FOOD SPECIAL.... BLACK EYED PEAS

BLACK EYED PEAS Soul Food 

Black-eyed peas are too easygoing to compete with more attention grabbing Indian legumes

Bora Bazaar Street in Mumbai's Fort area may seem like an unlikely food destination. It has vada-pav and jalebi sellers, but otherwise is so crowded and hemmed in with printers and stationery shops that it doesn't seem to promise much by way of food. But its narrowness means that the municipality's hawker harassing vans rarely come there and this combined with closeness to CST station makes it ideal for hawkers of a particular kind. These are older people who can't pack and run like younger hawkers even though they usually have only one basket of stuff. They bring it from Mumbai's outskirts, riding into CST in the afternoon and set up in Bora Bazaar Street for the returning home crowd. They have produce grown in their own gardens and it is not what you find with regular sellers. Their capsicums tend to be gnarlier, their tomatoes smaller and not uniformly red, but bursting with flavour and their bananas aren't the yellow Cavendish that has taken over most fruit sellers with its nice looking blandness, but smaller, spottier, chewier local varieties with real taste.
They also have less common local vegetables like drumstick tree leaves and banana flower, and it was one of these sellers who I recently found sitting with a small heap of small green beans which he had been shelling, since a pile of empty pods was at his side. Looking closer I saw the 'eye' which showed these were fresh lobia or chawli, known as black-eyed peas or cowpeas in the West. The green versions of most legumes are delicious since their sugars and other growing juices have not converted into bland starches for long tern storage, but their season tends to be early in the year.
Lobia is one of the most heat and drought tolerant of legumes, so its green forms come well into summer. These include both the shelled beans which was what the man had and the whole pods that are eaten when even younger. Because of their length these are known as yard-long beans or asparagus beans, and are particularly healthy, though I sometimes find it hard to tell when they just slip over into stringiness. The leaves are also nutritious but you have to be near the farms to get them.
    Mostly we are familiar with their dried form, and there is something cheerful about their appearance in a heap, white with the polka-dots of black eyes. They are found in most kirana shops, yet rarely receive the attention of other legumes in India. Different legumes take centre-stage in different parts of the country: rajma and chole in the North, toor and urad in the South, mung in the West and East, with little pockets of fandom for varieties like horsegram (kulith) in Karnataka, hyacinth beans (vaal) in Maharashtra or black chickpeas (kadala) in Kerala, but lobia is a minor player in most places. Even where it is appreciated, this is limited to just a few occasionally served dishes.
Punjab's lobia masala, for example, is deeply satisfying, but seems to be served mostly as a break from the rajma and kala dal that reign over tables for most of the time. Gujarat has nice dishes like a chawli-potato combination which you sometimes get as part of thalis, but that is almost the only time I ever see lobia in restaurants. Maharashtrians sprout them and cook them for a particularly nutritious usal, but usually in combination with other legumes. Goans cook them with pork for feijoada, a dish with resonance across the Portuguese speaking world, but a type of rajma is also used for this.
Kerala has the single best lobia dish in India: olan, an ultra simple combination of the beans cooked with ash gourd, coconut milk and minimal spices. Lobia has a particular affinity for coconut and olan is one of those dishes whose quiet perfection is easy to overlook until you realise you have eaten far more of it than you realise. I certainly did the first time I had it in my brother-in-law's house in Thrissur and I think his family still marvels at how much I put away! But even olan is usually only eaten along with other dishes as part of a sadiya, or special meal, and lobia doesn't seem to feature in any particularly special way in other Kerala dishes. I wonder if it is a coincidence that all these regions are on the West coast facing Africa which is the original home of Vigna unguiculata. It may have come by overland route, since lobia is known through the Middle-East, though it again plays second-fiddle to chickpeas and lentils. Even if it was brought direct over the sea by traders, it doesn't explain why it isn't more popular across India especially given that the introduction must have happened long back, which can be seen by the diversity of lobia varieties available in India, large and small, creamy coloured and brown. They all have an excellent nutritional profile, delicate taste and texture that when cooked becomes creamy, yet never collapses to mush, but perhaps are too fundamentally easy-going to stand up to more attention grabbing legumes.
    Lobia faces no such competition in Africa, where it is one of the most important food sources and a favourite ingredient, made in many different ways. It has also spread with Africans through the saddest of means. The paradox of lobia is that for all its cheerful appearance and easy adaptability, it has a sad history linked to the slave trade. When the trade with the Americas developed slavers found they were losing many slaves in the Middle Passage, the horrifying voyage of shops crammed with slaves to the New World. Slaves would refuse to eat, and died en route, which wasn't good business for the slavers, even if they couldn't care less about what the slaves felt.
    Some slavers realised that if, instead of feeding them any old thing, they tried to give them familiar foods the slaves might eat. Dried beans were easiest to bring along, so along with the human cargo, cowpeas were loaded in West Africa, and some of these were planted at the farms where the slaves ended up. Their owners observed that not only did these beans (they are not peas, despite their name) grow easily and were eaten by the slaves, they improved the fertility of fields — cowpeas are extremely efficient fixers of nitrogen in their roots. And in time the owners too began to like them for their taste.
    This was the origin of Soul Food, the African-American style of cooking, in which these beans play such a large role that the hiphop group the Black Eyed Peas took its name from them because they wanted their music to be 'food for the soul'. (Cowpeas also play a less orthodox role in African inspired American religions like Voodoo and Candomblé where they are a standard offering made to the gods). They are still seen as a dish to be eaten for good luck on New Year's Day; John Thorne, the American food writer explains this: "'Eat poor that day, eat rich the rest of the year' is both the explanation and the hope…but the experience is one of reaffirming one's roots."
    No special reason should be needed, of course, to eat lobia, especially when fresh like the ones I bought in Bora Bazaar Street. Since they were too tender to boil, but still a bit too raw tasting, I steamed them and, while still warm, stirred in a tadka of onions and tomatoes in sizzling hot ghee, added baby spinach and rocket leaves to wilt a bit in the warmth and then seasoned it with salt, pepper and white wine vinegar. It was the best bean salad I have even made and when I brought some to work, CD's editor, who I am convinced secretly believes that rajma is the only legume that needs to exist, actually ate it all. It was an excellent example of the value of lobia, a bean that is much more modest than it should be.

Vikram Doctor CDET130531