"black-eyed peas"

Welcome to A Man and His Beans! Don’t try this at home, kids.

Over the years, I have heard of a New Year’s tradition of eating black-eyed peas for… reasons. It’s probably supposed to be for good luck in the new year, but I can’t be knackered to find out. Black-eyed peas, though, I was intrigued by. To Wikipedia!

First of all, is a black-eyed pea actually a pea, or is a bean? I don’t care! I make the rules here, and I’m saying they count for my purposes. Here’s what the English Wikipedia says about the black-eyed pea (trimmed for shits and giggles):

The black-eyed pea […] is a subspecies of the cowpea, grown around the world for its medium-sized, edible bean. The common commercial variety is called the California Blackeye; it is pale-colored with a prominent black spot. […] Black-eyed peas contain calcium (41 mg) folate (356 mcg), protein (13.22 g), fiber (11.1 g) and vitamin A (26 IU), among other nutrients, with less than 200 calories, in a 171-g, one-cup serving.

Pale bean, black spot: that’s what comes to my mind. As it turns out though, what comes to mind, and what I actually have in my pantry ain’t ever exactly been similar. So for this, the inaugural review, I’m improvising! After 15 minutes of web-searching, I cannot find the size of an individual black-eyed pea, so I’m just going to wing it.

In an embarrassing turn of events, the AMHB (pronounced /æmhɪb/) pantry was low on beans this New Year’s Day. Fortunately, I did have an equally-embarrassing one-pound (0.45-kilogram) bag of navy beans from Wal-Mart. They’re beigeish and they have a crook in them for the “black eye”: I’m in business! Let’s collect everything we’re going to use for this review.

Looks good to me! Now, you may ask, “Man, aren’t you going to cook your ‘black-eyed peas’?” No, no I’m not. That’s because, with some selective quoting, Newell Brands says that while “Sharpie markers are AP-certified non-toxic[,] Sharpie has not been tested as an oven proof product”. I’m going to go even further and say Sharpie probably shouldn’t be cooked at all, oven or stove-top.

As you can tell from the third photo above, these little buggers are quite small, and with my miserable fine-motor control, it took about a minute or so to beat-up each pea and give it a black eye.

…and that’s the extent of our meal-prep today! Over the teeth and past the gums, look out belly, here it comes!

Review

The “black-eyed peas” were wholly uncooked, so they felt rather like malformed ball-bearings in the mouth. The beans had no discernible flavor, and—fortunately—neither did their black eyes. Self-preservation kept me from actually chomping on the beans (dentistry is expensive!), so I just let them malinger on the tongue for a second before swallowing. Their uncooked nature meant the bean was still very smooth, and it went down without any problem. All-in-all I’d say: C+, would swallow again if necessary.

As for their good-fortune efficacy, well, I’ll have to keep you appraised throughout the year. Y’all come back and see me again, okay?