The regional table / South Carolina
Hoppin' John, Cooked in the Pea Liquor
Everything this dish tastes of is in the water the peas cooked in, so that water is what cooks the rice.
The dish belongs to the Carolina rice coast, and the rice coast belonged to the people who were enslaved to build it. The National Park Service management plan for the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor puts it plainly in its chapter on West African rice heritage: Africans from the west coast of Africa were familiar with the technology of tidewater rice production, and that knowledge was transferred to the New World with their enslavement, while the planters, it notes, were reluctant to acknowledge that Africans also had an array of technological and managerial skills essential to the production of rice. By 1770 the rice coast ran from the Cape Fear region of North Carolina to the St. Johns River in Florida. Writing on Carolina Gold in the South Carolina Encyclopedia, John Martin Taylor gives the sequence of hands — clearing, the dikes and sluices, the heel-and-toe planting, the flooding, the hand harvest, the fanner baskets woven from sweetgrass, the mortars carved for hulling — and ends it in one sentence: from seed to table, Carolina gold was the domain of the enslaved.
The printed pedigree is thinner than the dish deserves, and worth being exact about. The first appearance of Hoppin' John in English is in Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife, Charleston 1847, published anonymously by a Lady of Charleston, whose version calls for one pound of bacon, one pint of red peas and one pint of rice — quantities quoted here from Taylor's encyclopedia entry rather than from the book, because the 1847 printing is not open anywhere online: the Internet Archive holds only the 1979 University of South Carolina reprint, locked to borrowers, and no scan of the original exists in the catalogues. What is readable is 200 Years of Charleston Cooking of 1930, which prints Hopping John with the accent on the John, calls it as characteristic of South Carolina as baked beans are of Massachusetts, and then lets its New York editor Lettie Gay record her verdict on the test kitchen's pot: for our tastes the dish seemed a bit flavorless and rather starchy. She had boiled the peas, thrown most of the flavour out with the water, and steamed the rice in what was left.
Why this version works
The pea liquor is the stock. Peas cooked with bacon and onion turn their water into a dark, savoury broth, and that broth is the only seasoning the rice ever gets. Measure two cups of it for one cup of rice and the grains carry the flavour of the whole pot; drain it away and you get exactly the flat, starchy plate the 1930 test kitchen described.
The lid stays on for twenty minutes. Long-grain rice steaming in a measured liquid needs undisturbed heat and its own trapped steam. Every lift of the lid drops the temperature and releases what is cooking the top layer, and every stir breaks starch off the grains and glues them together.
Red field peas, cooked short of collapse. Cowpeas hold their shape for a window of about ten minutes before they burst and go to mush. Stopping while they are tender but whole is what keeps this a rice dish with peas in it rather than a porridge.
Bacon fat at the start, bacon back at the end. The fat renders early and flavours the onion, the peas and eventually the rice. The meat itself goes back in after the rice is cooked, so it stays chewy instead of dissolving into the pot over an hour and a half.