Black Eyed Peas: Calcutta Style (with Bacon)

Happy New Year, y'all! Eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day is a fine southern tradition.  The origin story I was told as a child was that when Sherman marched through the south, the only crop he did not burn was the black-eyed pea, which he thought was used to feed hogs, so he let it be. Southerners then were thankful that they had something to eat on New Year's Day.  As it turns out, the story was concocted by a black-eyed pea company decades ago to... drum roll.... sell more black-eyed peas. The most likely story is that the black-eyed pea tradition was brought to Georgia by Sephardic Jews in 1733.

This morning while cooking my annual pot of good luck, I discovered that I had no ground cumin. Being a person with a strong affinity for Tex-Mex cuisine, my black-eyed pea recipe tends to look a lot like my black bean recipe, which includes a generous amount of ground cumin (comino molido). Before you know it, I was digging in our box of Indian spices, among the cardamom, star anise, and kalongi seed, and within moments this year's black-eyed peas had become a hybrid Indian recipe with a slab of bacon. Yes, I added black cumin seed and turmeric to the recipe, and my black-eyed peas now have a Tex-Mex-Indian fusion groove. And quite honestly, it is a pot of gold. Hurray for Calcutta-style black-eyed peas!

And, for an interesting aside, here's a picture of Kali, from whose temple Calcutta derives its name.