left to right: unroasted Texas pecan half from my local Greek supermarket; unroasted Schley (Georgia) pecan half from Sunnyland Farms in Albany, GA; Schley in the shell
It was in one of my favorite food travelogues, Pascale Le Draoulec's American Pie, that I was introduced to the idea of Dumpster Pie, the pie of which you take a bite and know, after that first bite, that the rest of the pie is fit only for the dumpster. It is pretty easy to find Dumpster Pie on the road, and even easier to find it in diners and coffee shops that really should know better. It is harder, but not impossible to find it at home. Finding it on the road is sad enough; finding it at home is sadder, and producing one with your own two hands is saddest of all. I know this because last night I threw away nearly three quarters of a maple walnut pie, Chez PTMYB's own Dumpster Pie. It could have been that the filling, a combination of dark brown sugar, grade B maple syrup and Australian golden syrup, was too sweet, or too rich. It could have been that the top of the pie baked a little too darkly, and the walnuts became a bit too bitter. But I am inclined to agree with the plain and simple words of Lloyd: "I just didn't like this with walnuts."
It should not have been a lesson I needed to relearn, but apparently I did, and now I have: No matter how elegant the prose that may have seduced you into the idea, it is never a good idea to make a pecan pie with anything but pecans. It may sound self-evident, but once you have turned a few hundred pies out of your oven, including a pair of pecan pies that surprise you with how wonderful they are, you may be inspired to branch out into combinations like maple walnut, or almond with a reduced-milk custard. These are delightful combinations for ice cream, but put them in a pie and all they will do is remind you of how much better the pecan is for the job at hand.
I will confess: I came to pecans long before I came to pecan pie. As a kid I eschewed nuts of all kinds, with the exception of crunchy peanut butter. I was one of those annoying little squits who would methodically pick the walnuts out of a brownie or the pecans out of a piece of fudge or the almonds off the top of an Almond Joy bar, leaving little cairns of uneaten nuts and smudgy chocolate fingerprints in my wake. Eventually I learned that the enemy was not nuts per se, but stale or rancid nuts; once I had my first taste of brownie with a snapping-fresh walnut, or a piece of almond bark made with Merckens milk chocolate and almonds from Bazzini's, that house of the rapid nut turnover, I never looked back. But I still shied away from pecan pie. Pecans were fun to eat out of hand, more fun to eat after they'd been tossed with a spicy butter sauce and baked, and really wonderful on top of a piece of sea foam divinity, or embedded in dark fudge, or soaking up the richness of a chocolate cherry cake saturated with bourbon for a month before Christmas. Pecan pie, though, was weird. I used to happily eat brown sugar straight out of the box for as long as it took for my mom to catch me and yell at me to stop doing that, but even I found pecan pie to be scarily sweet. The texture was even scarier: I'd always had visions of chewy caramel dancing in my head, so to take a bite of pecan pie and be greeted by a jelly-like filling set all of my finicky gross-out-o-meter alarms. Now that I am older, I can appreciate it better, but it was definitely an acquired taste.
It wasn't until reading John Thorne's essay "Perfect Pecan Pie" in Outlaw Cook that I finally came around to the greatness of pecan pie. Thorne's experience was similar to mine: he ate a lot of pecan pie, he found them spooky, he wondered if he could make something tailored to his palate. Fortunately, his palate doesn't fall far from mine: I took his advice to replace the corn syrup with Lyle's Golden syrup, I replaced the rum with bourbon, and I upped the quantity of pecans he uses by about 30%, and there it was: my own little beauty, the closest thing I have ever made to perfect pecan pie, which was devoured by seven people on Christmas Eve. I was afraid that it might have been a lost chord pie, that I would never be able to duplicate it, but I put the lie to those fears on New Year's Eve, when I made it again for my pals who gathered at my house for the Smithfield ham salt-fest.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink informs me that pecan trees can be grown from both seedlings and grafted cultivars. The first grafts were achieved in 1846 or 1847 by a slave owned by a Louisiana plantation owner; in 1877, Emil Bourgeois began work on cultivars that laid the groundwork for the cultivation of pecan orchards. Georgia is the largest producer of pecans from cultivars, while Texas is the largest producer of pecans combined from cultivars and seedlings. There is, of course, some controversy among pecan lovers over just which pecans are the best. The Turkish owner of the Greek/Italian/Slovak deli in my neighborhood insists that Texas pecans are the cream of the crop, what every serious baker needs. My mother, on the other hand, has been ordering pecans annually from Sunnyland Farms in Georgia, and she finds them hard to beat. I'm still trying to make up my mind via numerous quality controls and double-blind testing, but I haven't quite made up my mind yet. 
