ISSUE 11, FIELD PEAS, Part 3: Pickled

The Road Not Taking

The Road Not Taken

The first years of my life were spent in Japan, so my sense of taste was formed at a time when little sugar was in that country and traditional preparations still prevailed.  I loved vegetables fermented in rice bran, and stocks made of sea vegetables and dried bonito.  So when I study how vegetables taste in southern cooking, I unconsciously measure preparations against Asian analogies. 

I've been thinking about cowpeas a lot.  And so did that generation of agronomists active at the end of the 19th and early 20th century.  It seemed the lynchpin of sustainable field culture in diversified farms--a good green manure, livestock feed, a market vegetable, and cheap food for the farmer's family.  Most of the cowpea stocks grown in the South derived ultimately from West Africa.  But not all--some were Asian--particularly what used to be called the asparagus bean and now the yard long bean.  These were imported in some number in the 1890s. 

Some varieties of cow pea were cooked in the pod green (the rice pea was particularly savored this way).  But were they ever pickled in the pod like dilly beans.  Were cowpeas ever pickled--in any form.  This question was particularly on my mind when I went to the best Asian market in my city looking for something I suspected I would find:  pickled cowpeas.  I did, both hot, and vinegared in the pod.  Did southerners ever do the same? 

When pondering questions about cow pea cooking in the South my first move is to consult George Washington Carver's Tuskegee bulletin "How to Cook Cow Peas."  Surely there was a Gulla-Geechee hot cow pea salt pickle or vinegar pickle.  I looked--and there was only one--a field pea Chow Chow. Not exactly what I was seeking, but still a suggestion.

When the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation engaged in a comparative tasting of field peas in 2016 at the Gatewood House in Charleston (thank you Sarah Horton!) we asked April McGregor to prepare a pickled version of field peas.  She decided to do a spicy Asian version that proved to be a highlight of the tasting.

At that tasting I asked a number of chefs and guests about what fermentation of field peas in a miso style.  I had not realized that Sean Brock had already undertaken such experimentation and had employed it in numbers of dishes at Husk.  At any rate, field pea miso has become something that a number of persons across the South have created.