![\"\"](\"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/WP_Johns\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Rice-Cowpea.jpg\" "\\"Rice")
<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nChengdu, China. January 21, 2014<\/strong> Most of this post is taken verbatim from this very site from over 6 years ago \u2013 July 2007. At the time I was involved in an inner city community garden in Washington, DC, where it was a constant battle against the elements and the fauna \u2013 particularly the rats and squirrels. That seems so long ago. I\u2019ve since spent two years in Bulgaria and am now living in Southwestern China, where, if you look hard enough, you can find just about every edible thing under the sun. Today I ran across these pickled \u201crice cowpeas,\u201d which are eaten with relish here \u2013 and AS a relish, as this package shows. The most common variety of cowpea here is the yard long bean. You may have eaten them in a Chinese restaurant in the States; they\u2019re readily available in Asian markets. They\u2019re very common and popular here in Sichuan, where the green-bean-like pods, which are indeed very long, are invariably chopped into very small pieces and stir-fried. They neither are related to nor taste like green beans and they\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad do not cook up like green beans, either. They are cooked long before the beans inside form.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n In July 2007, I wrote: <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Many food writers seem to think that boiled p<\/span>eanuts and grits are the defin<\/span>ing foods of the South, but I sell stone-ground, whole-grain, heirloom corn grits to folks in every state, and many of my customers are chefs in restaurants. Very few of them are, in fact, southerners. And the Lee Bros. have popularized boiled peanuts in New York City, though I do think that the popularity of <\/span>edamame<\/span><\/em> (boiled green soybeans, very similar in texture and flavor) at sushi bars has helped boiled peanuts\u2019 visibility. Everyone has heard of blackeyed peas, perhaps the best known of the cowpeas. There\u2019s even an heirloom California black-eye. But few people outside the Deep South<\/span> [in America]<\/span> grow or eat the myriad other varieties of <\/span>Vigna unguiculata. <\/span><\/em>The nomenclature, both scientific and common, can be maddening, because all peas and beans, including cowpeas,\u00a0green peas (<\/span>Pisum<\/span><\/em>), soybeans (<\/span>Glycine<\/span><\/em>), pigeon peas (<\/span>Cajanus<\/span><\/em>), and common beans (<\/span>Phaselous, <\/span><\/em>which includes lima beans, black beans, Navy beans and green beans) belong to the legume family (<\/span>Fabaceae<\/span><\/em>). They have subtle and dramatic culinary differences. Red beans and rice, for example, does not taste like hoppin\u2019 john, but u<\/span>nripe cowpeas in the pod can be <\/span>eaten like unripe common beans (\u201cgreen beans\u201d)<\/span> [\u2013 and that\u2019s just how they\u2019re mostly consumed here in Sichuan]. <\/span>\u00a0 At the turn of the century,\u00a0Sturtevant classified cowpeas with pigeon peas, which also came with the slave trade from Africa, but today cowpeas are recognized as a separate genus. They are neither (green) peas nor (common) beans, but you may hear them called both.\u00a0If you hear a southerner talking about shelling peas, he means cowpeas, which are also known as crowders, field peas, and, tellingly, southernpeas. <\/span><\/p>\n The varieties are as varied as grapes or apples, and southerners tend to crave the type that was grown in their neck of the woods. I\u2019m partial to cream peas and some of the lesser known blackeye types, such as whippoorwills,<\/span> but, in truth, I love them all. [I have come to love the unripe pods here in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, which sits very close to the same parallel as Charleston and is just as hot and humid.]<\/span><\/p>\n Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1798\u00a0that the cowpea\u00a0\u201dis very productive, excellent food for man and beast.\u201d He praised the plants\u2019 ability to improve the \u201ctilth and fertility\u201d of the soil, and he sowed them in the\u00a0South Orchard at Monticello between 1806 and 1810. Perhaps the cowpea\u2019s reputation as both fodder and a soil enhancer has kept it off tables, because the season is not too long for most American climates. Indeed, the culinary historian William Woys\u00a0Weaver, grows several varieties in his\u00a0awe-inspiring garden in Devon, Pennsylvania.\u00a0Mine matured as quickly as my tomatoes and squash, and before my corn and melons. The photo at right<\/span> [from my DC garden]<\/span> shows whippoorwills on the left, both green and dried, and clay cowpeas,\u00a0a rare\u00a0old favorite of Confederate soldiers who both added them to their rations and planted them in fields alongside battlefield stations. One of the great beauties of growing them is that you can eat them fresh (I simply boil a piece of smoked ham hock or neck bones in water until it\u2019s seasoned, then add the peas and cook on a low boil for about half an hour) or save the dried beans for winter use. The green and dried cowpeas in the photo were harvested on the same day from the same plants. <\/span>[I was]<\/span> able to harvest several more times, then <\/span>[I simply left]<\/span> the plants in the ground to provide nutrients for <\/span>[the] <\/span>next year\u2019s corn.<\/span><\/p>\n We had great luck <\/span>with heirloom cowpeas from both <\/span>www.heirloom-seeds.com<\/span><\/a> and www.victoryseeds.com<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Since that summer back in the States, the heirloom vegetable craze has really taken off. Many more varieties of cowpeas are now available. When I was a child, over 300 varieties of cowpeas were grown in South Carolina. I would love to see them all come back.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chengdu, China. January 21, 2014 Most of this post is taken verbatim from this very site from over 6 years ago \u2013 July 2007. At the time I was involved in an inner city community garden in Washington, DC, where it was a constant battle against the elements and the fauna \u2013 particularly the rats […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3912,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[534,440,18,1315,535,1314],"class_list":["post-3911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-cowpeas","tag-hoppin-john","tag-hoppin-john-martin-taylor","tag-sichuan","tag-vigna-unguiculata","tag-yard-long-beans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3911"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3998,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911\/revisions\/3998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n