The Historic Problem With Hoppin' John

New Year's Day is approaching, which means we need to have a little talk about Hoppin' John. A savory blend of rice and black-eyed peas, it's served alongside collard greens as the traditional New Year's Day meal in the South and, increasingly, in other parts of the country. Eating those two dishes will ensure prosperity in the new year, and the collards represent greenbacks and the black-eyed peas coins. Or so they say. For a long time, if offered a plate of collards and Hoppin' John on New Years, I would have been inclined to say, "keep the change," for I never understood why anyone made a fuss over a mushy mound of rice and black-eyed peas. My own initial effort at making the dish began with a can of black-eyed peas and store-brand white rice and ended up in the garbage. Later, seeing the error of my ways, I tried starting with dried black-eyed peas, cooking them in homemade chicken stock and goosing them with onions, garlic, and a parade of herbs in a futile attempt to impose flavor on a fundamentally mild dish. Hoppin' John is the textbook example of how hard it can be to recreate the traditional dishes of the antebellum Southern kitchen, and it's not just a matter of recipe or technique. You can dig up old 19th century "receipts" (as they were called back then), follow them to the letter, and still end up mystified that anyone could ever have loved such stuff, much less decided it was an iconic Southern dish.