Sea Island Red Peas
Peas could mean two things in early Charleston—it could mean garden pea (Pisum savitum), the climbing vines that bore pods of spheroidal green seeds, that were cherished as Spring’s greatest blessing—or it could be field peas (Vigna unguiculata), the summer grown annual legumes that crossed the Atlantic with the enslaved Africans. The latter became a fixture of southern fields and particularly important on the rice plantations of the Lowcountry. Several varieties became beloved—indeed became fixtures of Gullah cookery and later Lowcountry cuisine: the red pea, the rice pea, and black-eyed pea.
In West Africa a variety of red field pea landraces have been nurtured for centuries. The Haricot Rouge de Burkina Faso has the deep red surface of the Sapelo Island Red Pea, but not the shape and eye configuration. The Dadjime cowpea of Benin has the shape and eye configuration but is a shade smaller the southern red peas. [See table below.] A lineage of the sea island red pea awaits the genetic analysis need to determine the exact west African patrimony. Both the Benin and Burkina Faso landraces have the good taste (both cooked seeds and leaves), productivity, and ability to withstand extremes of rain or drought that characterize the sea island red peas.
The red pea went everywhere the black dispora touched. Brazil. Jamaica. Cuba. It first appears in Charleston advertisements as “Bahama red pease” (Charleston Morning Post, January 27, 1786, 2). In June 1799 brokers Waring & Smith of Charleston offered “twelve hundred bushels of RED PEAS” along with 8 shares in the Santee Canal. Early advertisements indicated that Charleston’s early cultivators valued the field peas as fodder for livestock even more than they savored them as human food. A November 1812 newsletter from Charleston reported, “The crop of field peas, or red and back-eyed peas, was never known to be so productive, and many planters think they will not be able to gather above one half the crop of that useful and valuable provision for cattle and sheep.” (Trenton Federalist, November 23, 1812, 1). It is a fully established commodity by 1820 appearing regularly in the lists of products available at mercantile warehouses on the East Bay waterfront. By 1830 they were so widely cultivated and so prolific that there was no need for importing seed. Co-cropped with corn in the field, or in a pea row in a Gullah huck patch, it was the commonest legume encountered in the Lowcountry. While the black eyed pea, pods and vines, graced the feed trough in the cattle yard or hog pen, the red pea was found on the human table. The former had a rather chalky texture, the latter a deep meaty richness.
Sarah Rutledge supplied a recipe for “Red Peas Soup” in The Carolina Housewife, the first recorded of a repertoire of red pea recipes ultimately of African origin that would include “hoppin’ john”, red pea likker, red pea gravy, red peas and snaps, fried red pea cakes, and peas & greens.
Rutledge’s recipe: “One quart of peas, one pound of bacon, (or ham bone,) two quarts of water, and some celery chopped; boil the peas, and when half done, put in the bacon; when the peas are thoroughly boiled, take them out, and rub them through a cullender or coarse sieve, then put the pulp back into the pot with the bacon and season with a little pepper, and salt if necessary. If the soup should not be thick enough, a little wheat flour may be stirred in.”
The celery is no doubt Rutledge’s innovation. The addition of a bird or cayenne pepper was frequent in Gullah versions of the soup.
The red pea’s reign began to diminish in the 1880s and 1890s when agricultural experimental stations touted other field pea varieties for their productivity, their disease resistance, and their speed in maturation. It survived where it had installed itself in the African-American traditional foodways: in the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, and of course in Jamaica and other of the islands where it thrived and maintained its symbolic significance. Over the centuries the widely grown pea had become so attuned to the growing conditions of the Lowcountry that it naturalized and self-reproducing population skirted old corn fields and ditches. In Geechee enclaves such as Sapelo Island it had never gone out of cultivation, so when the revival of Lowcountry ingredients occurred, the red pea became one of the signal African diaspora components of soul food and southern food. It was boarded on Slow Food’s global Ark of Taste several years ago.
Dr. William Thomas at Georgia Coastal Gourmet Farm examining his red peas.
For those wishing to secure the Sapelo Island strain of Sea Island Red Pea, try Georgia Coastal Gourmet Farm in Townsend GA. They are on the web.
Excellent!