Any of you who have been reading here for more than a year will know that I make the same thing for our New Year's Day dinner every year: pork for health, greens for wealth, and black-eyed peas for happiness. My New-Orleans-raised mother always made this, and now I do.
Every year, for my entire adult life.
That means that I've been talking about this here for fifteen years now, and yet, I have never given you a recipe.
So now I will.
New Year's Day Black-Eyed Peas
Ingredients
1 pound of dry black-eyed peas
1 ham bone
4 tablespoons canola oil, lard, or bacon grease
4 tablespoons flour
1 large or two small onions, diced
1 bell pepper, diced (I always use red, because I don't like green, but green is traditional)
2 stalks celery, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 small can plain tomato sauce, or half a can tomato paste
1 bay leaf
Method
1) Pick through and rinse off the black-eyed peas. I always pick through them and rarely find anything, but this last time I found a pea-sized rock, which is why I always do it.
2) Soak your black-eyed peas in a big pot. You can soak overnight, but I never think ahead that far. I just cover them with water, bring them to a boil, and then turn off the heat and leave them to sit for an hour or two.
3) Drain the water off, and put fresh water in the pot to cover the black-eyed peas and the ham bone. I always have a ham bone from Christmas, and this is a good use for it. If you don't have the bone, you can just use ham, but don't put that in yet.
4) Simmer the black-eyed peas until soft, about an hour or so. The ham bone won't be soft enough yet, but that's okay. It can stay in there.
5) Dice up all your vegetables so they're ready to add to the roux. It will look like too many vegetables. It is not.
6) Make a roux with the oil, lard, or bacon fat. Heat the fat on medium heat and then sprinkle in the flour. Use a flat spoon to scrape and stir the flour around. This will take fifteen minutes or so. It will look pretty separate the whole time, but that's fine. You can be a little more negiligent to start, but once the flour starts browning, you really need to stir pretty constantly. When the flour is a medium dark brown color, it's done.
8) Dump all the vegetables into the black-eyed peas, add the bay leaf, the tomato product, and ham now if you didn't have the bone, and simmer the whole thing on low heat uncovered for a long time. Like two hours.
9) When the ham on the ham bone pulls off easily, remove the bone from the pot, let it cool a bit, and then pull all the ham off. Shred it and put it back in the pot and continue simmering.
10) Toward the end of the cooking time, you need to be scraping the bottom of the pot and stirring it frequently so it doesn't stick. This is also when you want to taste it and see if it needs more salt. I wait until now to do this because the ham adds quite a bit of salt and the whole thing reduces so much that it would be easy to over-salt it earlier in the cooking.
When the black-eyed peas have broken down quite a bit to thicken it all and there isn't much liquid left, it's done.
This looks delicious. Now I have a reason to try black-eyed peas!
ReplyDeleteMaking our New Year’s meal today since your dad just got back home yesterday. Thanks for the recipe, I think. Wasn’t going to bother with the rue, but now I have to put in the time to make them taste really good. You’re my cooking conscience!
ReplyDeleteDo you eat them just out of a bowl like soup or as a side or like ham and great northerns with cornbread or taco shells or chips? It kinda sounds like I am writing a children's book . Seuss-like.
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year.
G.P.: They're too thick to be soup. They're a side dish. I like them over rice. Some of my kids eat them plain, some put them on their pork as a sauce. Good any way you eat them.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in Virginia to parents who grew up in the Depression, so we ate lots of black-eyed peas. I never enjoyed them. Since I missed making yours on New Year's Day, I cooked them yesterday, on Epiphany. Wow - so delicious! I was talking to a friend while cooking so got the sequence mixed up and browned the vegetables before making the roux. No problem! The only thing I had an issue with was how much water to add. Mine would have been soup if I had not ladled off a pan full of the liquid to separately reduce. But that worked great.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great explanations and photos!
Elaine N.: I'm so glad these redeemed black-eyed peas for you. :-) And thank you for taking the time to let me know you made them. Happiest of new years to you!
ReplyDelete