The pea (Pisum sativum) is one of the eight Neolithic founder crops: the small, deliberately chosen bundle of plants with which humanity invented agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of Western Asia some ten and a half thousand years ago. Carbonised pea seeds appear in the earliest farming villages of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, amongst the oldest at Tell Aswad in southern Syria around 8500 BCE, alongside the founding cereals (emmer wheat, einkorn, and barley) and the founding pulses (lentil, chickpea, and bitter vetch). Wild peas (Pisum sativum subsp. elatius) shatter their pods explosively to scatter their seed; the first farmers selected, almost certainly without understanding what they were doing, the rare mutant plants whose pods stayed shut, so that the seed waited in the field to be gathered rather than flinging itself across the ground. That single non-shattering trait, repeated across lentil, chickpea, and pea, is the quiet hinge on which settled human life turns.
The pea is, above all, a keeping crop. Left on the plant to mature and dried, the seed becomes a hard, starchy sphere that will survive years of storage and months at sea, swelling back to edible softness in a pot of water. For the whole of recorded history before refrigeration, this dried field pea, not the sweet green pea of the modern table, was what 'pea' meant: the winter insurance of the northern European peasant, the ship's provision of the sailor, the Lenten protein of the Orthodox Christian, and the daily pulse of the Persian, Indian, and Ethiopian kitchen. The fresh green pea, eaten immature and sweet straight from the pod, is a comparative luxury and a comparative latecomer, a refinement that became a courtly obsession only in Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century France.
Four distinct culinary identities grew from the single species. The dried field pea (P. sativum var. arvense), split along its natural seam into yellow or green split peas, is the soup-and-porridge pea of pease pudding, ärtsoppa, erwtensoep, and Ethiopian kik alicha. The garden or shelling pea (P. sativum var. sativum), white-flowered and sweet, is the fresh green pea of risi e bisi, petits pois, and matar paneer. The edible-podded pea, eaten pod and all, divides into the flat-podded snow pea or mangetout (P. sativum var. macrocarpon), refined in early modern Europe and embraced wholeheartedly by the Chinese kitchen, and the round-podded sugar snap, a deliberate twentieth-century American invention of 1979. A wholly separate domestication produced a fifth pea: the Abyssinian pea (Pisum abyssinicum), taken into cultivation independently in the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea, genetically distinct from the Fertile Crescent crop and grown there to this day as dekoko.
The pea holds one further distinction unmatched by any other plant. It is the organism on which the science of heredity was founded. Between 1856 and 1863, in the garden of the Abbey of Saint Thomas in Brno, the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel grew and crossed some twenty-eight thousand pea plants, tracking seven clear either-or traits (round or wrinkled seed, yellow or green cotyledon, tall or short stem) across generations, and from the ratios he counted he deduced the discrete, particulate laws of inheritance that underlie all of modern genetics. The pea is not merely an ancient food; it is the plant through which life learned to read itself.
The pea travelled in two great modes, and the difference between them shapes its whole geography. As a dried pulse it moved early, quietly, and everywhere, a founder crop carried out of the Fertile Crescent in the very first expansion of farming: south into the Nile Valley, where peas were grown in the Egyptian delta by the fifth millennium BCE; west with the spread of agriculture across the northern Mediterranean shore into Greece and Italy; and east along the corridors that would later become the Silk Road, into Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and ultimately China. By the Classical period the pea was a staple of the entire Old World temperate zone, and the dried-pea pottage was the common food of soldiers, sailors, monks, and the poor from Britain to Bengal.
The Greeks gave the seed its enduring name. Ancient Greek píson became Latin pisum, and from pisum descend almost every European word for the plant, including the English 'pease', the medieval singular that was later misheard as a plural and clipped to the modern 'pea'. Rome systematised pea cookery: the first-century recipe collection attributed to Apicius records several pea dishes, the dried seed cooked to a purée and dressed with leeks, coriander, and the fermented fish sauce garum. Through Rome and the monastic gardens of medieval Europe the dried pea became the backbone of the northern table, recorded in the fourteenth-century English manuscript The Forme of Cury as pease pottage, the ancestor of pease pudding and of the nursery rhyme.
