Garden pea
Do you like the “assorted vegetables’’ commonly found in Taiwanese bento restaurants? In the “assorted vegetables’’, the yellow ones are corn, the orange ones are carrots, and the green ones are peas. Pea (garden pea, Pisum sativum) is an annual herbaceous plant belonging to the leguminous family. The tender stems, leaves, pods and seeds can be eaten. In Taiwan, peas are divided into soft pods (pod peas), soft beans (cooked beans, American beans), leaves (pea sprouts, pea tips), sweet beans (sweet peas, crisp peas) and bean sprouts (pea baby) etc. The world’s largest producer of peas is China, accounting for about 60% of the world’s total. In Taiwan, because peas prefer a cold, dry climate, they are mostly planted in the central region in autumn and winter; especially in Changhua, which accounts for 90% of the country’s output. Because the peas were introduced to Taiwan by the Dutch, they are also called “Holland peas”(huê-liân-tāu) and “barbarian peas’’ and so on.
Pea is native to Southwest Asia and the Mediterranean region, and wild species are currently still found in both places; the local wild peas generally overlap with barley, wheat, lentils and flax in the local area. It is currently believed that peas were domesticated about 10,250–9,550 BC, at the same time as barley, wheat, and lentils; they were originally intended to eat mature seeds. The mature seeds can be dried and stored. In addition to being directly added to dishes, they can also be ground into cakes. Pea has several changes after being domesticated by humans: the seed pod will not split after the seed matures; the size of seed has doubled; the seed coat has become thinner and smoother. After being domesticated, it spread along with barley, wheat, and lentils to Cyprus, the Aegean Sea, and the Balkans, to Central Europe around 8,000 BC, and to the Ganges River around 2,000 BC. China has a record of cultivation since the Han Dynasty, and it is said to have been introduced to Taiwan by the Dutch.
The old European way of eating peas was to cook a thick soup until the peas were invisible. At that time, both peas and lentils were considered “the food of the poor” and were not suitable for serving the nobility and the rich. When the peas (snow peas) that can be eaten with their pods appeared in the 16th and 17th centuries, they went to the “Sun King” Louis XIV table! Relatively speaking, broad beans and lentils do not seem to be so lucky. As for the sugar snap peas with thicker pods, they appear later.
As for the assorted vegetables, it is said to have been invented by Clarence Birdseye (1886–1956), the inventor of the frozen food technology, in the 1930s. Although protein (pea), starch (corn) and vitamins (carrots) are available, the taste of frozen assorted vegetables is not appealing, especially when peas are frozen and thawed, they often become soft and smushy, so that there are Internet comments that “frozen assorted vegetables can really destroy all the food in the world”! But there are many people who like it. In fact, if it is not frozen, it tastes good, isn’t it?
Everyone should have heard the story of Jack and Magic Beans. Jack traded a cow for a handful of beans, and the beans grew into the sky the next day! What kind of bean is the magic bean? According to research conducted by British anthropologists and Portuguese folklorists, this story is at least five thousand years old; if you look at the Fertile Crescent and the earliest domesticated legumes (lentils, chickpeas, broad beans, and peas) in the surrounding area , The only sprawling species is pea. Is Jack’s magic bean a pea?
In addition to being edible, peas have also made a significant contribution to science. On February 8, 1865, Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) presented his research results of the past eight years at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in Moravia: “Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden” (“Experiments on Plant Hybridization”). Although his thesis was not taken seriously at the time, it was rediscovered 35 years later by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, which changed the world’s view of life, and Mendel was respected as the father of genetics. Since peas are almost self-pollinated and easy to observe, Mendel has successfully uncovered the mystery of biological heredity; if you switch to other plants (such as the asexually reproductive Canadian hawkweed), such an important discovery will probably be delayed for many years. According to estimates, Mendel planted at least 28,000 peas for his research!
When I was a child, the elders in my family all pronounced peas as “huê-lin-tāu.” It is said that the peas were brought by the Dutch. But in some places, peas are pronounced as “huê-liân-tāu”. The children might as well go home and ask grandma to see if they pronounce peas as “huê-liân-tāu” or “huê-lin-tāu”?
