Hoppin john

[cathleeninnh]

Anybody else making hoppin john today?

Cathleen

[Otosan]

Nope, Blackeye peas and hawg jaw ....   

[KBCraig]

Steaks and potatoes au gratin.

We're not big on tradition. 

[Ron Helwig]

Vegetarian tamales!

Way better than gross sounding slave food. 

[Kat Kanning]

What are you talking about?

[Russell Kanning]

I guess that is why I married Kat ..... I don't know what half of you are saying ...... I thought you just have munchies around while you watch football all day long.

[Kat Kanning]

OK. I looked it up.  Bleah, I hate black eyed peas.

Why do they call it Hopping John?

pile of black eyed peas 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.

Looking ahead to the millennium, here's a recipe for

Hoppin' John Y2K

Open one or more cans of blackeyed peas.

Serve with the rice you cooked the evening before.

[Lloyd Danforth]

Home made chicken faihita's

[Otosan]

Well I did not have Hoppin John as per rice and blackeye peas cooked together, but by celebrating the new year with a southern tradition of blackeyed peas and hawg jaw, and a japanese tradition of rice, mochi and saki, I did mix my rice and peas together, so therefore I guess I had hoppin john....

[KBCraig]

Blackeyed peas are crap. Purple-hulls are so much better!