Serving fresh green peas is a custom on the 4th of July, the day of the celebration of America’s independence from the rule of King George lll of England in 1776.
Peas are planted in the spring, and as one Maine gardener writes, “Forget the dates, I’ll still have snow and frozen ground on Easter, but I will have peas by the Fourth of July … Fresh peas and salmon are a Fourth of July tradition here.*
Botanically a fruit, peas grow from seeds, and were found to have been in the food plan of early societies dating from the late Neolithic Revolution.* Grown mostly for their dried seeds, peas are evidence of the agricultural lifestyles that developed in small, independent groups or communities of the current countries of Greece, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan.
Variously described as garden, English, sweet, or simply green, peas can be low growing or vining. With the vining variety, thin, climbing tendrils from the new plant continue lengthening and waving in the air until each tendril finds a surface to coil around: a post, a tree branch the gardener has poked into the earth (called pea brush), a pea trellis, or a nearby fence.
In an article in Maine’s Bangor Daily News, Reeser Manley calls pea planting, “an inaugural event” and “an early-spring ritual.” She spreads composted goat manure onto a sunny, well-drained bed, forks it in, rakes the bed level, then drops her seeds in an inch apart, and in a month, as she tells it, her vines “will be so thick that a mouse couldn’t crawl through them.”*
In early summer this year, fresh peas filled my bowl. Surprised to see plentiful fat, green pods at the local market, I bought two kilos from the seller seated behind the ground cloth displaying his produce; I kept buying until the season ended. With the washed pods mounded in a strainer, one by one I pressed on the round back side of the bottom tip to pop open a small crack so my fingers could pull back the halves and slide out the peas into my pot. I found the cooled cooking water to be tasty and nutritious. Each morning as I shelled, I sang a children’s rhyme:
I eat my peas with honey;
I've done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
~Anonymous
As a girl at my grandparents’ Maine farm, in summers I ate green peas served in a china dish along with the rest of the dinner—but that’s not how it was done at my Uncle Charles and Aunt Annabelle’s home: they’d make a whole meal of only peas with butter, salt, and pepper!
My realization is, “Learning that one of our cool weather spring vegetables originated over six thousand years ago may offer an insight of wonder.”
*http://www.lancasterfarming.com/news/northern_edition/when-it-comes-to-planting-peas-forget-
the-date/article_cafea9dc-713c-5a82-bd77-ae22231a3957.html
* Neolithic Revolution: c. 8,000 B.C.E. to 3,000 B.C.E.
* http://bangordailynews.com/2009/02/06/living/gardening-year-will-begin-when-you-plant-peas/