Feeling lucky

Did you eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day? I did. It's a tradition, and a superstition. Eating black-eyed peas on January 1 brings you good luck for the whole year.

Luckily, black-eyed peas are available in the supermarkets here in Saint-Aignan. I got a one-kilogram bag of dried black-eyes at Intermarché. They put them in the imported food section. They are imported from Portugal. I think they might actually be grown in the U.S.A. Oh, and in French they are called cornilles [kor-NEE-yuh]. Here's a link to a brief Wikipedia article in French.

Black-eyed peas with turkey confit and Montbéliard sausages

There are quite a few Portuguese people living in the Saint-Aignan area. SuperU has an annual semaine portugaise — a week when Portuguese products are on special sale. Evidently, black-eyed peas are appreciated in Portugal and in Brazil, as they are in the U.S. South. Portugal had colonies in Africa, and that's where black-eyed peas came from originally.

Confit de dinde — turkey leg and thigh sections, with
the turkey heart and gizzard, cooked slowly in
duck fat for two or three hours and then drained

We cook our black-eyed peas with smoked Montbéliard sausages from eastern France, and we season them with duck fat and vegetables including celery, onion, and carrots. This year, I made confit de dinde — turkey leg-thigh sections slow-cooked in duck fat until the meat is very tender and cooked to the point of falling off the bone. That turkey meat went well with the black-eyed peas too.

Black-eyed peas have a distinctive, pleasant taste compared to all the other dried beans — cocos blancs (navy or great northern beans), cocos roses (pinto beans), lingots blancs (canellini beans), and haricots rouges (kidney beans). You can use all of them in soups and salads, though, or eat them as beans the way we did, with or without accompanying meats.