SC - Peas, Peas, Beautiful Peas...
Anne-Marie Rousseau
acrouss at gte.net
Tue Jan 30 08:36:06 PST 2001
I happily stand corrected!!!
- --Anne-Marie, who is always looking for altnerante beans to make benes
yfryd with....
At 08:28 AM 1/30/01 -0600, you wrote:
>Blackeyed peas are Vigna unguiculata and are of Old World origin (probably
>India with variants in China and Africa). Catjangs, cowpeas, and yard-long
>beans are all variants. The Italians lump them together with the New World
>Phaseolus, but they apparently were known and eaten (as food of the poor) in
>Classical Antiquity (see Pliny).
>
>If you look at the language, peas, lentils, favas and grabanzos are
>liguistically separate from phaseolus. The confusion comes because the
>Vigna and the New World beans were lumped together as fagiola (or fasioli)
>and then the term Phaseolus was taken taxonomically for the New World beans.
>Because the Vigna are tied linguistically to the modern variant of
>phaseolus, they are probably the phaseolus of the Romans.
>
>I refer you to Annibale Carracci's The Bean Eater for visual evidence of
>black-eyed peas being eaten in period.
>
>While Platina gives some recipes specifically for phaseolus (and remembering
>he predates Columbus and most taxonomic efforts), it is very likely that
>black-eyed peas would not be found much outside of peasant dining.
>
>Bear
>
>> beware...not all called "pea" is really a pea...."blackeyed peas", for
>> example are really beans and so new world (and not
>> appropriate for medieval
>> re-enactors).
>>
>> You want stuff out of the pea/lentil/fava/garbanzo family,
>> nitrogen fixers,
>> vetch leaves, etc
>> not the fasiolis ie bean/string bean/lima bean/scarlet runner
>> bean/etc family.
>>
>> not sure about the other varieties...you could tell by the
>> latin name, I bet!
>>
>> --AM
>============================================================================
>
>To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
>Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".
>
>============================================================================
>
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list