White Acre Peas
It appears in the cooler section of my local farmers market in plastic bags with two block letters in black marker blazoned on them: WA. If you don’t know about southern fields peas you won’t have a clue. BC = Brown Crowder. BE = Black Eyed. PH = Pink Eye Purple Hull. WA = White Acre, the creamiest best tasting of the offerings in that cooler.
The White Acre is a recent heirloom, bred in the mid-20th century of the white lady, cream, conch pea strains to produce a pea that was prolific, easy to grow, quickly and luxuriantly leafy to quash competing weeds, and setting pods high on the bush for easy picking. It had the good culinary qualities of its forbears. Maybe not so delicate as the Rice pea, or so fine grained as the best Texas Creams, but excellent withal. It broke into national consciousness in 1952 when canneries began processing White Acres and offering them year round in grocery stores. The fact that the young tender pods could be prepped like green beans or rice pea pods did not matter in the explosive growth of the pea’s popularity. It was a hit among farmers and a hit with consumers from Florida to Philadelphia.
Margaret Holmes canneries adopted it as a signature southern pea in its line of products. Yet it enjoyed equal favor fresh on the produce stand. In Georgia and Florida it largely supplanted the old Conch pea. In South Carolina its ease of cultivation enabled it to eclipse the rice pea. In the Gulf South it overcame the traditional lady pea by representing itself as a form of the lady pea. In Texas it never quite supplanted the old Texas Cream. By 2000 it was the most popular form of white pea grown in the United States that wasn’t a black eyed.
A southern pea is a bean rather than a garden pea, being Vigna unguiculata rather than Pisum style garden peas. (There are a couple of fine southern garden peas—I’ve written about the Wando recently..) Many beans are indigenous to the western hemisphere—think sievas, butter beans, lima, pod beans etc. But the southern peas (cowpeas/fieldpeas) for the most part came from Africa. All the famous sorts grown nowadays except the asparagus bean were African diaspora foods.
My favorite fields peas are ranked in order:
#1 Rice
#2 Sea Island Red
#3 Conch Pea
#4 White Acre
#5 Whippoorwill
#6 Pink Eye Purple Hull
#7 Brown Sugar Crowder
#8 Knuckle Hull
#9 Texas Cream
#10 Black Crowder
Richard Fery of Clemson did much important work breeding southern peas in the past several decades, developing pest and pathogen resistant high yielding varieties that preserved many of the taste virtues of the older landraces. His Carolina Crowder pea took that culinary qualities of the Mississippi Silver Hull variety and fitted them to the 21st century’s difficult growing conditions.
There are people trying to breed sweet cowpeas. I can’t help feel that this is just another expression of the sugaring of America.