[Though clearly African in origin, its inclusion in cookbooks like
the Sarah Rutledges Carolina Housewife indicates that even before the
Civil War the dish was being eaten by black and white residents of all
classes in the Lowcountry.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE HISTORIC PROBLEM WITH HOPPIN' JOHN  
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Robert Moss
December 22, 2020
Serous Eats
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_ Though clearly African in origin, its inclusion in cookbooks like
the Sarah Rutledge's Carolina Housewife indicates that even before the
Civil War the dish was being eaten by black and white residents of all
classes in the Lowcountry. _

A savory blend of rice and black-eyed peas, it's served alongside
collard greens as the traditional New Year's Day meal in the South,
Omid Tavallai

 

New Year's Day is approaching, which means we need to have a little
talk about Hoppin' John. A savory blend of rice and black-eyed peas,
it's served alongside collard greens as the traditional New Year's Day
meal in the South and, increasingly, in other parts of the country.
Eating those two dishes will ensure prosperity in the new year, and
the collards represent greenbacks and the black-eyed peas coins. Or so
they say.

For a long time, if offered a plate of collards and Hoppin' John on
New Years, I would have been inclined to say, "keep the change," for I
never understood why anyone made a fuss over a mushy mound of rice and
black-eyed peas.

My own initial effort at making the dish began with a can of
black-eyed peas and store-brand white rice and ended up in the
garbage. Later, seeing the error of my ways, I tried starting with
dried black-eyed peas, cooking them in homemade chicken stock and
goosing them with onions, garlic, and a parade of herbs in a futile
attempt to impose flavor on a fundamentally mild dish.

Hoppin' John is the textbook example of how hard it can be to recreate
the traditional dishes of the antebellum Southern kitchen, and it's
not just a matter of recipe or technique. You can dig up old 19th
century "receipts" (as they were called back then), follow them to the
letter, and still end up mystified that anyone could ever have loved
such stuff, much less decided it was an iconic Southern dish.

The problem with once-great iconic food often comes down to
ingredients: A key element of the dish either is no longer anymore or,
more frequently, is widely available but in a greatly debased form. In
the case of Hoppin' John, modern versions can come up short because
every single one of its ingredients are but pale shadows of their
former selves.

A Rice and Bean Dish

in The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (1992), the late
culinary historian Karen Hess dug deep into the roots of Hoppin' John,
which she categorized as one of the "bean pilaus of the African
diaspora." Pilau (or, as it is often spelled, perlo or purloo) was the
signature dish of the Carolina rice lands. Related to the Turkish
pilaf and the Spanish paella, it consists of rice that is washed and
pre-soaked then simmered in a flavored broth until the liquid is
almost fully absorbed and each grain stands out separate and distinct.

In classic Carolina pilaus, chicken or shrimp were often cooked in the
pot along with the rice. When the broth was flavored with bacon and
peas or beans incorporated, it became the dish known as Hoppin' John.
That technique of cooking rice and beans together was African in
origin, and it spread to every part of the Americas that had a
significant African presence. Each location developed its own
distinctive rice and bean dishes—the Moros y Cristianos of Cuba
(made with black beans), the Pois et Riz Collé of Louisiana (made
with red beans), and the Hoppin' John of the South Carolina
Lowcountry.

The original ingredients of Hoppin' John are simple: one pound of
bacon, one pint of peas, and one pint of rice. The earliest appearance
in print seems to be in Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife
(1847), and it's important to note that everything was cooked together
in the same pot:

First put on the peas, and when half boiled, add the bacon. When the
peas are well boiled, throw in the rice, which must first be washed
and gravelled. When the rice has been boiling half an hour, take the
pot off the fire and put it on coals to steam, as in boiling rice
alone.

The last instruction reflects the traditional Carolina way of making
rice, isn't quite like most people make it today. Rather than cooking
it 20 minutes until all the water was absorbed, cooks boiled it in a
large amount of salted water until the grains had become swollen. Then
the excess water was drained off and the pot was left on the ashes to
allow to "soak"—that is, to essentially steam over low heat till
each of the snowy white grains stood dry and perfectly separate and
distinct.

