In the South, it's traditional to eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day for good luck in the coming year. I grew up in Arkansas and Oklahoma doing so. When I moved out West in 1980, I was stunned to find very few people who even knew what a black-eyed pea was. For years we had big black-eyed pea parties on New Year's Day, and we made a lot of fans with this recipe. Our friends back in Arizona still have black-eyed pea parties on New Year's Day.
Hopping John is the dish known elsewhere in the South that combines black-eyed peas, also known as cow peas, with rice. In New Orleans, where the long-standing rule is to serve rice with every dish, this would just be called "black-eyed peas," as my friends Lynette observed.
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