29 May 2020

Carottes ou champignons ?

I wanted to eat peas — English peas, not black-eyed peas — but I couldn't decide whether to cook them with carrots or with mushrooms. So I cooked them with both, along with onions. Seasoned with duck fat and bay leaves.


Walt says that for his family in upstate New York, "peas" meant green garden peas. For us in eastern North Carolina, "peas" was just as likely to mean black-eyed peas, crowder peas, or field peas. I can get black-eyed peas here in France. They come from Portugal, either as dried beans or in cans, and are called cornilles and other names. I wish I could get crowder peas or field peas here. All three of these "peas" are varieties of beans that are called "cowpeas." Most of them are grown in Africa, including the counties of Niger and Nigeria, which account for 66% of world production (according to Wikipedia).


But back to "English" peas. They are not just English, of course, but also French, and called petits pois. Here's a well-known French song about them. I myself was born and grew up in a part of the United States where there were two great culinary traditions, each based on its own products and specialties. One tradition was English — green peas, fish and chips, beef stew, pot roast, butter beans, spinach, string beans, roasted chicken, white sandwich bread, butter and cream — and the other was African — collard greens, cowpeas, cornbread, hush puppies, pork and pork fat, okra, rice, corn (maize), fried chicken. Those were what later came to be called "soul food." When we said peas, we had to say which kind we meant.

7 comments:

  1. To me there's a distinct difference in flavour between "garden peas" and "petits pois" (the latter are sold as such here).

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    1. I think in the U.S. they were called green peas or garden peas, in standard AmEng. Maybe garden peas means something else in BrEng. We had an English friend here for a while. She told me that the French peas in tins were as good as any she had ever had in England.

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    2. Some quick and dirty research leads me to believe that the French peas are just picked earlier, younger, when they are sweeter.

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  2. I never heard of English peas until I got to the deep South. We didn't put gravy on biscuits either. My grandfather put his peas on a knife (his dinnerware had broad knives) to eat them! I've never seen anyone else do that and it must have taken some practice. I think your peas look delicious with mushrooms and carrots.

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  3. Evelyn's comment reminded me of a silly poem I knew as a child. "I eat my peas with honey. I've done it all my life. They do taste kind of funny, but it keeps them on my knife." The Hanover frozen peas which they sell as "petits pois" are much sweeter than garden peas and all I eat now. But I have some happy childhood memories of sitting with my mother and grandmother and shelling peas from the garden.

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  4. Je viens de découvrir la chanson de Julien Clerc !
    Avez-vous goûté les garden peas de chez Picard ? Ils se préparent comme les frais et sont aussi bons qu'eux et bien meilleurs que ceux en conserve. J'ai du mal avec tous "vos" pois 😉

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    1. Il n'y a pas de magasin Picard à Saint-Aignan. Il faut aller à Blois ou à Romorantin — tous les deux sont à 30 ou 40 minutes d'ici. Les pois dans mes photos étaient des pois surgelés que j'ai trouvés à Super U.

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