Also key is the kind of peas used, for early Hoppin' John recipes call
not for black-eyed peas but "red peas" or "cow peas." In 1895,
visitors from all over the country sampled Hopping John at the Atlanta
Exposition. An article in the Cleveland Leader captured a northern
housekeeper's reaction to it. "I tried to make the dish once . . . and
it was squishy and messy and unlovely to look upon. Then I ate the
Southern one. It was delightful. The grains of rice and the peas stood
apart, yet together, as it were, the purplish peas colored the rice to
their own hue, and the whole was seasoned satisfactorily with savory
bacon." That purplish hue is a hallmark of Hoppin' John made with
old-fashioned peas.

As for the origin of the dish's name, I can't put it any better than
Karen Hess did in The Carolina Rice Kitchen: "Most of the proposed
origins are demeaning to African-Americans, representing pop etymology
of a low order." Some of these proposed origins, I would add, are
demeaning to human intelligence in general, like the notion that it
comes from "Hop in, John," supposedly an obscure South Carolina way of
inviting a guest to come eat. It's obscure because nobody in South
Carolina actually says that. (Such explanations belong to the school
of food etymology that the Oxford English Dictionary has termed "an
absurd conjecture suggested merely by the sound of the word" and I
like to call "just making shit up.")

The most commonly accepted explanation is that Hoppin' John is a
corruption of the French phrase pois à pigeon, meaning "pigeon peas."
Hess discounts that etymology, advancing her own contention that it
comes via a long, circuitous route from the combination of kachang, a
Malay word for peas, and bhat, the Hindi word for cooked rice, but I
find that no more satisfying than any of the others. Lacking any
supporting evidence, we might be best off to just say we don't know
where it came from and leave it at that.

For what it's worth, though, numerous accounts of from the early 20th
century note that when Charlestonians said "Hoppin' John," they put
the emphasis on the second word.

I've been unable to turn up any 19th century accounts that link
Hoppin' John with New Year's Day, though it's likely that plenty of
people in Charleston had made it a custom to eat in on that day. By
the early 20th century, the connection with luck on the New Year was
clearly established.

In October 1907, the Quality Shop advertised in the Charleston News
and Courier that they had just received the season's first shipment of
cowpeas and noted, "It isn't New Year's yet, but this old Southern
dish is always hailed with delight." As early as 1909, the members of
the Hibernian Society gathered to enjoy, as the Charleston Evening
Post described it, "The New Year's hopping-john, a dish of cowpeas,
bacon and rice that invariably gives good luck for the whole year to
those who eat it on New Years day." The Society still holds its
traditional New Year's Day Hoppin' John dinner today.

Though clearly African in origin, its inclusion in cookbooks like the
Sarah Rutledge's Carolina Housewife, written by the daughter of
Governor Edward Rutledge and a member of Charleston's elite planter
society, indicates that even before the Civil War the dish was being
eaten by black and white residents of all classes in the Lowcountry.
By the turn of the 20th century, it was one of the featured stars of
the Charleston table. When President William Howard Taft visited the
city in November 1909, he was treated to a dinner of rice pilau, okra
soup, and Hoppin' John.

But something changed over the course of the 20th century, making it
hard to imagine anyone serving Hoppin' John to a visiting dignitary
today, especially if it's not New Year's Day.

If you try to cook Sarah Rutledge's recipe for Hoppin' John using
bacon, rice, and black-eyed peas from the supermarket, you're probably
going to be pretty disappointed. Today's ingredients have been
transformed by a century of hybridization, mechanization, and
standardization to meet the demands of an industrialized,
cost-minimizing food system.

As we've already seen, Southern stone-ground cornmeal was replaced by
hybridized corn picked unripe, air-dried, and bashed to powder by
steel roller mills, forcing cooks to add sugar to cornbread to
simulate its former sweetness. Tomatoes are bred to be as
indestructible as racket balls, and they're picked green, shipped to
supermarkets across the country, and get a good zap of ethylene gas so
they arrive perfectly round, bright red, and flavorless. Heirloom
breeds of pigs, with meat so red it's almost purple and marbled with
thick layers of fat, gave way to lean, factory-raised American
Yorkshire engineered to pass as white meat.