The second mode was the rise of the fresh green pea, and it is a far later and more localised story. The sweet, immature, eaten-green pea was refined in the kitchen gardens of Renaissance northern Italy, where it joined the new rice paddies of the Veneto to make the Doge's spring dish, risi e bisi. In January 1660 a courtier brought a basket of fresh Italian peas to the table of Louis XIV, and the French court was seized by a craze for petits pois so extreme that Madame de Maintenon could write of ladies who, having dined well, ate peas in their bedchambers before sleep, 'a fashion, a fury'. The royal gardener La Quintinie was set to forcing peas under glass in the Potager du Roi at Versailles to supply the king out of season. The fresh garden pea, from this moment, became a vegetable of refinement across Europe.
The pea's colonial and modern dispersals carried it to every inhabited continent. French settlers took the dried-pea soup to New France, where soupe aux pois became a defining dish of Québec. The Dutch perfected both the edible-podded pea and their national thick split-pea soup, erwtensoep or snert. British colonists planted garden and snow peas in the cool highlands of East Africa, where they met the indigenous highland pulse cookery of the Kikuyu to produce irio. The Indian indenture system of the nineteenth century carried the matar dal of the subcontinent across the oceans to Fiji and beyond. And in 1979, in Twin Falls, Idaho, the plant breeder Calvin Lamborn crossed a snow pea with a thick-podded shelling pea and released the sugar snap, the first pea bred to be eaten whole, crisp, and raw: the newest member of one of humanity's oldest cultivated families.
The pea is one of the most important legumes on earth, grown on every inhabited continent and eaten in nearly every culinary tradition of the temperate and highland world. It occupies two almost separate places in the modern kitchen. The dried pea, yellow or green, whole or split, remains the staple it has always been: the foundation of split-pea soups from Stockholm to Québec, of Ethiopian kik alicha and Persian khoresh gheymeh, of Bengali ghugni and English pease pudding, and a major source of plant protein across South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and northern Europe. The fresh green pea, harvested immature and frozen within hours of picking, is amongst the most successful frozen vegetables in the world, the green of countless rice dishes, curries, and spring vegetable plates.
The edible-podded peas have risen sharply in the modern global kitchen. The flat snow pea or mangetout is indispensable to Chinese stir-frying, and the tender shoots and tendrils of the pea plant, dou miao, are a prized green vegetable in Cantonese cooking. The sugar snap, bred in 1979, has become a fixture of the fresh produce aisle worldwide. Kenya and Guatemala are now major exporters of snow peas and sugar snaps to European and North American markets, a high-value horticultural trade built on a four-thousand-year-old plant.
Nutritionally the pea is exceptional: high in protein, fibre, and the B vitamins, and increasingly the raw material of choice for the plant-protein industry, where pea-protein isolate now underpins a large share of the meat-substitute and protein-supplement markets. The dried pea also remains, agronomically, one of the great nitrogen-fixing soil-building crops, returning fertility to the ground through the bacteria in its root nodules, exactly as it did in the first Neolithic fields. And it retains its singular scientific dignity: the garden pea is still a standard model organism in plant genetics, the living descendant of Mendel's twenty-eight thousand plants, the species through which humanity first glimpsed the laws of inheritance.
Historical Journey of Pea
Fertile Crescent, Western Asia — c. 8500 BCE
The pea (Pisum sativum) is one of the eight Neolithic founder crops, the small assembly of plants with which the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent invented agriculture. Carbonised pea seeds appear amongst the earliest cultivated remains of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, some of the oldest recovered from Tell Aswad in southern Syria around 8500 BCE, found beside the founding cereals (emmer wheat, einkorn, and barley) and the companion pulses (lentil, chickpea, and bitter vetch). The wild pea, P. sativum subsp. elatius, scatters its seed by springing its dry pods open; the first cultivators unwittingly selected the rare non-shattering mutants whose pods held shut until harvest, the single quiet change that turned a foraged plant into a storable crop. From this origin the dried field pea spread as a keeping pulse across the whole temperate Old World, the winter protein and ship's provision of civilisations from Britain to Bengal. It was never, in this ancient world, the sweet green pea of the modern plate: it was the hard, starchy, dried sphere that waited in the storeroom through the lean months and swelled back to life in the pot.
