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Dried Peas
Peas should be put to soak. In the morning, put them on and parboil. Drain, and put into fresh water, with a piece of ham or middling, and boil until thoroughly done.
A three-line formula that assumes you already know how long dried peas take and what a piece of middling is. Both are worth spelling out.
- The hinge: two watersThe parboil-and-drain step is the core of the method. Discarding that first water sheds loose starch and some of the oligosaccharides that make peas hard on the stomach; the pork then goes into fresh water, so its salt seasons the dish from the start.
- MiddlingMiddling (or middlin' meat) is the cured side of the hog, between shoulder and ham — what we would now buy as salt pork, streaky bacon, or a smoked hock. A ham bone with meat still on it does the same work.
- Soaking"Put to soak" means overnight, in cold water covering the peas by three inches. Older stock takes longer; peas more than a year in the packet may never soften properly no matter how long they boil.
- Whole versus splitWhole dried peas want the overnight soak and 60–90 minutes of simmering. Split peas need no soak at all and collapse into purée in 40 minutes, which is a different dish entirely — the recipe as written assumes whole peas.
- Boil is really simmerA hard rolling boil breaks the skins and clouds the pot. Bring to the boil, drop to a bare simmer, and hold it there until a pea crushes easily against the roof of the mouth.
- Salt and acidAcid is the real enemy: tomato, vinegar or anything sour in the pot will keep the skins tough however long you cook them. Salt is less of a problem than is often claimed — note that the recipe puts cured pork in with the peas from the start — so taste and adjust near the end.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives none. One pound of dried peas with a quarter-pound piece of pork feeds six as a side dish and produces roughly six cups cooked.
Dried peas were the ballast of the European and American winter larder long before canning, keeping for years in a dry crock and asking nothing but water and fuel. The pairing with salt pork here is thoroughly practical, and has long precedent in Europe as well as the American South: cured hog meat supplied fat, salt and savour to a food that has little of any, and the same logic governs the region's beans, greens and black-eyed peas. That the instruction runs to three sentences tells you how routine the dish was — a cook picking up this book needed reminding of the two waters, not of how to feed her family from a sack of peas.