All three of the main ingredients in Hoppin' John have suffered a
similar fate. Let's start with the bacon. Not only are the breeds the
pork bellies come from different, but so is the way those bellies are
treated.

The Bacon

In the old days, salt and smoke were used to preserve the meat, which
cured for weeks and then was smoked for two days or more. Today's
commodity bacon is processed in less than a day: brine-injected,
flash-smoked, and packed for shipping.

The Rice

The original Hoppin' John was made with the famed Carolina Gold rice,
a non-aromatic long-grained variety prized for its lush and delicate
flavor. But that rice was ill-suited for modern agriculture. The
Lowcountry tidal swamps were too soft to support mechanical
harvesters, and the rice required far too much manual labor to be
viable in the post-Emancipation world. A hurricane in 1911 effectively
finished off the industry in the Carolinas, and American rice
production shifted to Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana, where planters
grew new hybridized varieties on dry ground.

The new rice varieties are mechanically processed—heat-dried,
polished, and degerminated. They aren't nearly as nutty and flavorful
as the old Carolina Gold and not nearly as nutritious, either, since
the processing strips away all of the bran and germ. Until well after
World War II, much of rural South Carolina still depended on a diet
heavy on rice and beans, but that rice was the new kind brought in
from the Gulf regions. During the winter months when fresh produce was
unavailable, rural South Carolinians started suffering from
malnutrition due to lack of proteins and nutrients. A 1956 law
required that all rice sold in the state be enriched with the very
vitamins and minerals that mechanical processing had stripped away.

The Peas

Finally, let's address the thorniest issue: the peas. It's a hard to
know out exactly when black-eyed peas started being used in Hoppin'
John, for people have tended to use the terms cowpeas, field peas,
black-eyed peas interchangeably. All these beans (they're technically
beans, not peas) belong to the species Vigna unguiculata, and they're
often called "crowder peas" because of the way the beans crowd
together in the pod.

Red cowpeas have a black-eye in the center just like their paler
cousins, so they can be referred to as "red black-eyed peas." To
complicate matters, in the 19th century there were any number of
landrace and cross-bred varieties, often unique to just one or two
family's fields. These included the Sea Island Red Pea, which was once
a key rotation crop on the Sea Island just south of Charleston but
whose production was abandoned when rice growing ended.

As Adrian Miller relates in Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an
American Cuisine, One Plate as a Time (2013), black-eyed peas spread
more widely than other cowpea varieties. They were eaten throughout
the South by both blacks and whites alike, but they were looked down
on as poor-people food and were slow to take on in the north. For most
of the 20th century, the navy bean was preferred by most northern
shoppers, except for the African-Americans who had arrived during the
Great Migration. Miller posits that these expatriate Southerners ended
up substituting black-eye peas the traditional red peas in Hoppin'
John because the red versions weren't available outside of the
Carolinas.

The two peas aren't the same. Old-fashioned red cowpeas are firmer
than black-eyed peas and have a deep, rich flavor that can only be
described as "meaty." You walk a fine line when preparing dried
commodity black-eyes: cook them too briefly and they'll be
unpleasantly crunchy in the middle; cook them too long and they turn
to mush. You don't have that problem with red cowpeas, for their
texture holds up well, staying firm and chewy even with long, slow
cooking.

But eating Hoppin' John on New Year's Day was the tradition, and
Southerners kept that tradition going even when the original
ingredients were not available. During the middle part of the 20th
century, Hoppin' John was introduced to the rest of the country, too,
as recipes for the dish were published in dozens of cookbooks and
hundreds of newspaper columns nationwide, often around the New Year.

Most of the non-Charleston recipes for "Hopping John" (it tended to be
spelled with the "g" until the 1960s) call for black-eyed peas instead
of red cowpeas. This seems a matter of practicality since, as the
Seattle Daily Times noted in 1929, "Cow peas are well known to
Southerners although they are unobtainable in other parts of the
country."