Ethiopian Highlands (Abyssinia) — c. 3000 BCE
The Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands hold one of the world's quiet botanical secrets: a second, independent domestication of the pea. The Abyssinian pea (Pisum abyssinicum), known in Tigrinya as dekoko, is genetically distinct from the Fertile Crescent crop, the product of a separate taking-into-cultivation in the cool, high plateaux of the Horn of Africa, and it has been grown there for thousands of years as a prized highland pulse. The highlands are one of the great independent centres of plant domestication, the home of teff, ensete, and noog, and the Abyssinian pea belongs to that ancient indigenous agriculture. Ethiopia's Orthodox Christian majority observe meat-free fasting (tsom) for as much as two-thirds of the year, and in that long fasting calendar the pea, dried and split, became indispensable. The mild, turmeric-gilded yellow split-pea stew kik alicha, simmered in spiced clarified butter and served on injera, is one of the cornerstone fasting dishes of the Ethiopian table: a pulse stew whose lineage reaches back to the highland domestication of the pea itself.
- Kik alicha (Ethiopian mild yellow split-pea stew)
Nile Delta, Ancient Egypt — c. 2400 BCE
The pea travelled south from the Fertile Crescent with the first spread of farming, and was cultivated in the Nile Delta by the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, dried peas appearing amongst the pulses of Old Kingdom Egypt alongside lentils, broad beans, and chickpeas. As in all the ancient world, it was the dried seed that mattered, a keeping protein for a civilisation built on the granary and the flood calendar. The pea has remained an Egyptian staple ever since. Bisella (بسلة), the homely Egyptian stew of green peas braised with onion, garlic, and tomato around pieces of meat and served over rice, is one of the everyday dishes of the Egyptian table, the kind of unceremonious, deeply savoury home cooking that defines a cuisine far more truly than its banquet food. Fresh in spring and frozen the rest of the year, the pea sits at the heart of Egyptian domestic cooking as it has since the age of the pyramids.
- Bisella (Egyptian green pea and meat stew)
Delhi & the Punjab, North India — c. 1200 CE
The pea entered the Indian subcontinent from the northwest in deep antiquity, carried along the same corridors as wheat and the other Western Asian pulses, and it found in the cool North Indian winter an ideal second season. The fresh green pea, the matar of Hindi and Urdu, became one of the defining vegetables of the North Indian winter table, its sweetness a foil for the warm spice and the rich dairy of the Mughal-influenced kitchen. Matar paneer, cubes of fresh pressed curd and bright green peas in a spiced tomato gravy, is amongst the most beloved vegetarian dishes of Punjab and the whole Hindi belt, a fixture of the home kitchen and the roadside dhaba alike. Across the eastern reach of the Gangetic plain, in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the winter pea is coarsely ground and simmered into nimona, a rustic curry of crushed green peas and potato that is the taste of the cold-season village kitchen. From the festive to the everyday, the pea is woven through the vegetarian heart of North Indian cooking.
- Matar paneer (North Indian peas and fresh cheese in tomato gravy)
- Matar ka nimona (Awadhi and Bhojpuri crushed green pea curry)
Beijing & Northern China — c. 1300 CE
The pea reached China across the steppe and the Silk Road from the west, a foreign provenance still recorded in its Chinese name 豌豆 (wāndòu). It found two quite different places in the Chinese kitchen. In the north, the dried pea was milled and set into one of the most refined of all Beijing sweets: wandou huang (豌豆黄), a cool, pale-gold jelly of sieved yellow split peas and sugar, cut into neat blocks. Once a humble temple-fair snack eaten on the third day of the third lunar month, it was taken into the Qing imperial kitchen after it became a favourite of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who is said to have summoned a street vendor into the palace to make it for her, whereupon the court cooks refined it into the delicate confection served in the teahouses of Beijing today. In the south, the pea is grown for its tender young shoots and tendrils: dou miao (豆苗), stir-fried hard and fast with garlic in a blazing wok, are amongst the most prized green vegetables of Cantonese cooking, and the flat snow pea, eaten pod and all, is indispensable to the Chinese stir-fry.
- Wandou huang (Beijing imperial sweet yellow pea cake)
- Dou miao (Cantonese stir-fried pea shoots with garlic)
Athens, Ancient Greece — c. 350 BCE
The pea was a well-established crop of Classical Greece, and it is to the Greeks that the plant owes its enduring name: the Ancient Greek píson (πίσον) passed into Latin as pisum and from there into nearly every European language. The philosopher and botanist Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor, described the pulse crops of the Greek farm in the late fourth century BCE, and the comic poets joked about the thick pea-and-bean purée called étnos that was the common food of the Athenian poor. The fresh green pea remains a fixture of the modern Greek spring table: arakás (αρακάς), young garden peas braised gently in olive oil with spring onion, tomato, and a generous quantity of fresh dill until meltingly soft, is one of the classic ladera, the family of vegetable dishes cooked in olive oil that form the backbone of Greek home cooking and of the long Orthodox fasting calendar.
