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47
NEW YEAR’S DAY
luck, fortune and romance in the coming
year, all of which seem to be piling up in
considerable extremes during this one
simple family meal.
I mean: How much luck does one man
really need?
(All he can get.)
• • •
Funny thing I have noticed about Hoppin’
John, prior to researching this story, is
how few people in New Orleans, my base
of operation — as well as a community
famously-well-versed in matters of food —
seem to know what Hoppin’ John is.
I have lived in New Orleans for 30 years
and have traveled extensively around the
South, but I had never encountered the term
Hoppin’ John until I began working at a
French Quarter restaurant last winter. Chef
Greg Sonnier at Kingfish offers a Hoppin’
John salad on the menu — a mound of
leafy greens and two fried green tomatoes
smothered with pickled black-eyed peas and
topped off with a remoulade dressing.
And my experience since working there is
that “Southerners” at-large generally know
what it is, but many New Orleanians appear
completely stumped. And diners from
north of the Mason-Dixon generally ask:
“Isn’t that the name of a dance?”
(OK,
that
I made up.)
This all furthers the conventional wisdom
that New Orleans is not really “Southern”
in anything but geography in the first place;
its rhythm, aromas, general groove and
sexual healing aligning more naturally with
tropical latitudes.
Regardless, you really ought to try the
Hoppin’ John salad at Kingfish some day.
You might even get lucky.
• • •
Now, about that name.
Like many other traditions whose lineage
becomes untraceable the further back
you go in history, the origin of the name
Hoppin’ John remains in dispute.
(I mean it: Don’t call or email me with proof
or evidence otherwise. I’m not answering.)
The earliest printed references to Hoppin’
John are traced to two 19
th
century
cookbooks from the Carolina lowlands,
“The Carolina Housewife” in 1847 and
“Recollections of a Southern Matron” in
1838. What this tells us, primarily, is that
they don’t title cookbooks like they used to
anymore, huh?
One version of the name’s origin has it that
an old hobbled man by the name of Hoppin’
John used to sell peas and rice on the streets
of Charleston, S.C., and I’m not making
this up. Google it if you don’t believe me.
And it’s a charming fable to be sure; it’s so,
shall we say — Dickensian?
Now, I’m no licensed anthropologist, but I
vote no to the old crippled guy. I mean, c’mon!
Then again, none of the other explanations
I’ve come across quite satisfy either, but true
foodies and historians seem to have settled
on a consensus etymology that nicely
parallels with that of the brand of Louisiana
dance music called zydeco.
That story,familiar tomanySouthLouisianans,
has it that one of the earliest songs from the
musical canon created by the accordion-playing
black Creoles of Cajun Country carried the
lyrics, “les haricots sont pas salés,” translated:
The snap peas have no salt.
That first phrase, “les haricots,” repeated
over and over in Anglicized form, takes the
sound of “zydeco.” Sort of.
(Look, this folklore business takes a degree
of suspending your disbelief. These names
had to have come from somewhere, right?)
Similarly, then, we have Hoppin’ John
emanating from the Haitian Creole term
for dried peas “pois pigeons.” As with “les
haricots,” if you say it long enough and fast
enough, it just might — I said just might —
sound like Hoppin’ John.
Then again, why do we always have to spoil
a good meal by trying to figure out where
its name came from? And what’s with all
this stuff being named after beans?
Conventional theories notwithstanding,
none of this explains why, on the day
after New Years, the leftover portions of
a Hoppin’ John are called Skippin’ Jenny.
And I am not making this up. I promise.
And if you want to read more than you ever
wanted to know about that dish, then tune
into these same pages, this same time next
year, and we’ll spill the beans on the story
of Skippin’ Jenny. The dance craze that
swept the American South off its feet.
Black Eyed Peas & Cabbage
“Honestly, I thought Chris was making this dish up. I’d never heard of
Hoppin’ John, and neither had my mom. But we always have black-eyed
peas and cabbage on New Year’s Day. It’s tradition, and superstition.”
—Ali Rouse Royster
