Black-eyed Peas

No, not the hip hop group, but Vigna unguiculata, known by many names, but mostly in these parts (the southern US), as black-eyed peas. Supposedly eating them on New Year's Day will bring you luck, and if you eat them with some sort of greens, usually turnip greens, you are promised luck and money!

All these thoughts came to the surface while I was putting my dried black-eyed peas on the soak. Yesterday in the grocery store, all the canned and frozen peas were sold out, but I happen to prefer the dried ones anyway. In years past they would have been cooked with lots of bacon or fatty ham, but in these more health conscious times they are cooked without anything but a little salt. However, in a salute to my ancestors, I will cook mine with a small amount of very lean ham. I will have turnip greens and cornbread, from my Mother's recipe, along with my black-eyed peas and sit back and wait for the luck and the money to pour in.


In the remote event that anyone is interested, black-eyed peas originated in West Africa, probably northern Nigeria and Niger. When I was assigned to Ibadan, in the West State of Nigeria, in the 70s, we saw pea vines growing in the ditches that looked like black-eyed peas. When I asked a local botanist about this, he told me that was the wild version of the plant, still growing.


Slaves brough black-eyed peas to North American and they also brought with them okra another southern traditional vegetable that originated in West Africa, in the region of Nigeria. This rather furry veggie with big soft seeds is not to everyone's liking and in an effort to make it more palatable, the traditional way to cook it is to slice it in little rounds, coat it well with cornmeal and fry it. If you boil it you get a gelatinous unappetizing dish.


These two vegetables were long thought of as poor folks food but have now worked their way onto southern tables of all degrees.



Thinking of the slaves and their efforts to bring a little bit of home with them, reminds me of one of the most emotionally devastating places I ever visited. That was Elmina on the coast of Ghana. It was one of the "castles" built in the 15th -16th centuries to hold salves until they could be loaded on boats for transport to Europe and North America. Yes, I said Europe, slavery was not abolished in England until 1833, just a few years before the US Civil War. Elmina is one of more than 60 of these holding places built by the English, Dutch, Portugese, French. Many of these are now used a police stations, government offices, etc, but Elmina has been turned into a museum. The small dark rooms still had the chains attached to the walls and you could look down the shoot that the slaves were pushed down to load them into the ships. The fact that they managed to bring anything with them is a miracle.

It looks pretty nice on the outside, and some of it was, but the holding areas, really pens is the only word that describes this accurately, were in the lower levels, and were dark, dank, and very small. I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor several months ago that Elmina is being "sanitized" so that it will not offend the tourist trade. Everyone has to be so politically correct these days.

I don't know how I got here from soaking a package of dried black-eyed peas.