Instructions: For decades, frozen peas have silently and honorably served this nation as a multipurpose vegetable. Aside from being a side dish and a dump-and-go soup or salad ingredient, lumpy bags of them make great ice packs for injured body parts. Small children who wont eat anything green often eat frozen peas.

Gerbils adore them. Defrosted green peas even make great markers for a bingo game.

Although they arent fresh, they act fresh. In this mad, mad world, when you need a vegetable and everything in the refrigerator is a moldy, slimy science experiment, peas are ready and waiting. Despite the habit of a friend who measures out water according to package directions when she cooks frozen green peas, you can really just defrost them and dig in.

This all brings us to the bond between frozen green peas and Thanksgiving.

You must serve them on Turkey Day. Its the law.

Some of you may argue that it is a certain casserole of green beans in canned mushroom soup topped with canned onion rings that should be the vegetable emblem of Thanksgiving. No. That dish was foisted on gullible cooks by advertising executives who called it company-good in a 1961 soup ad.

Peas, on the other hand, seem to have been our own idea.

Technically, green peas are not a traditional Thanksgiving food, since the first feasters did not partake of them. Clarence Birdseye and Charles Seabrook didnt invent the way to freeze them until 1925 and it wasnt until March 1930 that they became available to consumers for an outrageous 35 cents a box in a Springfield, Mass., market.

But what a boon frozen green peas would have been to Pilgrim and Indian cooks as they ran around like turkeys with their heads cut off - feathers flying, potatoes waiting to be mashed, corn ready for husking. All that, plus making sure everybody got drinks as they chatted about the weather (hardly a modern phenomenon). In addition to catering, take-out, electricity, canned chicken stock, blow dryers, deodorant and zippers, frozen green peas would have helped those early Americans immensely.

Despite their relatively recent appearance, for us frozen peas are nostalgic.

They were discovered by homemakers in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when many of us were growing up. They are a kind of Leave It to Beaver food that we loved to have around even if we had to sit at the table until bedtime until we cleaned our plates of them.

As adults, we dont toss them under the table. We eat them because we dont have to or because we like their taste. And on Thanksgiving, we eat them because we appreciate a great accessory when we see one.

On a Thanksgiving plate, much of the food is either brown or tan and fairly oblong or blobbish. Peas add texture, shape and color. They are perky, round and bright. This is even after you have used them on a sprained ankle!

The biggest reason we serve them, though, is one nobody admits. When you absolutely, positively must have a vegetable substance on the table - even when you know nobody gives a hoot about the USDAs food pyramid and everyone is fixated on gravy and pumpkin cheesecake - green peas are easy.

You can serve them heated or in a vinaigrette. Even a klutz can make them.

They taste fine as is; you dont even need butter.

So do the right thing. Make frozen green peas on Thanksgiving. Heck, make peas and carrots. Cream them. Knock yourself out and put little pearl onions with them. Just make sure they are on the table. Its the right thing to do.

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