In the absence of pig’s tail, you could use whatever pork you’ve got on hand. Or you can swap out that protein entirely for beef. Once, in a bind and miles away from the nearest Caribbean grocer, I cooked the dish with the Chinese sausage in the back of a boyfriend’s fridge and genuinely couldn’t have been more pleased with the result. And in the cookbook “Original Flava,” the chefs Craig and Shaun McAnuff remove meat entirely, noting that “there’s so much flavor already that meat doesn’t have to be the star attraction.” Each memory of enjoying the dish created a recipe in itself, entirely honest to the moment in which I partook of it.
As it did for any number of recipes, our most recent pandemic rewired my sense of the dish. Stew peas had been window dressing for me — familiar, omnipresent, delicious. But as the months passed, this dish’s necessary gentleness became less of a habit or a memory than a remedy — one of the primary compulsions for me to actually cook something. And I’d experienced that with several dishes, like the velvety richness of nikujaga and thit kho; or the elation of chewing ropa vieja after a full day of anticipation. But stew peas had already woven their way into the background of my life: cooked on a lazy Sunday alongside a partner, or munched as leftovers, or shared among friends far too late in the evening, balancing a bowl on my knee beneath a table of beer. The dish laid a foundation for me to really feel every meal that followed it. And, for me at least, this motion — of slowness, of a meal that’s taking form as the day unfolds — became just as much a feeling as a flavor. Another way of feeling the time pass. The sort of ingredient whose absence, when taken for granted, immediately becomes distinct: So it’s no surprise that when I’m away from my place, stew peas is what I’m looking to conjure. And when friends visit, it’s one of the things I most want to share with them.
As Suzanne Barr notes in “My Ackee Tree,” “building flavor is the key to developing any delicious dish.” Stew peas is a chance to allow life to carry you alongside it, less an orchestra than a gauzy jam band playing well after last call. After you’ve combined the peas and the meat, you could start your laundry. For more than two hours, the pot simmers until the peas have softened, bubbling their own low chatter while you fiddle with podcasts or text friends from the sofa. Eventually, you roll the spinners in your hands, adding them to the dish, setting your rice on another pan. And then the dish is done.
Cooking is labor. It’s work. What if one route was looking for gentleness and slowness on this front, toward ourselves and others? Cooking this dish fortified that patience for me, allowing it to settle into my daily revolutions along with all of its ingredients.
Then again, taste can be clumsy. Feeling is easier. A few months back, ambling around Provincetown after a too-late evening, I wandered out one morning on a mission for friends, searching for brunch ingredients with a tote bag full of pot and jam. At a park bench beside a market, a woman who worked there leaned over a bowl of stew peas. I’d seen her in town earlier that week. And this dish couldn’t have been on the menu. But she relished it, and she glanced my way, allowing me to relish it, too — and we shared the moment for another few seconds before we both moved on.
