Why am I only just now getting to know black-eyed peas? If you are reading this from USA or Africa, you are no doubt saying yes, why? Black-eyed peas are native to Africa and one of its largest crops. They’re also a staple of southern US cooking, probably introduced from West Africa on slave ships. We white Australians though have never had a real introduction to African cuisine or food plants, and though I know “black-eyed peas and collard greens” from books and songs, I’d never grown either.
My seed was gifted to me by a neighbour without a lot of English language, and for a long time I thought they were a strange variety of snake bean with short stubby pods (short for snake beans anyhow). I know snake beans. They’re a staple of south-east Asian cuisine, and I know how amazingly hardy and prolific they are in my sub-tropical climate. I’m not a complete idiot – black-eyed peas are Vigna unguiculata subsp. unguiculata, and snake beans are the closely related Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis, so they’re close cousins, just about siblings, but quite different to cook with.
I shell snake beans and dry them for storage and using like adzuki beans, but only if I accidentally grow too many. They are best picked green and cooked very fast and little – stir fried or very lightly steamed and dressed. Black-eyed peas are the other way round. They can be cooked like a green bean but they’re best left till the pod yellows, then shelled. At this point they can be cooked fresh, and they cook quite fast – half an hour of simmering or ten minutes in a pressure cooker. Or they can be dried for storage, then soaked and simmered the same way dried beans are cooked.
A quick internet search tells me there’s lots of cultivars. Mine is a very tall climbing variety that grows like a snake bean – fast, dense, tall climbing. I planted just 8 seeds and they have fought off the cucumbers to take over this archway and have yielded kilos of peas already. The internet tells me they are drought hardy but I haven’t had a chance to test that yet in this la Nina year. They are pest hardy – nothing has touched them, not even the catbird that loves to decimate my green beans.
I’m only just learning to cook with them, and so far I’ve only got as far as classic Hoppin’ John, and a slow cooker version of Southern Black-Eyed Peas with kale (that was very good). We eat a lot of beans in various ways – besides being delicious, and warm and filling as a comfort food, and versatile to go with whatever’s in the garden, they’re also very very good for you – the basis of blue zone diets around the world. I’m looking forward to playing with some African recipes with these. But yeah, black-eyed peas are set to become a staple in my garden.
