Every new year, people — especially those whose roots run deep in the South — soak black-eyed peas to make their favorite good luck dish, Hoppin’ John. Beloved by all but commonly misunderstood, the dish of rice, peas and pork is traditional in the Lowcountry, the coastal areas of South Carolina, but it has found its way to tables around the country through two mass migrations of African people and their descendants.
It’s a recipe older than its first written mentions in the early 1800s, and it’s older than the wives’ tales and legends it comes from. There is no doubt as to why it resembles the waakye found in Ghana, made with black-eyed peas or cowpeas, or why it’s so familiar to the rice and peas you find in the Caribbean, Brazilian feijoada, or the red beans and rice of Louisiana.
The two exoduses — the forced transatlantic slave trade and the Great Migration of African Americans in the early 1900s — helped make the recipe commonplace. The slave trade introduced the cowpea to the Americas, but rice-and-bean dishes already were being made and eaten in areas where rice grew wild.
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Brought for their physical labor, enslaved Africans were masters of domesticating rice in the humid, wet regions they toiled.
The famed Carolina Gold rice, once lost but now “found” again, made Charleston one of the wealthiest cities of the new America and changed the landscape of the “rice coast” of the Deep South.
The enslaved Africans’ skill in cooking as well as growing rice, along with the cowpeas’ ability to grow in sandy soil, meant one-pot meals using them both were a means of retaining culture and feeding families nutrient-rich, stick-to-your-bones meals.
As the slave trade came to an end, rice planters lost the free labor force that had performed the dangerous work of growing and harvesting rice in the marshy areas. With industrialization came the ability to grow the more common Asian long-grained rice on a larger, cheaper scale.
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Cowpeas met a similar fate.
What wasn’t lost were the recipes that Black people — and the people they cooked for and fed outside of their culture — loved, such as Hoppin’ John.
Gullah families still living on the Sea Islands kept seeds and kept growing (in very small quantities) the local, heirloom peas and rice. But during the Great Migration, Black people who left the South couldn’t find the ingredients they were familiar with, so black-eyed peas, arguably the most popular cowpea across the world, were used in Hoppin’ John instead.
Hoppin’ John is more than just a meal, because it, like so much of Gullah Geechee and Black culture, is a physical, tangible manifestation of a spiritual act of Hoodoo. Not only are we directly connecting our foodways to our ancestors, we are calling upon them: leaving them an offering, and then taking in that offering, asking for blessings of good luck, health and prosperity.
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Hoodoo, the spiritual practices created and maintained out of traditional African religions and other New World religions and practices by the descendants of enslaved West Africans, has also found itself immersed in mainstream and non-Black cultures. And while Hoodoo’s deep, magical connections between food and spirit are recognized and practiced by Black people, they should be honored by those who eat Hoppin’ John outside of the culture as well, even those who don’t practice Hoodoo.
In keeping with the dish’s history and meaning, it absolutely must be made in one pot, with the meat, rice and peas all cooked together, forming the fluffy pilau (or pirloo, or pilaf) we know and love.
While the rice and peas are the star of the show, smoky salty pork gives the dish its distinct flavor. Pork crosses cultural boundaries around the world, with many sharing the belief that eating it, especially at the start of a new year, will bring wealth and good luck. Many people nowadays shy from eating pork, especially the fattiest parts, but it serves as the base and the literal meat and bones of Hoppin’ John.
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The presence of salty, fatty, sometimes smoked meats in such dishes has created a false narrative that much of the food Black people eat is unhealthy, or was born from scraps given to Black people to make do with. But rural southern Black people often had their own gardens or farms, which surely included hogs to sell and to eat, in addition to beans and peas.
It’s natural to use as many edible parts of an animal or a plant as possible because nothing should go to waste, and tougher animal parts served well in dishes that needed to be simmered for a long time. Especially with expensive ingredients like pork, these dishes would be served in large portions within families and entire communities.
Truth be told, the smoked or fatty meats give a lot of our food its deep, unctuous soul. The fat lends each grain of rice and every single small pea a generous boost of flavor, and the salt in the meat seasons a rich stock and gives the peas a creamier texture. Most importantly, the meat’s protein makes the dish filling, especially when it’s served along with collard or other leafy greens.
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Fable has it that the real Hoppin’ John was a Gullah man who walked the cobblestone streets in the Lowcountry selling the dish, like other street vendors of the time, in the singsong Gullah and West African style of call-and-response. Hobbling down the narrow streets, ol’ Hoppin’ John, as the Gullah Geechee Nation’s website says, is surely an ancestor who has to be delighted that every year around this time, so many sing and call his name and make this dish for good luck, and that the tradition continues.
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