Home › Cookery › Cornfield or Black Eye Peas
Cornfield or Black Eye Peas
Shell early in the morning, throw into water till an hour before dinner, when put into boiling water, covering close while cooking. Add a little salt, just before taking from the fire. Drain and serve with a large spoonful fresh butter, or put in a pan with a slice of fat meat, and simmer a few minutes. Dried peas must be soaked overnight, and cooked twice as long as fresh.-Mrs.
A plain method for fresh-shelled field peas, written for cooks who had them by the bushel in July. The instructions assume green peas straight from the pod; the dried-pea note at the end is an afterthought.
- Which pea this is"Cornfield" peas are cowpeas (Vigna unguiculata) interplanted between corn rows, the same family as black-eyes, crowders and lady peas. Fresh-shelled they cook like a shell bean, not like an English green pea.
- Fresh cooking timeThe recipe gives none. Fresh-shelled cowpeas need roughly 25 to 40 minutes at a bare simmer, until the skins slip and the interior is creamy. Dried, soaked overnight, allow 1 to 1½ hours.
- "An hour before dinner"Dinner here was most likely the midday or early-afternoon main meal, so the peas would sit in water for several hours after shelling. That soak keeps them from drying out; an hour in cold water does the same job today.
- Salt at the endThe instruction to salt just before serving may reflect the old belief that salt toughens skins. Modern practice is the opposite for beans and peas, salting early gives more evenly seasoned, no tougher, results. Either way, taste and adjust off the heat.
- "A slice of fat meat"Salt pork or streak-of-lean side meat, not bacon as sold now. A two-ounce piece of salt pork or a smoked ham hock added to the cooking water does more for the pot than adding it at the end; if you use it, cut back the salt.
- Covering closeKeeping the lid on holds the temperature and stops the peas from drying at the surface, but a hard boil breaks the skins and clouds the liquid. Hold it just below a simmer.
- YieldA pound of shelled fresh peas serves four as a side. Note that this recipe drains the peas, though in wider Southern practice the cooking liquid, the potlikker, is kept.
Cowpeas came to the American South through the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa, where they had long been a staple, and by the eighteenth century they were grown across Virginia as much for soil and fodder as for the table. The name in this recipe describes the farming: the vines were sown between rows of standing corn, where they fixed nitrogen and were harvested green in midsummer or left to dry for winter. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, collected contributions from named Virginia housewives, credited by name or initials. That the book treats fresh and dried peas in a single short paragraph says something about how thoroughly assumed the dish was, no one needed telling what to do with a bowl of field peas.