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Home Plate, December, Hoppin’ JohnThere’s an old saying: “Eat poor the first day of the year, each rich the rest of the year.”Traditionally, at least down south, the “poor” food eaten on New Year’s Day is a dish of black eyed peas and rice called Hoppin’ John. Who exactly Hoppin’ John was is amystery – some say he was the one-legged slave who originated the recipe – butvariations of the dish itself, a savory stew of beans, onions, garlic and herbs mixed withrice, is found throughout the southern United States, the Carribean and Latin America.The color of the beans changes, and a few of the savories, and the name – in Cuba it’scalled Moors and Christians – but essentially the dish remains the same, an inexpensive,filling, satisfying, easy to fix, nourishing meal for the kind of folks who can’t afford (or don’t want to eat) meat.Legumes – lentils, peas, chickpeas, favas, adzukis, black-eyed peas, limas andcommon beans – are some of the oldest crops on earth. The common bean,

Phaseolusvulgaris

, a native of the Americas introduced to Europe by Columbus, has beencultivated for perhaps as many as 7,000 years. These beans made it to New England fromMexico and the southern United States relatively recently – explorers first recordedIndians in this area growing them along with corn and squash in the 1600s – but rapidly became an essential source of protein for everyone living in these parts.It’s no wonder beans caught on so quickly here. First of all, they’re easy to growonce the soil has warmed a little in spring, sprouting quickly and growing rampantly with just a bit of water and sun. The climbing varieties are happy to wrap around the stalks of their sister crop, corn, exchanging their ability to release nitrogen in the soil to the hungryroots of the maize plants for a lift up into the light.

The bean pods are then left to ripen and dry on the dying corn stalks and later harvested and winnowed for winter storage. The dried seeds, which keep extraordinarilywell over a long period of time, were ground in the colonial era for flour, or cooked intovenison stews, maple-sweetened baked beans, or a protein-rich combination with driedcorn.Most home gardeners in these parts, if they think of growing beans at all, plant thegreen variety, meant to be eaten pod and all before the seeds fully mature. I love green beans at the peak of the season, but I have to say, there’s something infinitely moresatisfying for me come December in a row of jars filled with multi-colored, organicallygrown, dried beans out of my own garden. There’s something embryonic and vital aboutthem, something pulsing just beneath their shiny skin, as if they are impatient in their glass houses, anxious to get on with it, to be stewed and swallowed or to get back out intothe dirt and the warmth, stretching up to the sun. If you’d like to grow your own, check out the Fedco Seed catalogue (www.fedcoseeds.com) for good variteties suited to NewEngland.Dried beans are inexpensive at the supermarket, and still available in a remarkablevariety, especially given the average American’s laziness when it comes to cooking.You’ll find among others, navy beans, soldier beans, pintos, black beans, Jacob’s cattle,yellow eye, kidneys and black-eyed peas (a different species of bean, too tender to growin the north, also called cowpeas). Some are even grown and/or packaged around here;look for the “State of Maine” and “A-1” brands out of Kennebec, ME.All of these will cook easily, usually in just a few hours and with only a fewcomplementary ingredients, into a rich, soupy bean stew that serves as the base for any

number of variations. Though most recipes instruct the cook to soak the beans overnightor to bring them to a boil and then soak the beans in the hot water for an hour beforediscarding the soaking water, this isn’t necessary.Some books claim that this process removes some of the flatulence inducingqualities from the beans, but there’s really no good evidence for this. Our very owngovernment did quite a bit of research into this in the early years of sending men intospace – NASA scientists were worried that the astronauts would asphyxiate themselves intheir tiny space cabins. What they discovered is that there are parts of the beans that canonly be digested by the bacteria in our small intestines. Gas is a by-product of this process. Some people make more gas than others (which led some at NASA to consider measuring a would-be astronaut’s flatulence output before accepting him into the space program). If you find that you are not exactly astronaut material, try using a few drops of Beano before indulging in legumes.

Basic Beans and Some Delicious Variations

Begin by measuring out as many beans as you’d like to cook. They will expand aboutthree-fold, so that one cup of beans will become three cups cooked. Put the beans into acolander or bowl and wash well with cold water until the water runs clear (the beans areoften extremely dirty, so don’t skip this step). Pick through the beans as you wash themlooking for small rocks to discard (believe me, you will find one every now and then).When the beans are clean, put them into a heavy saucepan and cover them withcold water to a depth of about three inches above the top of the beans. For a pound of beans, add two or three cloves of peeled garlic, a small peeled onion and some herbs if you like – several leaves or a spoonful of dried sage is good, as is the same amount of

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December - Hoppin John

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Upload Date:	12/03/2009
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Tags:	beans traditional foods new years recipes beans traditional foods new years recipes (fewer)