All we are saying is give peas a chance
About 12,000 years, humans were moving out of caves into huts and tepees, domesticating goats instead of hunting woolly mammoths while being hunter-gathers, and those living in what is now Iran came upon the pea. We don’t know what early peas looked like, but it appears growing peas was a factor in folks being willing to settle down. Peas were important enough in early Mideast civilizations that Egyptians included them in tombs for the journey to the afterlife.
Dried peas were the fare for Europeans until the Italian Renaissance when gardeners developed a variety which was shelled and the peas inside were consumed fresh and green. This fad reached England and Holland by the 1500s, and today we call these varieties English peas.
Farmers eventually created a variety with a soft, edible pod with immature peas inside for easy eating and no shelling. French folks, in a fit of linguistic genius, termed the new pea “mangetout,” which means “eat all.” We now call them snow peas, but more on that later.
Humans, of course, are ever curious, so breeders in the early 17th century crossed the English pea with the mangetout and created an early version of the sugar snap variety of pea, similar to the edible pod pea but with a fuller edible pod. This variety disappeared by the end of the 19th century and the sugar snap version we consume today had to be re-created. More on that later.
But first, we visit an Augustinian monastery in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, in the mid-19th century, where young monk Gregor Mendel studied peas like nobody before him. From 1856-1863, Mendel meticulously studied the results of cross breeding of peas through generations, watching which traits like seed shape, flower color or plant height carried forth, and from his experiments and observations he found consistencies which eventually earned him respect as the founder of modern genetics. Mendel created the terms recessive and dominant when referring to pea traits. Go peas!
Though Americans associate edible pod peas with Asian cuisine, evidence indicates it was Dutch traders who brought them to China maybe as late as the 19th century. Nevertheless, peas became an integral part of Asian cuisine.
The Mandarin name for edible pod peas translates as “Holland pea,” and one legend has it the term snow pea originated in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
In the late 19th century, the Campbell Soup Company began canning English peas, and within a few decades companies began selling frozen peas. Think about the noble journey peas have taken from settling down and sustaining the early hunter-gatherers to being frozen in a humble box or bag. You do what you have to do in this world.
I grew up in the last half of the 20th century never knowing anything about peas but canned English peas until I struck out on my own, read Organic Gardening magazine and grew snow peas in my own garden. During this same time, Calvin Lamborn, a plant breeder for a company in Idaho, visited pea fields in Africa in which he saw women with children strapped to their backs bending over to harvest peas. He became determined to breed a pea variety which would develop higher on the vine for easier harvesting.
He succeeded. In 1979, Lamborn received an All-American Selections National Award for the Sugar Snap pea, a cross between a mutant English pea and a snow pea, the results of which are available to all of us today. I will never eat Sugar Snaps again without remembering what inspired Lamborn.
The first vegetable that drew my older son to my gardens was snow peas. Pea seeds are easy to save, and twice a year I plant descendants of those same snow peas. I have added a wonderful softer version from India with yellow pods and purple flowers. I have not grown the purple snow pea yet, but maybe in autumn.