They should be no more than three or four inches long, with absolutely no wrinkling at all.

The sugar snap pea is, ideally, a bit paler than you would expect from a pea, totally firm and crisp and taut in texture, and the stem is still attached. It’s pretty rare that you can ever figure out the exact provenance of any particular sugar snap, so before you buy, eat one and make sure that they taste right. The name “sugar snap” is mostly used to denote a firm, round, edible-pod pea with an elevated level of sweetness. These days, there are dozens of varieties of sugar snaps, all variations of the original. Is Montana a cool state? Hell yes, look at the sugar snap pea. Is American produce good? Yes, look at the sugar snap pea. Are seed conglomerates good? Yes, look at the sugar snap pea. None other than James Beard, the grandfather of modern American cuisine, raved about it in the New York Post, calling it “nothing short of sensational.” He was correct the sugar snap makes a good argument for every single possible thing involved in its creation. The first year the sugar snap pea was available, it was an immediate smash hit. Instead what they got was the sugar snap pea: a pea with a thick-walled, edible pod a fresh, herbal flavor and an incredibly high sugar content.

Parker’s weirdo mutant shell pea had a particularly tight pod, which basically never burst or twisted, and the two cross-bred the Chinese snow pea with the mutant pea, thinking they might come up with a snow pea that doesn’t have the physical problems. Shelling peas, meaning a pea with an inedible, fibrous pod, are by far the most common variety of pea in the world - all our frozen peas come from this sort of pea. Lamborn was hired by the Gallatin Valley Seed Company as a breeder, and Parker introduced him to a bizarre fluke mutation he’d found a decade and a half earlier. But the snow pea can be tricky to grow, twisting and buckling and popping when it gets to even a moderate size.

The snow pea is unusual for having an edible pod that’s basically bereft of insoluble fiber, making it very easy and delicious to digest. Parker in a quest to solve a problem associated with the ancient Chinese snow pea, the flat variety you often find in takeout American Chinese food (and also from-China Chinese food, and also other food it’s a good pea). Lest you think I am opposed to recent American advances in the competitive world of produce breeding, now is the time of year to gorge on one of my all-time favorite vegetables, created for a Gallatin, Montana-based company and first released in 1979: the sugar snap pea, which is showing up in farmers markets, meaning that winter is finally over. I have written in the past about lab-created varieties of fruits and vegetables that I think are garbage (the Red Delicious apple), lackluster (the Tommy Atkins mango), or good but perhaps overrated (the Honeycrisp).

Shopping app snap pea