- Arakás laderós (Greek green peas braised in olive oil with dill)
Rome, Roman Empire — c. 25 CE
Rome inherited the pea from the Greek world along with its name, and systematised its cookery. The first-century recipe collection attributed to Apicius, De Re Coquinaria, records a whole sequence of pea dishes under the heading pisa: the dried seed boiled to a soft purée and finished with leek, fresh coriander, lovage, and the ubiquitous fermented fish sauce garum, sometimes layered with sausages and sweetbreads into an elaborate moulded dish, sometimes served simply with oil and pepper. The dried pea was a Roman staple from the legionary's ration to the patrician's table, and it was through Rome and the monastic gardens that followed that the pea became entrenched as the great keeping-pulse of the European table. The medieval pease pottage, the Renaissance risi e bisi, and the courtly petits pois of France all descend from the Roman pisa.
- Pisa (Apician Roman split pea purée with leek and coriander)
Tabriz & the Iranian Plateau, Persia — c. 600 CE
Persia, lying directly on the pea's eastward route out of the Fertile Crescent, made the yellow split pea, lapeh (لپه), a quiet cornerstone of its cooking. Lapeh is the body of khoresh gheymeh, one of the most beloved of all Persian stews: tender lamb or beef and yellow split peas simmered slowly with tomato, turmeric, and the dark, sour, earthy fragrance of dried Persian limes (limoo amani), the whole crowned with a tangle of slender fried potato matchsticks. In the northwest, in the Azerbaijani city of Tabriz, the split pea is worked into koofteh Tabrizi, the giant stuffed meatballs of rice, minced lamb, and split peas that are the pride of the Tabrizi kitchen, each one hiding a filling of dried fruit and egg. The split pea is to the Persian stew what rice is to its pilau: an unshowy, essential, load-bearing ingredient that the cuisine could not do without.
- Khoresh gheymeh (Persian lamb and yellow split pea stew with dried lime)
- Koofteh Tabrizi (Tabriz stuffed rice and split pea meatballs)
Kolkata & Bengal, Eastern India — c. 1500 CE
In the eastern reach of the subcontinent, in Bengal, Bihar, Odisha, and Jharkhand, the dried white pea found its own great expression. Ghugni is dried white or yellow peas soaked overnight and simmered until tender in a fragrant, mildly spiced gravy of onion, ginger, and ground cumin and coriander, then finished, in its street-food form, with raw onion, green chilli, a squeeze of lime, and a scatter of crisp fried bhaja masala. It is one of the great street foods of Kolkata and the ubiquitous tea-stall snack of the eastern states, sold from kerbside cauldrons across Bengal, ladled over puffed rice as part of the Bengali jhalmuri tradition, or eaten with flatbread for breakfast. Where the North Indian kitchen prizes the fresh green pea, the Bengali kitchen built an entire beloved category of dishes on the humble dried pea, the keeping pulse of the founder-crop tradition carried into the everyday cooking of a hundred and fifty million people.
- Ghugni (Bengali spiced dried white pea curry)
London & Northern England — c. 1390 CE
Nowhere did the dried pea sink deeper into the national diet than in Britain, where the pease pottage of the medieval poor became one of the defining foods of the island. The fourteenth-century manuscript The Forme of Cury records the dried-pea pottage by name, and from it descend both the nursery rhyme ('Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old') and pease pudding, the smooth, savoury purée of yellow split peas boiled in a cloth with a ham hock that remains a fixture of the North East of England, eaten with boiled ham or saveloy. Alongside it stands a wholly distinct British pea tradition: mushy peas, made from marrowfat peas (mature green peas dried hard in the field), soaked overnight with bicarbonate of soda and cooked to a thick, green, comforting mush, the inseparable companion of fish and chips and the centrepiece of the northern 'pea wet'. From the ship's galley to the chip shop, the dried pea is woven through British food.
