Field Peas

The most important African dietary contribution to the American South is undoubtedly the Vigna unguiculata. It produces a rather wild-looking pod, sometimes more than a foot in length, ranging from white to pale green to deepest purple, and when ripe yields the black-eyed pea and its many cousins: crowder, field, cow, lady. By the early eighteenth century, these peas (actually more bean than pea) had reached Charleston, having already been well established in Caribbean cooking.