Purple Hull Peas

The bane of Southern childhood, the thing you want on your cornbread.

“Listen, if God had meant for purple hull pea lovers to keep suffering, He would not have bestowed an automatic pea sheller upon Murray Rogers so that all of Bailey could come get their peas shelled for $3 a bushel.”

This ended the text message exchange about the in-season purple hull peas that I’d gotten at the farmers market and who was going to separate them from their casings, me or the person recovering from knee surgery who didn’t have anything better to do but play Animal Crossing.

Of course, purple hull peas are pretty easy to shell—if they’re ripe they pop right out of their skins, and if they’re not you can squeeze ‘em down to the end of the pod like pushing the last of the toothpaste out of the tube. It can be a meditative task, sitting there, watching something on Netflix, plinking peas into a metal bowl with the sound of the first drops of rain hammering the tin roof, like your ancestors did on the front porch on summer afternoons.

You can also get dried blackeyed peas, of course, but those lack the earthy, grassy flavor of something that was sitting in the garden a few days ago—New Years tradition or not.

They do sell them pre-shelled in some farmers markets, and frozen in the supermarket, but you lose the connection to your roots that way. Or to a childhood where the worst punishment on the planet was hours of mindlessly shelling peas, where today we’d be mindlessly playing Candy Crush Saga and thinking we’re being entertained.

They’re in season. They couldn’t be simpler to cook, and the process of shelling them might be enough make you slow down a twitch in the heat of summer, to plink, and think, and remember summers long-passed, with an afternoon rainstorm and stepping in to a cold room after an hour on the porch, shelling what your grandparents were growing in the back garden.

Purple Hull Peas

2 lbs purple hull peas in pods (about 2 cups shelled)

1 tbsp salt

1 tbsp bacon grease

1/2 tsp Tabasco sauce

Water to cover

In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, bring all ingredients to a boil. Lower heat, taste the liquid (it shouldn’t taste bland,) and simmer, covered, for about an hour, or until peas are tender. Serve (over / beside / underneath / inside a bowl made of, but make sure that bowl is inside another bowl, because it will fall apart) cornbread.