More peas, please! 17 delicious ways to devour Britain’s most brilliant vegetable | Vegetables

It’s not good news for the pea farmers: pea consumption in the UK has fallen to a 50-year low. According to data from Defra, the average Briton ate just 37g of peas per week in 2025, down from 144g per week in 1975.

Though a classic British staple, peas are not for everybody. Apparently only 22% of gen Z associate peas with Britain at all (which is patently ridiculous: 90% of the peas we consume in the UK are grown here, while we produce about 160,000 tonnes for freezing alone each year).

But if I’m honest, I ate zero grams of peas last week; ditto the week before. I like peas – or at least I’m rarely offended by them – but as a suppertime option, they seem a little mundane. And while all the pak choi and purple sprouting broccoli in the fridge risks going floppy with age, frozen peas can be postponed indefinitely.

It shouldn’t be this way. Peas are healthy, versatile, sustainable and insanely available. If you’re like me, you don’t even need to buy peas to eat them: I’ve always already got some. But if you’re still in need of inspiration, here are 17 delicious ways to help keep the UK pea industry afloat.

Pea soup is a good place to start – especially if it’s Felicity Cloake’s perfect pea soup, an ideal distillation of this classic dish. As with all these recipes, frozen peas are called for at this time of year – but, as Cloake says, frozen and fresh are pretty indistinguishable in soup. In one sense frozen peas are fresher than fresh peas anyway – chilled within 150 minutes of picking, before they develop any starchiness. If you’re after something a bit fancier, Tori Haschka’s pea soup with almond and chorizo crumbs also contains courgette, broccoli, kale and a diced red apple – all blitzed smooth at the end and accessorised with crumbled chorizo on top.

Ravinder Bhogal’s easy pea and mint dip – which includes feta and a lightly pickled radish salsa – can be served with bread or crudites or both, and is allegedly even good on toast for breakfast. Simpler still is Jamie Oliver’s peas with broad beans, chilli and mint: all the ingredients are in the title, apart from a squeeze of lemon and a dash of olive oil.

Chorizo and pea risotto makes for a quick yet rather elegant midweek supper. Rukmini Iyer’s green pea pulao is another rice dish, topped with a fried egg and spiced with cardamom. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall mines a similar vein in a different genre with a dish featuring baby peas, bacon, garlic and risoni – a rice-shaped pasta more commonly known as orzo (although not in Italy, apparently).

Rachel Roddy’s peas and pasta offering uses ingredients you may well have on hand right now: peas, cream, onion, butter, lemon, some kind of hard cheese, a single tablespoon of cream cheese and pasta (macaroni, penne, fusilli or similar). A potato gnocchi with peas from Masha Rener is finished with ricotta salata – salted ricotta. If you haven’t got gnocchi, Rener says linguine can step in as understudy.

Many of us normally serve peas as a side dish with meat – as an afterthought, even – but Yotam Ottolenghi’s lamb shoulder chops with marinated feta and peas gives them a strong supporting role. You’ll struggle to secure the pea shoots he suggests at this time of year, but rocket makes a perfectly acceptable substitute. For Nigel Slater’s hake with pea salsa, the just-cooked peas are whizzed with coriander, parsley, mint, oil and vinegar.

Slater also has a recipe for pea, herb and mozzarella pie, which calls for leeks and courgettes too.

Rosie Sykes’s pea pav bhaji is a spreadable curry made with potatoes and eaten on bread rolls. This spiced green pea coconut curry from Maunika Gowardhan is yet another pea and potato pairing – this one using kokum petals, if you can find them, and tamarind paste if you can’t.

Should there be any peas left in the bag at the end of the night, here are three slightly weird desserts you can try. In the first, a pea sorbet from James Knappett, frozen peas are blitzed with sugar syrup, citric acid and salt before returning to the freezer, eventually to be served with sliced strawberries and mint oil.

This pea mousse combines a thin custard with gelatine, white chocolate and frozen petit pois. And odd as it sounds, Kate Hackworthy’s vegetarian pea cake is actually everything you would expect from an ordinary Victoria sponge, plus peas. And yes, it is green.