As with any proud Basque, peas have played a huge part in my culinary education – they even feature in one of my earliest kitchen memories, of five-year-old me podding peas with my mother. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that peas are one of the most important ingredients in our cooking tradition, and we happily eat them for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner, as well as a raw snack. Every spring, we Basques turn into pea-obsessives, because that’s when guisantes lágrima come into season. They’re much smaller than regular peas, and much, much sweeter, and we cook them every which way, from roasting and frying to stews and salads – they’re so revered that we call them “green caviar”. Lágrima peas are next to impossible to get hold of in the UK, but that’s not to say you can’t use fresh British peas in similarly delicious and varied ways.
