Since I was a kid I’ve loved eating peas ‘out of the pod’. Just seeing them brings up lovely memories. Like the time I bought a bagful from a stall at the market in L’Aquila and took them back to the house in Fossa. Sitting shelling them (and eating most) and watching village life amble by.
Nanna Francesca’s colossal bowls brimming with peas in leftover tomato sauce, passata, ‘the gravy’ as she called it, that she served with her home-made meatballs, polpette, more egg-shaped than round.
One evening when I was in Calabria, seeing in a Castrovillari lane an elderly couple chatting while sitting on their front step shelling peas together. Sensing the lovely camaraderie between them borne of a long time together.
And, of course, Nonno Anni’s pea patch in his backyard at New Farm in the 1970s. Come winter, it was a forest to me as a child when I’d work my way up and down the rows, swiftly learning to open the pods single-handedly as I crammed peas into my mouth. How kind Nonno Anni and Nanna Francesca were that they didn’t mind a kid decimating their crop at times!
Although over the years, this pea patch was replaced by snake beans, chicory then a stack of bricks, I recall again now how years later, when I was an adult, Nonno Anni planted peas there again. ‘Remember how you were always in the pea patch when you were little?’ he said to me, eyes crinkling in a smile with a bit of a tear. ‘I planted these for you.’ It still makes my heart swell to think of it.
I’ve been buying peas from the market every week while they’ve been in season the past few months and this is the last basket now for the year. I’m sad to see them go but they wouldn’t seem as special if I could buy them all year round anyway. So I’ll savour these (not sure any will make it into the pot!) and look forward to more peas come next winter. 😊💚
Each day the peas in the vegie patch are getting plumper and I can’t wait until they are ready to be picked, not that any will make it to the pot. Since childhood, I’ve loved fresh peas straight from the garden. And peas seemed to have worked their way into both my books: Nanna Francesca, her mother and grandmother in Calabria, sitting on their balcony overlooking the sea, shelling peas and feeling the breeze as lightning licked the horizon… And the pea patch Nonno Anni grew in his New Farm backyard in my childhood… Even now, though both my grandparents are gone, when I look at my own, much smaller, pea patch, I’m reminded of happy memories being a child among their pea plants that were taller than I was – my own little forest. Winter sun warm on my shoulders as I would make my way along the rows, eating the peas, my grandparents not far away…
Zoë Boccabella 