Tiger Torn and the black-eyed pea

If you’re superstitious, Texan, or Southern, the odds are good that black-eyed peas are part of your New Year’s Day menu every year because eating black-eyed peas on Jan. 1 is supposed to bring good luck and prosperity the rest of the year. 

Popular U.S. folk wisdom holds that the tradition started during the Civil War when union troops burned southern agricultural fields but considered them cowpeas— livestock feed— and left them alone. The black-eyed peas they left behind sustained southerners who might have otherwise perished. 

Depending on how you feel about black-eyed peas, we have two people to either thank or blame for their popularity. One is J.B. Henry, who accidentally made black-eyed peas a commercially viable product, and the other is Elmore “Tiger” Torn, father of actor Rip Torn and founder of the International Black-Eyed Pea Appreciation Society. 

Henry, an Athens businessman, first decided to grow black-eyed peas in large quantities around 1909.  In trying to figure out a way to combat the weevils that bedeviled his plants, he dried his pea plants in an oven on East Tyler Street in Athens. 

The process may not have done much for weevil research, but it made the peas easier to ship and Henderson County grew, canned and shipped enough back-eyed peas to make them a new agricultural commodity. Athens soon billed itself as the Black-Eyed Pea Capital of the World. Even after the commercial production of black-eyed peas in the area declined, the city has continued to pay homage to the pea’s historical importance with a Black-Eyed Pea Jamboree. 

Tiger Torn was a chemurgist, or one who researches industrial applications for raw organic material, especially farm products; today he would be called a biochemical engineer. In his travels around the world and his study of food problems Torn said he discovered that serving one kind of black-eyed lentil or another was a good luck tradition in India, Egypt and France. 

“One explanation is that these lentils are great soil builders,” he theorized. “Ask any farmer. You plant black-eyed peas for a few years and they restore soil worn out, for instance, by long cotton cultivation. So, this business of the legume restoring the soil may have something to do with the superstition that the black eyes bring good luck for all the year.”

Skeptics complain that Torn made up the story of black-eyed peas bringing good luck to promote black-eyed peas for the Henderson County Chamber of Commerce. They say he sold the story to gullible food editors at newspapers all over the country, who then passed it on to an equally gullible public. That would be some impressive debunking if not for the fact that stories and advertisements touted black-eyed peas as a good luck victual as far back as 1904, well before Tiger Torn spun his stories. 

Torn was, for many years, the black-eyed pea’s biggest booster and ambassador. He even attempted (unsuccessfully) to expand the black-eyed pea into Vietnam in the 1960s, during the height of the war. He also offered to supply U.S. troops with black-eyed peas for their New Year’s Day meals. The Army politely declined. As Gen Westmoreland put it, there just didn’t seem to be a big demand for black-eyed peas from the troops.

Athens has held an annual Black-Eyed Pea Festival for many years to celebrate the humble legume that once brought it international fame. The festival’s cook-off has revealed a versatility of uses that might have perplexed even J.B. Henry and Tiger Torn.

There have been black-eyed pea enchiladas, cowpea quiche, and black-eyed pea cheesecake along with Jell-O and adult beverages like a “peatini” and black-eyed pea wine. A pickled version of the peas is called Texas Caviar. Black-eyed peas aren’t for just the cows and hogs anymore.