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.
First time I have heard this too.
HAM is our staple on New Years and I might add, days later too.
Can? Can? Against the law here in Mississippi to have can black eye peas
We were all too full to eat much of anything today. On New Year's Eve, the son-in-law (native Floridian), fixed up a huge spread of Cracker Boil (blue crab, shrimp, corn on the cob and little potatoes) all boiled til just done with tons of spicy seasoning. It's dumped on a newspaper over a picnic table and then a free-for-all. On the side there was crawfish, stone crab, and steamed clams and oysters and a table full of sides. Delicious Cracker feast!
Salt pork is what I use to season my "older than dirt stew." Good eatin'.
> Can? Can? Against the law here in Mississippi to have can black eye peas
Same here. Who would think of cooking with mushy beans and that slop they're packed with from a can?
Now how do you cook those black eyed peas like I do (dried and soaked over night), or fresh off the vine?
Central East Alabama! Where abouts? We're here between Montgomery and Auburn!
We're having pot roast tonight. Mother-in-law is making it and I can't say no or her daughter will be mad.
Well, for us, (South Carolina heritage) it was always black eyed peas, ham, fried cabbage and corn bread. This very day, cooking on my stove in fla, is ham, collards, cabbage, peas and potatoes, with corn bread in the oven. I feed it to yankee and cracker alike where ever I am.
The Chicken Fried Chicken isn't bad either!
Yes, I should have searched further for those bagged blackeyed peas instead of the dreaded can, but I felt lucky to get the canned variety. Out here in this part of California, Albertson's has a little Southern food section -on the exotic foods row. This place would be paradise if only we had any Southern-cookin' restaurants (Blackeyed Pea, for one) and a Dillards within 75 miles!
My paternal grandmother's family is from Eufaula AL and from points north of there up through Russell County to Hurtsboro and Uchee.
My paternal grandfather's family is from Cherokee County AL, mostly from Goshen and Centre, but really from everywhere in the county. We have all sorts of collaterals and cousins up and down the Chattahoochee river valley, we're related to most of Columbus GA and Rome GA.
The grandparents met and married in Rome, GA after their families migrated there around the turn of the last century.
No Hoppin' John, but we did enjoy our black eyed peas and ham. With a generous dose of Louisiana Hot Sauce to boot.
The black-eyed pea, sometimes called cowpea, originated in Asia and is thought to have been introduced to the United States through the African slave trade.
This is how all superstitions spread and become legends; they begin as harbingers of good luck and then when it seems the fad is about to die, the desperate practioners change the wording just a little bit and it becomes, "Do this or bad luck will follow."
I thought we weren't going to bring up the Ford family again.
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