What Kind of Pea?

Pea Soup Andersen’s, a popular restaurant chain for travelers with locations along California’s Highway 101 as well as on I-5, bases its menu around “split-pea” soup. The pea that Andersen’s uses would be a modern variety of Pisum sativum that has been selected by plant scientists for its utility in producing dried peas. A “Split pea” is not a

specific variety of pea.The pea plant is a “dicotyledon,” meaning that the seed is an embryonic plant that will germinate to present a pair (“di”) of infant leaves (cotyledons). A dried pea seed can be “split” into two halves, each part being a half of the starchy dicot pair that is enveloped by the hull of the seed. The Snow pea, the Sugar Snap pea, and the English pea are also varieties of Pisum sativum developed for use as fresh vegetables, but you could let their seeds mature on the vine until dry, then “split” them and make them into soup too, if you wanted or needed to.

The Andersen who founded Pea Soup Andersen’s was a Danish immigrant using a traditional family recipe. Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote the Princess and the Pea back in the mid 1800s was a Dane too, so it seems likely that they’d both be thinking of the same pea, but there are some concerns we must address before we can be confident about this because there are other possible peas that could have been used by a conniving palace staff to “trigger” the aristocratic tendencies of a potential princess. Consider the “Sweet Pea,” or Lathyrus oderatus, for example.

Lathyrus oderatus, like Pisum sativum, is an “Old World ” species meaning that the plant evolved in Europe. (Yes, the American half of the planet is just as old a world as is Denmark, but we won’t address that issue now.) The Sweet Pea was native to Southern Europe- places like Sicily, Southern Italy, and the Aegean Islands. While the seeds of the Sweet Pea are toxic and inedible, the amazing fragrance and lovely form of the sweet pea would have been appreciated by royal and humble gardeners alike. We’re talking Fairy Tales here, so it’s entirely possible that the palace maid charged with hiding a dried pea in the bedding was herself having a relationship with a palace gardener (probably named “Boots”) and maybe he gave her a Sweet Pea seed from his seed inventory for her “Royal Blood Test.”

Or what about the Black Eyed Pea?  The Black Eyed pea is a form of Cowpea, or Vigna unguiculata, and was originally developed in Africa. The Black Eyed pea may be one of humankind’s oldest cultivated crops. Vigna unguiculata can tolerate very sandy soils as well as high heat, which makes it an especially valuable plant in the Sahel of Africa. It’s unlikely that the Black Eyed Pea would have been cultivated by Boots, the Danish Royal Gardener, but  we can’t rule out a Black Eyed Pea from being found under a stack of mattresses. After all, Black pepper, or Piper nigrum, is an essential spice in traditional Danish Split Pea soup and the Danes couldn’t grow black pepper either. The Royal cook would have needed to buy her spices from a Spice trader. The Spice trade was dominated by Muslim traders who gathered their wares from across the Muslim world, from the Indies in the East to Timbuktu in the Sahel. Mohammed was himself a spice trader before he drifted into prophecy. Maybe a Spice Trader sold the palace kitchen a “magic pea” which could turn a whining, entitled, malingering teen into a princess. Weirder things have happened in Fairy Tale world.

And then there’s the “Chickpea,” or Cicer arientum. Chickpeas are also called “Garbanzo beans,” but they’re beans in name only, since the true bean is an entirely “New World” phenomena. Chickpeas were developed in the Levant, but they made their way into Northern Europe early on. Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, had chickpeas served in his court over a thousand years ago, for example. A Chickpea is a dicotyledon just like the Sweet Pea, the Black Eyed Pea or the Pisum sativum peas, but its seeds are considerably larger. The size of the Chickpea speaks against its use in tests for nobility. If the true test of royal blood is to be capable of complaining about the smallest thing, then a girl only noticing a Chickpea would certainly be less refined than one who could find discomfort in Sweet Pea seed. Tanya Tucker comes to mind again; she could find relief laying in a field of stone. Tanya’s no princess!

So the controversy can’t be resolved at the moment. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been enjoying snap peas. This week we begin the English Pea harvest. We even have planted a crop of Chickpeas, and we’ll see how they do. Peas of any kind are an important crop for the farm because they are legumes. Legume species have the important ability to capture unusable atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into a form that plants can use as fertilizer. Legumes have a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria that infect the roots of the host plants and pay for their stay taking in and digesting nitrogen gas, then excreting it in a form that is available to the plant. That’s pretty “magical,” if you ask me. We grow peas to feed you, but we also plant peas in our cover crops to feed the soil so that we can keep farming the land happily ever after.