Hoppin' John

Early print references The Oxford English Dictionary's first reference to the dish is from Frederick Law Olmsted's 19th century travelogue, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1861). A recipe for "Hopping John" in The Carolina Housewife by Sarah Rutledge, which was published in 1847, is also cited as the earliest reference. Lexical source The origins of the name are uncertain. One possibility is that the name is a corruption of the Haitian Creole term for black-eyed peas: pwa pijon () lit. 'pigeon peas' meaning black-eyed peas. Pwa pijon is a borrowing from the French pois pigeon. ==History==

Hoppin' John originated from the Gullah people and was originally a Lowcountry one-pot dish before spreading to the entire population of the South. Hoppin' John may have evolved from rice and bean mixtures that were the subsistence of enslaved West Africans en route to the Americas. Hoppin' John has been further traced to similar foods in West Africa, in particular the Senegalese dish thiebou niebe. It is also similar to waakye, a rice and beans dish from Ghana. One tradition common in the United States is that each person at the meal should leave three peas on their plate to ensure that the New Year will be filled with luck, fortune and romance. Another tradition holds that counting the number of peas in a serving predicts the amount of luck, or wealth, that the diner will have in the coming year. On Sapelo Island in the community of Hog Hammock, Geechee red peas are used instead of black-eyed peas. Sea Island red peas are similar. American chef Sean Brock claims that traditional Hoppin' John was made with Carolina Gold rice, once thought to be extinct, and Sea Island red peas. He has worked with farmers to reintroduce this variety of rice. As of 2017, several rice growers offer Carolina Gold rice. == Variants ==

Other bean and rice dishes are seen in Southern Louisiana and in the Caribbean, and are often associated with African culinary influence in the Americas. The Louisiana Creole version is called congri, and other regional variants include the Guyanese dish "cook-up rice", which uses black-eyed peas and coconut milk; "Hoppin' Juan," which substitutes Cuban black beans for black-eyed peas; the Peruvian tacu-tacu; and the Brazilian dish baião de dois, which often uses black-eyed peas. ==See also==