Makin' Hoppin' John - My Recipe Dried Black-eyed peas on my cutting board, eager to become a delicious treat There are probably as many methods of preparing Hoppin' John as there are people who prepare it. For the uninitiated, Hoppin' John is a dish that many southerners believe (at least hope, or pretend to believe) will bring good luck for the subsequent year if consumed on New Year's day. And why not? It is tasty and nutritious, fun, easy and inexpensive to prepare. There are various tales as to how the dish got it's name. You can Duck Duck Go it if you care; I don't. Most of my Berkshire neighbors who were, unluckily, born north of the Mason-Dixon Line, seem unfamiliar with this tradition. In responding to my last minute search for Black-eyed peas via a posting on "The Hill", our neighborhood Google newsgroup, ( see my previous post) one of my neighbors asked how we prepared Hoppin' John. One cannot merely post a reci
A bowl of dried black-eyed peas artfully arranged for photographic effect My Great Barrington neighborhood, "The Hill", (we live on a hill) is one of the best aspects of life in the Berkshires. Although it has been my home for almost 50 years, my roots trace to the deep south. My 98 yr old Aunt Mil still lives in the Burgaw North Carolina house where I originated and remember from my early school days. My father was born and reared on a farm at the edge of Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp . Generations of my direct forbears share North Carolina, Georgia Texas and Tennessee as places of birth, life and death. A direct Grandfather who was at Valley Forge, his wife and many descendants are buried in the Ebenezer Baptist cemetery in Hendersonville NC. I migrated to the Berkshires from Eastern New Mexico, my mother's birthplace, just a spit from the Texas Panhandle, where I had lived since my 10th year. Mrs Cowboy got started in Puerto Rico, (which is way, way so