- Pease pudding (Northern English yellow split pea pudding)
- Mushy peas (British marrowfat peas)
Venice, Republic of Venice — c. 1500 CE
It was in the kitchen gardens of the Veneto that the fresh green pea, eaten young and sweet, rose to its first culinary eminence. Risi e bisi, the celebrated Venetian dish of rice and peas, was the ceremonial first course presented to the Doge at the banquet held on the 25th of April, the feast of Saint Mark, patron of the Republic. A dish of springtime and of civic pride, risi e bisi sits deliberately between a soup and a risotto, all'onda ('wavy', loose and flowing), the peas, often cooked together with a stock made from their own discarded pods, lending it their fleeting sweetness, the rice their substance. The peas came from the fertile flatlands around Scorzè and Padua, the rice from the paddies of the Veronese and Vicentine lowlands established under Venetian rule. The marriage of the ancient pulse with the newer rice, both of them Asian crops naturalised in the Italian plain, made one of the great spring dishes of Europe.
- Risi e bisi (Venetian rice and peas)
Stockholm, Sweden — c. 1500 CE
In Sweden the dried yellow pea became the heart of one of the most enduring food rituals in Europe. Ärtsoppa, a thick soup of whole yellow peas simmered with salted pork, onion, and a whisper of marjoram or thyme, has been eaten on Thursdays since at least the Middle Ages. The tradition is generally traced to the Catholic fast: with Friday a day of abstinence, a hearty pea soup on Thursday evening fortified the household before the lean day to come, and although Sweden turned Protestant under Gustav Vasa in the 1520s and the Friday fast lapsed, the Thursday pea soup never did. It is still served on Thursdays in the Swedish armed forces, in school canteens, and in homes across the country, traditionally followed by thin Swedish pancakes (pannkakor) with jam and cream, and sometimes a glass of warm spiced punsch. Few dishes anywhere have held their appointed day in the week so faithfully for so many centuries.
- Ärtsoppa (Swedish Thursday yellow pea soup)
Amsterdam, Dutch Republic — c. 1600 CE
The Dutch made two lasting contributions to the world of the pea. The first was horticultural: the kitchen gardeners of the Low Countries were amongst the great early developers of the edible-podded pea, the tender 'sugar pea' eaten pod and all, and of the capucijner, the brown field pea that remains a Dutch winter staple. The second was a national dish. Erwtensoep, universally known by the affectionate name snert, is a split-pea soup so thick that tradition holds the spoon must stand upright in it: yellow split peas cooked down to a purée with pork (typically a smoked sausage, rookworst, and often pig's trotter or bacon), celeriac, leek, and onion, and served with slices of dense Frisian rye bread spread with bacon. Eaten through the long Dutch winter and prepared in vast cauldrons at the edges of frozen canals during the skating season, snert is, with its smoked sausage and its standing spoon, one of the most emphatically national of all Dutch dishes.
- Erwtensoep / Snert (Dutch thick split pea and smoked sausage soup)
Brno, Moravia — c. 1856 CE
In the garden of the Abbey of Saint Thomas in Brno, the capital of Moravia, the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel performed between 1856 and 1863 the experiments that founded the science of genetics, and he performed them on the garden pea. Mendel chose Pisum sativum with great care: it offered clear either-or traits (round or wrinkled seed, yellow or green cotyledon, tall or short stem, purple or white flower), it could be both self-pollinated and cross-pollinated by hand, and it produced several generations a year. Across some twenty-eight thousand plants he counted the offspring of his crosses, and from the recurring three-to-one ratios he deduced the existence of discrete, particulate units of inheritance, the laws of segregation and independent assortment, decades before anyone understood chromosomes or DNA. He presented his findings to the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1865; the world ignored them for thirty-five years. The pea is thus not merely an ancient food but the very organism through which life first learned to read its own rules. Moravia keeps its own deep pea-eating tradition too: hrachová kaše, a thick purée of yellow split peas topped with crisp fried onion, is a homely Czech classic eaten across Bohemia and Moravia to this day.
- Hrachová kaše (Czech yellow split pea purée with fried onion)
Versailles & Paris, France — c. 1660 CE
In January 1660 a courtier presented a basket of fresh green peas, brought up from Italy, at the table of Louis XIV, and the French court was seized by a craze for petits pois unlike anything in the history of a single vegetable. Within months the fresh pea was the obsession of Versailles; Madame de Maintenon recorded the spectacle of great ladies who, having dined and dined well, would eat peas in their bedchambers before sleep, calling it 'a fashion, a fury'. The king's gardener, Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, was set to forcing peas under glass cloches in the Potager du Roi, the royal kitchen garden, so as to supply the sovereign's table out of season. From this courtly frenzy the fresh garden pea entered the canon of French refinement, above all as petits pois à la française: the youngest peas stewed gently in butter with shredded lettuce, tiny spring onions, and a little stock until they are soft, sweet, and glistening, the definitive French statement of the green pea.
