Hoppin’ John

According to authority John Taylor ‘this is pure soul food … strongly associated with Gullah traditions in the Low Country and common fare on the old rice plantations around Charleston in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries’. Gullah is one of the black English creole communities and languages of the Atlantic seaboard.

For true authenticity, the dried legume used should be the cow-pea or black-eyed pea – a smaller member of the same family as the black-eyed bean – known locally by