It was back in the spring when Kindra mentioned she had never eaten purplehull peas.
So one Saturday several weeks ago, we bought some seeds and planted them in some of our plastic tubs that formerly held potatoes.
Purplehulls are one of my favorite things to eat, right up there with butter beans, sweet potatoes and anything that comes from a cow, so I have been telling her how much she would like them.
When I was a kid, my parents almost always planted a big patch of purplehulls in the garden. My mother fried cornbread instead of baking it, and my favorite way to eat purplehulls was to slice open a piece of fried cornbread and open it, butterfly-style, and spoon the peas and juice over it.
I liked them so much that I didn’t complain about having to help shell them.
If you aren’t familiar with purplehull peas, they are much like black-eyes peas, and I mean this in the same sense that a crappie is much like a gar.
They originated from the same general families - peas, fish - but if you have the chance to eat ether a crappie or a gar, you will always bypass the gar. Same with purplehulls and black-eyed peas.
In addition to tasting good, purplehulls are easy to pick. The pods grow near the tops of the plants and turn purple when they’re ready to pick.
If you shell purplehulls in the volume that my parents used to grow, you will wind up with purple thumbs and fingertips from splitting open the pods and stripping out the peas. To the old folks, it was a badge of honor for a kid to have purple thumbs because they indicated a willingness to work and help put food on the table.
That was a big deal to people who’d lived through the Great Depression.
It was the same way with the brown thumbs you would get in the fall by picking up pecans and rubbing off any husks that were stuck on the nuts.
I figured Kindra and I planted enough seeds to get three good messes of purplehulls, and the first came ripe over the Labor Day weekend.
We picked and shelled them and Kindra paid homage to my family tradition by cooking them in the pressure cooker and making a pan of cornbread.
“Oh, wow,” she said with the first bite. “These are delicious.”
I didn’t ask for specifics, just in case she was humoring me, but she mentioned again later how good they were.
I hadn’t had fresh purplehulls in probably four years, since my last big garden, and I had forgotten how good they are.
Now I’m figuring it’s time for a big patch next spring.