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Resipee for Cukin Kon-Feel Pees
Gether your pees 'bout sun-down. The folrin day, 'bout leven o'clock, gowge out your pees with your thum nale, like gowgin out a man's eye-ball at a kote house. Rense your pees, parbile them, then fry'em with som several slices uv streek<??> middlin, incouragin uv the gravy to seep out and intermarry with your pees. When modritly brown, but not scorcht, empty intoo a dish. Mash em gently with a spune, mix with raw tomarters sprinkled with a little brown shugar and the immortal dish ar quite ready. Eat a hepe. Eat mo and mo. It is good for your genral helth uv mind and body. It fattens you up, makes you sassy, goes throo and throo your very soul. But why don't you eat? Eat on. By Jings. Eat. Stop! Never, while thar is a pee in the dish.-Mozis Addums.
Under the comic spelling is a straightforward method: fresh-shelled field peas, parboiled, then finished in the fat of salt pork and served with raw tomato. The dialect hides two real instructions worth pulling out.
- Kon-feel peesCornfield peas are cowpeas — the family that includes black-eyed, crowder and lady peas — grown between corn rows. Fresh shelled peas are the intent here; frozen black-eyed peas are the closest year-round substitute, and dried ones will need soaking and much longer cooking than this method allows.
- Gowge out your peesThis is shelling, nothing more: pressing the pod open with the thumbnail and pushing the peas out. The recipe gives no reason for picking at sundown and shelling at eleven the next morning.
- Streekt middlinStreaked middling is salt pork belly, the fatty side meat with lean streaks running through it. Modern salt pork or thick unsmoked bacon works; if it is heavily cured, blanch it briefly or the finished dish will be too salty.
- Parbile themSimmer the shelled peas until barely tender — roughly 15 to 25 minutes for fresh cowpeas, depending on age. They finish cooking in the pork fat, so stopping short of done is correct.
- Incouragin uv the gravy to seep outThe hinge of the dish. Render the middling slowly over moderate heat so the fat comes out before the meat browns, then add the drained peas to that fat. Frying the peas in a dry or scorched pan gives none of the meaty liquor the recipe is built around.
- Moderitly brown, but not scorchtKeep the peas moving and pull them off while they are tawny at the edges. Cowpea skins burn bitter quickly once the pan runs dry — a spoonful of the parboiling liquid will loosen things without stewing them.
- Raw tomarters with brown shugarChopped ripe tomato, sugared and left a few minutes to draw out juice, is added off the heat as a cool dressing against the warm mashed peas. Adding it to the pan turns the dish into a stew and loses the contrast entirely.
- YieldNo quantities are given. About two pounds of peas in the pod, or a pound shelled, with four ounces of middling and two medium tomatoes, serves four as a side.
Mozis Addums was the pen name of George William Bagby, a Virginia physician turned journalist who edited the Southern Literary Messenger during the Civil War years and became one of the best-known comic writers in the postwar South; the Addums letters, generally traced to the late 1850s, made his reputation with their heavy phonetic dialect and rural narrator. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is a small joke among the practical receipts — a literary set piece rather than a kitchen note. The dish itself is entirely serious food: cowpeas were planted between corn rows across the South, harvested green in late summer, and cooked with the salt pork that every farm kept, which is why a humorist could count on every reader knowing exactly what he meant by "streekt middlin."