I do know that I am mad for a varietal that Sunnyland sells called Schley, which to my palate is a bit sweeter and more moist than most pecans. Sunnyland brags that the shells of Schleys are so thin that you can crack them by squeezing them together. I thought this was a bit of advertising hyperbole until I did it myself. It is a neat thing to crack a pecan, and even neater the first time you manage to extract from the shell an entire unbroken nut, sweet and self-contained and perfect, ready to offer itself up to your pie, or to your sea foam, or to your biscotti (Maida Heatter has a recipe for an ultrathin pecan biscotti; when you cut into the loaf for the second baking, the pecans look like lace, just ridiculously beautiful, or to the rich, boozy pecan cake that the artist Thomas Hart Benton's wife shared with Clementine Paddleford, or even just to your open, waiting mouth.
We finished the hoppin' John on Friday night. I'd made an enormous pot of it on New Year's Eve for our dinner party; even with the six of us eating platefuls of it, there was still enough left over for me and Lloyd to eat it every single night for the next week. Normally when I have that much of anything left over, I get depressed around the third night of eating it, and when I suggest to Lloyd that we get some nice takeout, he never says no. Hoppin' John is the exception to the rule. I have yet to feel that sinking feeling that comes from having too much of a good thing. The prospect of coming home to a third or fourth night of hoppin' John is not despair, but rather relief and happy anticipation. There is always a moment of fear when I tell Lloyd that yes, we're having beans and rice for dinner again, but fear is a silly thing, for Lloyd's response has never been "aGAIN?", but rather, "Yeah! Pass the Trappey's!" He's a smart fellow, Lloyd.
I went to bed last night with a head full of enthusiastic, overwrought prose in praise of hoppin' John, and the desire to get all the words out on paper. I woke up this morning with what I thought was a weather-based headache, but turned out to be a mild bug of some sort, which sent me home ill and shaky, and completely unfit for doing justice to the topic. If I were any sort of serious thinker, I would wait until I could put it all together. Alas, I am not a serious thinker. But I am -- at least I hope I am -- a friend to those in need, and based on the comments I received on Friday's picture post, a lot of friends are in need of some beans and rice.
Before I get to the recipe, it helps to define terms a bit. Karen Hess, in The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection, identifies hoppin' John as a bean pilau, a dish of the African diaspora. One of the hallmarks of a pilau is the consistency of the rice: it should be dry, not so dry as to be dried out, but dry enough so that each grain of rice maintains its individual integrity. (This individual integrity is furthered by cooking the rice with sufficient fat to coat the cooked rice grains; again, we are not looking for an oily sheen, but just enough of a coating to further the texture and flavor of each grain.) In the recipes that Mrs. Hess cites as the best examples of the dish, the preparation is simple: water is boiled with a piece of cured meat, usually a ham hock (although there are variant rice-and-bean dishes made in Muslim communities that use cured mutton or beef instead of pork); blackeyed peas are added and boiled until tender; at that point, the rice is added, the pot is covered, and the whole is steamed dry. In general, the only seasoning in the dish is the ham hock, along with some pepper, usually ground black peppercorns, although Mrs. Hess points out that in early hoppin' John recipes, the spice was provided by whole cayenne peppers. (Black peppercorns were an imported spice, and an expensive one, whereas cayenne peppers could be grown easily in the corner of a South Carolina kitchen garden.) There are newer recipes that call for wider ranges of spices, but Mrs. Hess takes a dim view of these, stating that too many spices muddy the straightforward flavor of the dish, although she allows that an individual herb or spice could have its charm, the signature of a thoughtful and intuitive cook. (I should mention that Mrs. Hess is not decrying forcefully-spiced bean dishes per se; in other works, she celebrates the "marvelous, aromatic" cuisine of the Indian subcontinent. Her argument here is that a confluence of spice, added to blackeyed peas and rice, do not a hoppin' John make.) I am a bit more lenient on the issue than she is, although I would agree that at some point, there is such a thing as too much seasoning -- and I agree wholeheartedly with her that the finished dish should be a dry, fluffy, flavor-rich bowl of pilau, not a stew-like mixture requiring the use of a thickener. If it looks like risotto, it is not hoppin' John to me.
