white ones, so often). Also, for the record, mint, olive oil, and lemon juice are dynamite with feta.

This is a simple salad, so its components must be treated with care. The peas should be just blanched in salted water and then immediately cooled to preserve their color and crunch. The almonds should be fried in olive oil and dusted with salt while still warm. The other elements of this salad can be shifted according to taste, but there is one imperative: you must slice the sugar snap peas exactly like they do at Tavolata.

A more detailed recipe follows.