Posted on 01/01/2007 10:50:17 AM PST by blam
Why do they call it Hopping John?
On New Years Day east Tennesseans, and people here and there all over the South, eat black eyed peas and rice and call the mixture "Hopping John" (often written "Hoppin' John".) Over the years I have eaten hopping John with good friends in the kitchen, been served it from chafing dishes by well-off San Antonio ladies three sheets to the wind, and walked into a roadside restaurant in Maryland with a can of black eyed peas and asked to be indulged. Somebody at the table always asks "Why do they call it hopping John?" and nobody ever knows why.
Hopping John seems long to have been associated with the meager cuisine of slavery. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase is first attested in 1856 in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (page 506), one of a number of American travel books written by Frederick Law Olmsted, later to gain fame as the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park and the great Biltmore House in Asheville NC. He wrote that "the greatest luxury with which they [presumably the slaves somewhere] are acquainted is a stew of bacon and peas, with red pepper, which they call "Hopping John".
Surfin' the Net, I find one plausible explanation: that "Hoppin' John" is an odd adaptation of the Creole French pois pigeons 'pigeon peas', pronounced pwah peeJON. It's not toofar from that to "hoppin' John" (though why not "poppin' John", I wonder).
The OED offers some support for what I think is an equally likely origin of the word, recording a statement by an otherwise anonymous Hardy (not the novelist, who lived somewhat later) in 1843 that "These feasts, or as they are called elsewhere in Northumberland, hoppings, are held on the festival of the patron saint."
New Years Day follows less than a week after the feast of St. John the Evangelist (the traditional author of the Gospel and Epistles of John and of Revelation) on December 27th. The feast of the other Biblical John, St. John the Baptist, comes at the other end of the year, on June 24th. Thus marking the two solstices, the festivals of the two saints John are thought of in traditional calendar lore as the two supporting points of the year.
Some northern European peoples say that the Sun is seen to dance at the winter solstice, at the time when it is seen at the farthest point to the south, and begins its return northward. Could this dance have occasioned the name of this homely dish?
I think we shall never really know.
For more hopping John lore, with recipes, visit John and Matt Thorne's Outlawcook and read some really fine food writing on the site while you're there, along with a harrowing account of the horrors of slavery.
I've eaten this meal every year on New Year's Day for 63 years and I've never heard of 'Hopping John'.
Your thoughts?
Ping to Mr. Expert on this subject. ;-)
I've never heard of 'Hopping John' either.
ah! cRAP 'music'.....
cRAP let it all die a painful death.
My thoughts?
Where are the collard greens and hamhocks?
My wife is from South Carolina and it's tradition in her family to have Hoppin' John for dinner New Year's Day.
When I was little we would eat black eyed peas on New Years
my mom would put a dime or a quarter in the pot ...if you got the money in your bowl that meant you would be rich the whole year
rabbit rabbit rabbit
Foodie Ping!
The tradition is that eating Hoppin' John on New Year's Day will bring you "coin money" -- eating collard greens with ham hock will bring you "folding money" in the New Year.
You don't have collard greens with that???
The recipe for Hoppin' John is right on the bag of black-eyed peas here in Texas.
Does anyone have the recipe for what they call 'Texas Caviar?' It's a bean and spice mix that you eat with tortilla chips.
Beans, onion, celery...that's all I remember!
Thanks!
No, the take-out where I got this meal didn't have any. So...
I suspect this is an old custom that probably originated with the Cherokees, and passed on the the early white settlers in the region.
Check back on similar terms that might exist in the Cherokee language, and you may discover the origin of the term.
I think the cabbage "thing" comes from the Irish. Anyone know if that's true?
The recipe for hopping john is on the back of most bags of black-eyed peas. I am cooking them now for dinner. We have always had black-eyed peas on New Years Day, they bring luck throughout the year.
From one of my cookbooks:
Hoppin'John ~
Blackeyed peas are actually cowpeas which are not botanical peas at all but a type of bean, a low legume that was fed to cattle and slaves in eighteenth-century American and named for the more valued animal.
Brought to the West Indies from Africa, cowpeas crept north to Georgia in the 1730s and multiplied so rapidly that they became both the common "field pea", as they are often called, and the decorative "black-eyed pea" that Jefferson planted at Monticello. Creoles called the peas "congri," echoing Congo Square. When they mixed the peas with rice and threw in picked pork, they called the dish "jambalaya au congri".
One lexicographer suggests the name Hoppin' John may have been a corruption of pois a pigeon, since pigeon peas were common in the Caribbean. Another suggests that the name originated in a children's game played on New Year's Day, since the dish and the game were thought to bring good luck, beans carring with them the magic of voodoo. The name certainly springs from the same joking matrix that calls red beans and rice "limpin' Susan" and black beans and rice "Moors and Christians".
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