So much for what it is not. Here, happily, is what it is. My method here varies a bit from the traditional recipes I have started to collect: I don't boil the hock before adding the beans; I cover the beans with cold water, drop the hock in and put the heat on. Traditional recipes also call for equal volumes of beans and rice, i.e. a pint of beans to a pint of rice. One night I was a bit distracted as I put this together, and instead of using equal volumes, I used equal weights. I probably should do the weight/volume comparison, and determine just what the difference is between a pint of rice and a pound of rice, but I have to admit that the resulting hoppin' John was so good that I have made it this way ever since. I have cut my usual proportions for this dish in half, as I'm not sure that there are too many people out there who want to eat this every day for a week. Then again, I could be wrong.
Hoppin' John
(serves at least 6, depending on appetite)
1 small ham hock, or 1 large ham hock, split by the butcher (I prefer a cured, unsmoked hock, but these are not easy to find; if all you can find is a smoked hock, it will still be fine.)
1/2 pound blackeyed peas, picked over for stones and rinsed
1 1/2 quarts (6 cups) cold water
1 small red chile pepper, or 1/2 tsp. cracked black pepper
1/2 pound long-grain rice (I use Tilda basmati, but any long-grain rice, like jasmine or Carolina Gold, will work), rinsed thoroughly, soaked in cold water for 1/2 hour and drained
Place the ham hock and beans in a Dutch oven or soup pot, cover with the water, add the pepper and set the pot on the heat. If a heavy scum forms on the cooking surface, skim it off. Once the beans come to a boil, turn the heat down and let them cook, uncovered, for about an hour or until the beans are tender. You don't need to fuss over them, but keep an eye on them; the water should be boiling, but gently; not a ferocious rolling boil. The cooking water will turn black, but you should still have a sense of the water level; by the time the beans are tender, there should still be about an inch of water covering them. If at any point the beans are in danger of boiling dry, add more water, but try to add only as much as you need to keep the water level at about 1".
Once the beans are tender, stir in the rice gently. Bring the water back to a boil, cover the pot, turn the heat down to low and let the rice steam for 10-15 minutes. (Check the pot after 10 minutes; the rice should look dry, but if there is still bubbling liquid, let it go for another 5 minutes.) At the end of the cooking time, turn the heat off and keep the pot covered for 10 more minutes. Remove the ham hock and fluff the rice gently with a large fork -- you can also use a spoon, but be very careful not to crush the rice grains. Get some big bowls. No, bigger than that. Serve it forth. Be prepared for conversation to cease at the moment everybody bites into the first blackeyed pea and realizes just how warm and soulful this food is. This would be your hoppin' John.
In the Americas rice-and-bean dishes are associated primarily with peoples of African ancestry, and with justice...Hoppin' John is the signature dish of South Carolina, black and white. As Helen Woodward wrote in her receipt for it in Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking (1976): "South Carolinians, like my husband, who have been away from home a long time, if they feel a culinary homesickness, always long for something called Hoppin' John, with the accent on John." Yankee though I be, I too get yearnings for it because it is such a satisfying dish; if, in addition, it had associations with home and the days of my youth, those feelings would be even more intense, I'm sure. Fortunately, although it seems so rooted in its home territory, it is a dish that travels well, always supposing that one can find the proper peas -- and black-eye peas are everywhere available in the United States -- and the proper receipt, which must be a home grown South Carolina receipt.
-- Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (University of South Carolina Press, 1992)
