Two weeks ago, a phrase appeared on this page, pretty much incidentally, in a column regarding the holiday party season.The phrase was "Hoppin' John's."
In the wake of that particular column, the question "Hey, what the hell is 'Hoppin' John's,' anyway?" has been directed at me often enough to warrant some elaboration. Those of you who know what it is are free to proceed to the cover story, or go ahead and pay for your reasonably priced meal of foreign food and return to work, or whatever. Or read on: You might be surprised, as you were when you found out you'd been using the word "lugubrious" incorrectly all that time.
I was introduced to the term five or six years ago by St. Pete residents Roger and Mimi Peterson (he plays bass in garage-rock outfit Crippled Masters; she runs downtown new-and-used lifestyle boutique/hair salon Star Booty with partner Susan Riggs). The Petersons have hosted a New Year's Day Hoppin' John party — apparently, the apostrophe and the "s" are optional equipment — for seven years. After whatever New Year's Eve festivities are on the docket for any given year, Roger catches a few hours' shuteye before rising with the sun to begin cooking an absolutely killer assortment of Southern and soul-food staples. By late afternoon, all manner of artists, musicians and other people you don't know by name but recognize from every local live-music venue in town are wandering the house and surrounding area, chowing down, nursing beers or Bloody Marys, and generally creating an enjoyably subdued dull roar.
As far as I knew, "Hoppin' John's" referred to the party itself, some tradition involving the first day of the New Year. And fried chicken and collard greens and macaroni and cheese. And it being OK to publicly postpone your hangover, like when you're on vacation with friends from high school in New Orleans. When I later noticed a canned conglomeration of black-eyed peas, okra, jalapeno peppers and other assorted crap called "Hoppin' John's Mix" on the shelf at Kash n' Karry, I just figured more people threw New Year's Day parties featuring soul food than I'd previously assumed; enough for Libby's to create a mix for just that occasion, anyway. I got excited. I even bought a can — hey, I like black-eyed peas, okra, jalapeno peppers and other assorted crap — and heated it up a few days later. It tasted like cardboard soaked in the Davis Islands yacht basin for about a million years.
But it made me curious. This year, after being asked quite a few times for specifics, I decided to find out exactly where the tradition came from — without, y'know, looking like I didn't know where the tradition came from.
New Year's Day was perfect — sunny, breezy and a Saturday. Shorts and flip-flops. Sorry, Denver. By 5:30 p.m., the old-school front porch of Roger's new place just north of downtown was crowded with young men and women in black T-shirts, while those that didn't get the dress-code memo watched TV inside and gathered in the backyard.
I cornered our host near the decimated kitchen table, and circled around the subject for a while. Finally, I asked where he and Mimi got the idea for Hoppin' John.
"In '94, we were visiting my family up in Maine, and we went to a New Year's Day party at this lesbian arts community," he said. "It was great. All this soul food, people sitting around watching football, yelling at the TV."
Really?
"Yep. It was the first time I'd eaten a lot of this stuff."
And Roger went off to make himself another Bloody Mary, leaving me to wonder exactly how hard I was being fucked with. Yankees are notorious for their deadpan delivery, you know.
As cool as it would be if the whole thing actually had originated at a lesbian arts community in rural Maine, I don't believe that to be the case. And while it was far from definitive, a fairly thorough perusal of the Net seemed to back me up in that regard. The research did, however, reveal that one of my basic assumptions was flawed.
Hoppin' John isn't a party. It's a recipe, a dish composed primarily of black-eyed peas, rice, and bacon or salted pork, traditionally eaten on New Year's Day by the family in order to bring good luck in the coming year.
(None of the instructions I found for it mentioned the inclusion of okra, jalapeno peppers or assorted crap.)
Most experts agree that the entrée has its origins in early African-American slave culture, but nobody seems to know exactly where the name came from. Some say it's named after a particularly efficient and motivated waiter in some famous Southern restaurant. Some say it's named after the crippled cook who concocted it. Still others contend the name Hoppin' John is derived from the old practice of a family actually hopping around the kitchen table before eating on New Year's Day, another practice intended to inspire good fortune.
The most tedious explanation I found had to do with the eventual bastardization of ancient Arabic and Hindi words for "cooked rice," coupled with the equally mangled name of a pea that traveled from Madagascar to become part of the African diet.
It's all very interesting, but I kind of wish I'd never tried to discover the proper definition of Hoppin' John in the first place. I prefer the associations it had for me before I went looking for its literal meaning, and those are the associations I'll continue to explain to anyone who asks me what the phrase stands for: good food, good company, a good time, and the hope that the coming year is better than the one that came before.
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2005.