Blackeyed Peas - a Southern Tradition

The dish, not the rap group "The Blackeyes Peas", is traditional Southern dish with ham hocks served on New Year Day (we had it last night for New Years Eve).

Here's an article from SC about this tradition.
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The Main Ingredient
Of all the luck: Eat black-eyed peas for a fortunate 2006

By Robert J. Byers and Tara TuckwillerStaff writers

You've nursed your hangover, firmly declared your resolutions and kept a sharp eye on 36 hours’ worth of bowl games. But have you eaten your peas?

Sorry, you won’t have any good luck this year if you don’t eat a heaping helping of black-eyed peas. Nobody’s sure why. One story says that when Yankee troops burned all of the South’s crops during the Civil War, Southerners felt lucky that they left the “cowpeas” (black-eyed peas are a variety of cowpea) that Yankees thought were only fit for cows to eat. More likely, the peas — each with one round, black “eye” — are supposed to represent coins, to bring wealth in the coming year.

Black-eyed peas are really more like beans. All cowpeas hail from India, but they’ve been growing in China, the Middle East and Africa since prehistoric times. Slave traders brought them to America in the late 1600s, having used them to feed their human cargo on the long trans-Atlantic journey.

Even today, cowpeas are one of the most important foods in sub-Saharan Africa. They are incredibly nutritious, and incredibly hardy: They flourish in dry, rocky, poor soil, and their protein-packed green leaves are the earliest food available at the end of the “hungry time” between harvests.

Some sort of black-eyed pea/rice dish can be found on tables all over Africa, the Caribbean and the Southern United States. In South Carolina it’s “hoppin’ John,” in which the peas are slow-simmered with salt pork or ham hocks. Some say that’s the true good-luck dish, although the accompanying story about how it got its name (reportedly, children somewhere used to hop once around the table before eating the dish on New Year’s Day) has never been proven.

What? You didn’t spend New Year’s Eve soaking peas? Well, you can still throw together a top-notch “Texas caviar” (a great Tex-Mex dip for corn chips that’s not traditional anywhere, really, but perfect for bowl games) because like other beans, black-eyed peas are quite decent right out of a can.