Peas and Lentils

Description Varieties Recipes

Americans in the 19th century used two broad categories to denominate peas: garden peas and field peas. Garden peas (Pisum sativum) were the various sorts of green, roundish seeds shucked from pods born on vines, associated with European cookery—pease porridge, green pea soup, boiled peas with mint, stewed peas and lettuce. Field peas (Vigna unguiculata) were myriad colored, sometimes spotted, seeds shucked from pods born on vines, consumed by livestock as much as humans, and associated almost exclusively with southern agriculture. Of the Field Peas, or Cow Peas as they were sometimes called, Black-Eyed Pea, Tory Pea, Crowder Pea, Rice Pea, and Red Pea all generated devotees at southern tables. Culinary tradition included several other items in the category of pulses: lentils and chick peas being the two that mattered most in American agriculture and cookery. Lentils were never more than an incidental crop in the 1800s, yet were universally known because of the popular association between lentils and the pottage for which Esau sold his birthright in the book of Genesis. [1] The Chick Pea was noted in garden books of the period, but not the cookbooks.

The green garden pea during the colonial period enjoyed the greatest esteem among Anglo-Americans, cherished as the first green vegetable of Spring and for its sweetness. Thomas Jefferson loved peas above all other products of his garden. The desire to enjoy the vernal pleasures of green peas in winter months drove the Europeans to perfect splitting and drying the peas in the 18th century, and canning them in the 19th century. Gardeners worked intensively during the 18th and 19th centuries to create new varieties, maturing at different times in the calendar, and possessing different taste profiles. The profusion of types led to a situation in which neither master gardeners nor master chefs had a comprehensive sense of what the tastes and qualities of available peas were for much of the century. Robert Buist in 1850 observed, “In flavor and quality there is as great a difference in the Pea as in any vegetable with which I am acquainted, through, from observation, cultivators and even cooks have little knowledge of the quality and flavor of the different varieties in cultivation. Some, when merely plain boiled and seasoned, are of themselves a luxury; others require more assistance from the culinary art to make them palatable.” (Buist’s Family Kitchen Gardener p. 92). Of the multitude he grew, Buist named 19 that most mattered: of the early peas he commended “Early Grotto” for its flavor and noted the local dominance of “Extra Early” in the Delaware Valley, of the Marrow Peas he favored Woodford for its brilliant color and “Matchless” for its taste, of the late peas he declared that “New Mammoth” excelled all peas in flavor, and that the “Sugar Pea” was so sweet that people consumed the pods as well as the seeds.

The field peas’ origins were mysterious to most commentators on southern agriculture.[2] Some sought clues about their genesis in names: “It is doubtless indigenous; and from the circumstance of its having been cultivated by the aborigines, it has long been known as the ‘Indian Pea,’ to distinguish it from the English garden pea, just as the indigenous maize has been denominated ‘Indian Corn,’ to distinguish it from the common cereals brought over from Europe by the first colonists. Under a wise system of farm economy this American Legume is second only in value to maize, from its natural adaptation to the soil and climate of the United States; and from the large amount of excellent forage and seeds that may, with little labor, be produced per acre.” By the end of the 19th century global surveys of Vigna varieties had convinced botanists that Africa was the home of field peas. African-Americans, for their parts, had long asserted the African origin of the Cow Pea, lynchpin of a cooking tradition that boasted iconic dishes such as Hopping John and Reezy-Peezy. George Washington Carver in 1908 demonstrated the culinary versatility of the pea in a cook book devoted to the vegetable. While African-American employments of the Field Pea tended to elaborate its uses as human food, most southern agriculturists from the 1830s onward were fascinated with field peas because of their productivity as animal feed, and because when grown with corn, it restored nutriments to soil (they could fix nitrogen). J. V. Jones of Burke County, Georgia, would become the earliest great experimenter in field pea breeding. In 1856 he published a list of varieties he cultivated and in some cases created.

