Black-eyed pea soup is a new venture for our test cook, who saw it as a way to use up a ham bone.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
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Black-eyed peas, carrots, celery and onions, garlic, fresh spinach, a ham bone, vegetable broth, olive oil, smoked paprika and diced tomatoes are among the ingredients in our test cook’s Smokey Black-Eyed Pea Soup.
Mary Therese Biebel | Times Leader
When I brought a slow cooker filled with “Smokey Black-Eyed Pea Soup” from the Times Leader test kitchen to the newsroom last week, none of the men were interested. They seemed to think the weather was too hot for soup.
But the distaff side didn’t hesitate.
“I would eat soup in any season,” reporter Margaret Roarty said, adding she likes all sorts of beans and she liked the soup.
“I like the combination of vegetables,” said news editor Liz Baumeister, who also mentioned she found the soup “a little bland.”
Anticipating that some people would want more flavor, I’d brought along a handy bottle of hot sauce, and page designer Lyndsay Bartos tried the soup both ways.
“I like’d it better without the hot sauce,” Lyndsay said afterward, “because you can appreciate the taste of the vegetables more.”
“It seems like the kind of soup you could add anything to,” she pointed out.
I appreciated that last comment, because I did indeed add something to this soup. Along with the veggies, spices and of course black-eyed peas, all of which I’d read about in an online recipe, I added the large bone leftover from our Easter ham.
Actually, I felt a little uneasy about adding that bone, as if it was an insult to the author of the recipe, because without it the soup would have been vegan. But, in waste-not, want-not mode, I hoped to find a use for that bone, and soup seemed to be the way to go.
Guess who would probably back me up? None other than Scarlett O’Hara.
Of course, she’s a fictional character, the star of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” which I first read as a teenager. I’ve been revisiting the book, and recently spotted a passage in which, after the war, Scarlett complains to the man who is managing a lumber mill for her that he is not giving enough food — by that she means the food she has provided — to the convicts who work there.
“Haven’t you got any side meat in these peas?” she asks Rebecca the cook. “Black-eyed peas are no good without bacon. There’s no strength to them. Why isn’t there any bacon?”
OK, she suggested bacon. I used a ham bone. Same animal.
Mark has been reading the novel, too, — it’s the first time, for him — and remarked the other day that he doesn’t “understand why anyone would like Scarlett.” He seems especially dismayed at her “indifference to her children.”
I’ll agree Scarlett is a flawed character, but she makes a fascinating protagonist.
Among those of us who have read the book or seen the 1939 movie, who can forget Scarlett wearing her black widow’s dress and long veil as she breaks convention to dance with Rhett Butler at a hospital fund-raiser?
Or her harrowing wagon ride from Atlanta back home to Tara with a vulnerable group that includes her physically frail sister-in-law, Melanie, and Melanie’s newborn baby?
Or when, facing poverty, hard work and an uncertain future, she takes on the leadership of family, friends and formerly enslaved, vowing that as God is her witness neither she nor any of these people, her folks, will ever be hungry again?
Speaking of hunger, if you would like to try this smokey black-eyed pea soup — the name is a reference to using smoked paprika — here is the recipe I used. Feel free to add different vegetables, different spices, to leave out the ham bone, whatever you like.
Smokey Black-Eyed Pea Soup
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, diced
3 medium carrots, sliced
2 medium celery stalks, diced
4 garlic cloves, minced
8 cups vegetable broth
1 pound dried black-eyed peas, soaked overnight, drained and rinsed
1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1 large bunch fresh spinach, chopped
1 ham bone
Saute the onion, carrots, celery and garlic for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in the broth, peas, tomatoes, and spices. Also add the ham bone. Raise the heat and bring the liquid to a boil. Then lower the heat and simmer for at least 60 minutes. To give flavors more time to permeate, refrigerate overnight and remove any fat that has risen to the surface. Also remove the ham bone. Reheat, add the spinach about 5 minutes before serving and enjoy.
