- Black-eyed peas flavored with cheap pork product
- Jello with fruit salad embedded in it
- Corn bread
- Greens
- (optional) punch, with or without bourbon, almost certainly with ginger ale
I stick to this menu every New Year's, and it's to my dear spouse's credit that she has gamely gone along. This year the challenge was only in getting my eldest to try the peas, he now having decided that peas are yucky. We told him they tasted like meat and I got him to eat two. That should suffice for the good luck. To my surprise, when I looked up the origins of good-luck new year black-eyed peas on the Interwebs, the wiki claims that the black-eyed-peas-for-good luck came over to this continent with Sephardic Jews in the 1730s, mostly likely to Georgia, thence to the public at large. I have no idea what to make of this, but I guess I'll go along and believe anything I read on the internet. The pre-literacy on that side of the family into the 18th century precludes me from making any evidentiary conclusions about anything related to the family tree, particularly as I don't know whether my Grandmother picked this up from her own mother's side, father's side, or both, or just the culture at large.
In any event, here's my own version of how to cook the peas, plus or minus:
Cover two cups of rinsed black-eyed peas in water in a big pot (I use my trusty dutch oven) overnight. In the morning, drain them, rinse again, and set aside in a bowl.
Cut up one medium-sized onion into a rough dice and cook in the bottom of the medium-hot dutch oven with a tablespoon of heated cooking oil (these days I use the very inauthentic extra virgin olive oil; the flavor disappears in the vat of peas, so you can use almost anything, I think). Add salt and pepper, a quarter teaspoon of cayenne, a teaspoon of dry mustard (or a tablespoon of prepared mustard of your choice), combine with onion, and cook until the onion softens, 5-10 minutes. Add in about a half a cup of beer, combine, and bring to a simmer, about two minutes. Variation: use a quarter cup of bourbon instead of the beer.
Now add the soaked and rinsed peas and cover with water, and then about a cup more, usually 4-5 cups total of water. Add 1 tablespoon of molasses (less if you are not, for some reason, using beer). Bring the whole thing to a simmer.
Now add in your cheap pork product, sliced up according to the merits of the pork. In recent years I've been using about a half pound of shank, although I started out making this most years with salt pork, I can't find the latter now and can barely find shank. If it has fat and bone, don't bother defatting or deboning before throwing it in.
Bring back to a brisk simmer, then turn the heat to the lowest setting you have to to get the mixture to just bubble very mildly. Let cook for at least 90 minutes, preferably longer, up to 3 hours. Stir every 10-15 minutes (remember your pork cooking safety -- you want to get the pork good and done, so rotating it around your approximately 225 degree pot of peas is important.) Add a little water if it thickens before the time is up, but you do want the peas to reduce to a thickish pasty sauce with just enough liquidity to ooze a bit.
I usually then fish out the pork with tongs or a spoon, trim off the remaining fat/gristle/bone, dice up the remaining pork meat and throw it back into the pot, stirring it in.
Forgot to soak the peas? I rarely do these days, but if you really must, then you can of course boil the peas for 20-30 minutes, drain and set aside, and then re-insert them into the recipe as above.
Having just spent Nedw Year's in the actual South for the first time in my life, I can confirm that, indeed, EVERYONE EATS THEIR PEAS on New Years' -- if you go to the grocery store on the 2nd and ask anyone at all "Now, did you eat your peas yesterday?" They say "Oh, yes ma'am I surely did."
Posted by: Lefty | January 05, 2010 at 17:59