Black-Eyed Pea

As any southerner will tell you, eating black-eyed peas at New Year's will ensure good luck. For a simpler (and meatless) version of this hors d'oeuvre, omit the pork and serve these tender little cakes topped with just the red pepper mayo.

Can be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

This dish is also known as Texas caviar.

Hoppin' John is a traditional southern dish of black-eyed peas and salt pork served with rice. Here, it's a risotto dotted with black-eyed peas and flavored with bacon and pancetta. This is an unconventional method for making risotto — rather than slowly adding hot stock to the rice, Rollins adds it, unheated, in just 2 batches. This will allow you more time for preparing the chops that go along with it.

This rendition of the traditional southern side dish is served chilled.

This dish harks back to West Africa, where black-eyed peas, according to some culinary historians, were eaten prior to European arrival. Certainly for many African-Americans, black-eyed peas were, and are still, the staff of life. They turn up with rice in Hoppin' John, the traditional New Year's dish that has spread from South Carolina to the rest of the South; and they are often served at other times of the year as a main dish or vegetable. This is a basic recipe. The black-eyed peas may also be cooked with a ham bone, a precooked ham hock, or with olive oil instead of bacon fat. This last sacrifices the traditional smoky taste to contemporary concerns about cholesterol, but whatever way black-eyed peas are served, they're delicious. Black-eyed peas can even be pickled, as in this recipe, which also goes by the name of Texas caviar. The dish can be prepared with either cooked dried black-eyed peas, canned ones, or, if you are really lucky and live in an area where they can be obtained, with fresh ones. May be prepared in 45 minutes or less.

Add corn bread, a crunchy chicory salad, and peach pie for summer supper at its best.

No one seems completely sure where the name Hoppin' John comes from. Variations run from the clearly apocryphal suggestion that this was the name of a waiter at a local restaurant who walked with a limp, to the plausible, a corruption of pois pigeon (pigeon peas in French). Culinary historian Karen Hess in her masterwork, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection, offers a twenty-plus page dissertation on everything from the history of the dish to recipe variations to a number of suggestions for the origin of its name, ranging from Malagasy to ancient Arabic. The only thing that all seem to agree on about Hoppin' John is that the dish is emblematic of South Carolina and is composed of rice and black-eyed peas. Many years back I was amazed to discover a startlingly similar dish on the luncheon table at the Dakar home of Senegalese friends. There, the dish was prepared with beef and not smoked pork, but the rice and black-eyed peas were the same. The name of that dish was given as thiébou niébé. There seem to be two variations on Hoppin' John: One calls for the rice to be cooked with the peas. The second calls for the peas and rice to be cooked separately and then mixed together at a final stage prior to serving. I prefer to cook my rice and peas together.

These fritters are called akara in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, and akla or koosé in Ghana. They're eaten as a snack, side dish, or breakfast, served with a hot pepper relish (ata). We think they make a great hors d'oeuvre. Active time: 45 min Start to finish: 9 hr (includes soaking time)

This dish is wonderful served with mashed potatoes.

A new variation of the classic bean dip.