In an important shift, many of these recipes specified that the rice
and peas be cooked separately and combined at the end. This might have
seemed sensible to cooks unfamiliar the the Carolina way of cooking
rice, but it also meant that the grains wouldn't get imbued while
cooking with any of the smoky, savory flavor of the bacon-laced broth.

Not surprisingly, 20th century recipes started adding in other stuff
to augment the flavor of the rice and beans. Hoppin' John was boosted
by the federal government and countless home economists during the
Depression years, appearing in a series of publications offering
advice for buying and making food for "keeping the family well fed at
low cost." Eminently affordable, rice and beans were a natural choice,
but one suspects the Yankees writing the recipes had at best a passing
familiarity with traditional Hoppin' John.

One particularly durable recipe from federal government shopping
guidelines was "Hopping John with Tomato Sauce." It called for soaking
and cooking two cups of dried beans (variety not specified), browning
salt pork and chopped onion in a pan, then combining them all with
cooked rice and serving with tomato sauce. That recipe was published
in newspapers from Boston to San Francisco, and "home agents" (cooking
instructors) taught it to members of women's clubs from Idaho to
Greensboro, North Carolina, where the attendees noted that to them, at
least, Hopping John was "a new one."

In 1935, the Daily Illinois State Journal noted that "Mrs. Roosevelt
served Hopping John at the White House not long ago and everybody in
the country started buying blackeyed peas....They save money, they add
proteins to the diet and above all, savorily [sic] seasoned, they make
the best kind of eating."

In recent decades, cooks have since gone to even further lengths to
try to impart some sort of flavor on black-eyed pea-based Hoppin'
John, and today's recipes tend to be downright elaborate. Emeril
Lagasse's Food Network version starts with a ham hock and sautéed
onion, celery, green pepper, and garlic, and the peas are cooked in
chicken stock with bay leaves and thyme. Ree Drummond of the popular
Pioneer Woman website "keeps it basic" in her formulation, though like
Emeril she calls for simmering fresh black-eyed peas in chicken broth
seasoned with aromatics, ham hocks, and cayenne. Down in New Orleans,
chef Stephen Stryjewski concocted an amped-up version that
incorporates tasso and jalapenos. In all three, the black-eyed peas
are cooked separately and either spooned over cooked rice or mixed in
with it just before serving.

I can't blame anyone for trying to gussy up modern Hoppin' John, since
for a long time that was the only way to end up with a dish that was
savory and flavorful. A few decades ago, though, a small group of food
lovers began to realize the great bounty that had been lost and have
gone about trying to recapture and revitalize heirloom vegetables and
grains as well as heritage breeds of animals and traditional
preservation techniques.

In 1986, Richard Schulze, a Savannah ophthalmologist, planted a crop
of Carolina Gold rice at his Turnbridge Plantation using seeds
propagated from a few grains of Carolina Gold that had been held in a
USDA seed bank since 1927. Two years later, he harvested a ten
thousand pound crop, and through the efforts of the Carolina Gold Rice
Foundation, a small group of rice farmers now produce a sufficient
supply to sell to restaurant chefs and home cooks interested in trying
their hand at classic recipes.

Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills sells Carolina Gold rice online, and he
has worked with farmers in the Lowcountry to cultivate heirloom beans
and peas, too, including Sea Island Red Peas. A few smokehouse
operators like Benton's in Madisonville, Tennessee, and Edwards of
Surry, Virginia, were still practicing their craft quietly out in the
countryside, and their rich, deeply-smoky products have been
rediscovered by chefs and home cooks alike.

So, for this New Year's Day, try to get your hands on some Sea Island
Red Peas, Carolina Gold rice, and some good old-fashioned smoky bacon.
Cook them together in the same pot until the grains of rice and the
peas stand separate and apart, the rice dyed a purplish-red hue from
the peas. I can't guarantee it will bring you more money in 2015, but
you'll certainly enjoy true riches on your plate.

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