Blue Pea, hardy and prolific. A crop of this Pea can be matured in less than 60 days from date of planting the seed. Valuable.
Lady, matures with No. 1. Not so prolific and hardy.A delicious table pea.
Rice, most valuable table variety known, and should be grown universally wherever the pea can make a habitation.
Relief, Another valuable table kind, with brown pods.
Flint Crowder, very profitable
Flesh, very profitable
Sugar, very profitable
Grey, very profitable. More so than 5, 6, 7.
Early spotted, Brown hulls or pods.
Early Locust, Brown hulls, valuable.
Late Locust, Purple hulls, not profitable.
Black Eyes, Valuable for stock.
Early Black Spotted, Matures with Nos. 1, 2, and 3.
Goat, So called, I presume, from its spots.Very valuable, and a hard kind to shell.
Small Black, Very valuable, lies on the field all winter with the power of reproduction.
Large Black Crowder, The largest pea known, and produces great and luxuriant vines. A splendid variety.
Brown Spotted, Equal to Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 14.
Claret Spotted, Equal to Nos. 6, 7, 8, and 14.
Large Spotted, Equal to Nos. 6, 7, 8 and 24.
Jones Little Claret Crowder, It is my opinion a greater quantity in pounds and bushels can be grown per acre of this Pea, than any other grain with the knowledge of man. Matures with Nos. 1, 2, 3, 9 and 13, and one of the most valuable.
Jones Black Hull, prolific and profitable.
Jones Yellow Hay, valuable for Hay only
Jones No. 1, new and very valuable; originated in the last 2 years.
Chickasaw, Its value is as yet unknown. Ignorance has abused it.
Shinney or Java, This is the Prince of Peas.[3]

Jones associated profitability with its utility as a forage crop, yet did not scant its value as human food. The ideal forage plant was tall, bushy, leafy, prolific, and disease resistant. During the middle of the 19th century, southerners developed a decided preference for light colored peas for the table. These types did not have the habit of a forage plants, so no dual purpose field pea arose to dominate the market. Instead, multiple varieties flourished in fields below the Mason-Dixon line. By the early 20th century three varieties, Whippoorwill, Iron, and Clay, dominated feed cultivation, and were intercropped with corn and sorghum.[4] The Iron & Clay pea, a hybrid of the Iron and Clay peas, now reigns in the south’s corn fields. One pea on Jones’s list elicits superlatives for taste—the rice pea. While certain regions cultivated special tastes—Charleston for the red pea, and the Lowcountry for black-eyed peas—the universal preference of southern cooks throughout the last half of the 19th century and early 20th century was for the rice pea, so called for its color, small size, and grain-like configuration. I. M., a writer for the Boston Cooking School Magazine in 1915, sang the pea’s virtues: “[T]here is a field pea called the rice pea, grown extensively in southern states, which is white, eye and all, with a slightly creamy ting, and it is even ore delicate of flavor than black-eyed peas; these are as delicate as early June peas, and they retain their natural color when cooked, and do not change the color of meat cooked with them. Perhaps the reason rice peas are not grown more generally is that they are not as hardy as black-eyed peas and other field peas. These delicately flavored rice peas, cooked with tender young pork, are far and away more appetizing than pork and beans, and almost or quite as nutritious. They are good, either cooked after they have become dry in the autumn and winter, or when young and tender in the late spring and early summer. Southern ladies often cook the tender young peas, pods and all, as snap beans are cooked.”[5] Heirloom seed for the rice pea is available at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

1. A writer on lentils in Valley Farmer 5, 5 (May 1853), 174, remarks that they are not in general cultivation in the United States.
2. The earliest comment on the varieties were John MacLeod, American Farmer (1822), J.M.G. Farmers’ Register 2 (1835), p. 752. In Virginia there was a tradition of calling the cow pea a “cornfield pea.”
3. J. V. Jones, Burke Co., GA, The American Farmer 11, 11 (May 1856), 347.
4. C. V. Piper, Agricultural Varieties of the Cowpea and Immediately Related Species (Washington, DC: Gov. Printing Office for the U.S.D.A., 1913).
5. I.M., “Some Dainty Southern Recipes,” Boston Cooking School Magazine, 19 (June-July, 1914), p. 59.