We’ve all heard the legend that eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day helps ensure good luck in the coming new year. Whether the guarantee of good luck is true or not I really don’t know - and I don’t care. I’m a big fan of black-eyed peas and I welcome the chance to cook them.
I visited Athens, Texas, several years ago when my brother was living there and attended their black-eyed pea jamboree. It was lots of fun. There were black-eyed pea cooking and black-eyed pea shelling contests and a competition to choose a black-eyed pea queen. There were arts and crafts booths and a few contests unrelated to peas like the watermelon eating contest, which my niece entered.
The Athens festival is mentioned in the following article from the March, 1983, Progressive Farmer. It’s an excerpt from James J. Kilpatrick’s The Foxes Union and I’d like to reprint it for your enjoyment.
Black-eyed Peas - The Noble Legume
“I am often asked, in my capacity as Number One Pea, Pro Tem, of the Black-Eyed Pea Society of America, if the black-eyed pea is soul food. Yes, of course it is soul food. It is good not only for the soul, but for the heart, the mind, the liver, the gizzard, the forehand, and the backhand as well.
“Occasionally, though seldom in my presence, people scorn the Noble Legume as a mere cowpea, suitable only for the lower classes. This is nonsense. The black-eyed pea is above social status. It is also below social status. It sustains both commoner and king. Every President of the United States since Rutherford B. Hayes, with the sole exception of Mr.Harding, is known to have relished the black-eyed pea. It is the favorite food of second basemen, public auditors, gas inspectors, and masters of the flugelhorn.
"Black-eyed peas are of ancient origin. In its dried form, the black-eyed pea traveled with Moses in the wilderness; there is high authority, indeed, for the proposition that this is the manna described in Exodus 16. The black-eyed pea came to Virginia with John Smith in 1607; it has been the vegetable of choice in our great houses ever since.
"Imagine, if you will, the perfection of an August afternoon. The husbandman and his wife proceed to the pea patch. There they pick a peck of black-eyed peas.The jade pods are somewhat larger than a good copy pencil; they dangle from the lush vines like tassels on a lampshade. This splendid harvest then is taken to a back porch, where the jeweled peas are popped from their velvet encasements.
"Thence to the stove, where a kettle of fresh tomatoes has been simmering, smershed in happy communion with celery, onions, bits of crisp bacon, salt, pepper, cayenne and Tabasco. The black-eyed peas then are cooked by themselves, with a hefty wedge of fatback, or added to the tomatoes. The better form is to cook them solo and to serve them beside the tomatoes with a slab of hot cornbread.
“But it is among the infinite glories of the NobleLegume that it cannot be cooked badly. The blackeyed pea is good the next day. It is good the day after that. The black-eyed pea may be squashed, mashed, pureed, mixed with rice, or fried in the form of patties, hash or petits fours. Down in Athens, Tex., in 1973, the annual black-eyed pea jamboree saw first prize awarded to a gentlewoman who concocted a black-eyed pea mousse. No other vegetable can make that claim. No other vegetable can even approach it.”
Susan Holland is longtime resident of Benton County and a staff member of the Westside Eagle Observer. She may be contacted by e-mail at sholland@ nwaonline.com.
Opinion, Pages 8 on 12/29/2010