- Petits pois à la française (French braised peas with lettuce and spring onion)
Québec City, New France — c. 1700 CE
French colonists carried the dried-pea soup of the homeland across the Atlantic to New France, and in the cold of the Saint Lawrence Valley it became one of the founding dishes of Québécois cooking. Soupe aux pois, made from the whole yellow pea (the pois jaune that gave the early French Canadians their nickname, 'pea soup'), is simmered slowly with salt pork or a ham bone, onion, and savory until the peas collapse into a thick, golden, smoky soup. It was the everyday sustenance of the habitant farmer and the voyageur fur trader, food that kept and reheated and fortified against a brutal winter, and it remains a defining comfort dish of Québec, served in the cabane à sucre and the family kitchen alike. The same dried-pea tradition spread south into the United States and across English Canada as split-pea-and-ham soup, the North American descendant of the Roman pisa and the medieval pease pottage.
- Soupe aux pois (Québécois yellow pea and salt pork soup)
Viti Levu, Fiji — c. 1879 CE
Between 1879 and 1916 the British colonial indenture system carried some sixty thousand indentured labourers from India to the sugar plantations of Fiji under the agreements that gave them their name, the Girmitiyas (from 'agreement'). They came overwhelmingly from the Gangetic plain and the south, and they carried with them the pulse cookery of the subcontinent, above all the dal of split peas and lentils that is the daily protein of the Indian kitchen. In the Pacific, that tradition met the coconut, and produced a distinctively Indo-Fijian dish: a dal of yellow split peas simmered not in water alone but in fresh coconut milk, tempered with a South Indian tarka of mustard seed, curry leaves, and dried chilli. The Indo-Fijian coconut dhal is a living record of the indenture diaspora, the matar dal of India transplanted to a Pacific island and remade with the islands' own defining ingredient, the dried founder-crop pea travelling the full width of the world to a new home.
- Indo-Fijian coconut dhal (yellow split peas in coconut milk)
Central Highlands, Kenya — c. 1900 CE
The cool, fertile central highlands of Kenya proved ideal pea country, and the crop arrived there along two routes. The indigenous highland pulse tradition of the Horn of Africa, reaching south from the Ethiopian centre of domestication, met the garden and snow peas that British colonial settlers planted in the highlands from the turn of the twentieth century. Out of the first came irio (also called mukimo), the Kikuyu dish of green peas, potatoes, green maize, and pumpkin leaves mashed together into a smooth, green, comforting mound, one of the cornerstone foods of central Kenya. Out of the second grew a major modern horticultural industry: Kenya is today one of the world's leading exporters of fresh snow peas and sugar snaps, flown to the supermarkets of Europe, a high-value trade built on a Neolithic crop. In the Kenyan highlands the most ancient and the most modern of the pea's identities, the indigenous mash and the air-freighted mangetout, grow side by side.
- Irio (Kikuyu mashed peas, potato, maize, and greens)
Twin Falls, Idaho, United States — 1979 CE
The newest member of one of humanity's oldest cultivated families was born in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 1979. The plant breeder Calvin Lamborn, working for the Gallatin Valley Seed Company, had been set the task of straightening the twisted pods of the snow pea, and in pursuit of it he crossed a snow pea with a rare thick-podded shelling pea. The result was something genuinely new: a pea with a plump, rounded, crisp, entirely edible pod and sweet peas within, designed to be eaten whole and raw. Released in 1979 as the 'Sugar Snap' and an instant winner of an All-America Selections award, the sugar snap pea was the first pea bred from the outset to be a fresh, crunchable, eat-the-pod vegetable. Within a generation it had become a fixture of fresh produce aisles around the world, the modern face of a plant whose ancestors fed the first farmers of the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years before. Eaten raw, blanched, or flash-fried, dressed simply with butter, salt, and a little mint, the sugar snap is the pea reinvented for the age of the salad bar.
- Buttered sugar snap peas with mint
