Unique Short-Season Heirloom Cowpea

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Fast-growing ‘Fagiolino Dolico Di Veneto’ heirloom dwarf cowpeas from northern Italy, in the pod and dried ROB CARDILLO

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Delicious, easy to grow and prolific, this northern Italian heirloom brings a lot more to the table than your typical Southern black-eyed pea. The flavor is somewhat earthy like mushrooms, but with a buttery texture. In the Veneto (the region in northeastern Italy that contains Venice), it is often cooked with mushrooms, or served as a side dish with eel, a local favorite. ‘Fagiolino Dolico di Veneto’ (loosely translated as “dwarf cowpea from the Veneto”) comes to us with a rich history, though no one knows exactly how long it has been cultivated.

This dwarf cowpea came to Italy with the arborio rice that is often served with it. The rice has been grown in the Po River Valley in northern Italy since the 15th century, and evidently came from the East, most likely Cyprus, where the Venetians had a long-established trading presence. Cowpeas claim sub-Saharan Africa as their genetic origin, but they were cultivated for thousands of years by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. These were the “beans” that the Greeks ate on New Year’s Day to invite good luck.

Rice with young spring peas was a holdover of the ceremonial porridges served at the beginning of high feasts in the Middle Ages, except that this much-imitated Venetian culinary classic (now called risi e bisi) should be made with a special baby pea from Lumignano — which is unavailable in this country. The recipe below is a version made with arborio rice and baby cowpeas, the fagiolini dolichi of the Veneto. Note that Venetians, in their own dialect of Italian, do not refer to them as fagiolini (plural) but rather fasolin’dolichi often dropping the final “i” and running the two words together. You will certainly find it written that way on country menus, and if you shop for these cowpeas in a Venetian farm market, you would need to know this.

‘Fagiolino Dolico di Veneto’ probably shares some botanical kinship to the ‘Fagiolino Dolico Nano dall’Occhio’ of Tuscany. These dwarf varieties of cowpea, with miniaturized pods and peas, were well-established by the 1600s, and were bred and re-bred for cultivation in small gardens.

In the United States, we have similar varieties called “rice” cowpeas, generally white or red in color. However, in this country Southern cowpeas are generally treated as a field crop because of their rampant vines and sprawling habits. The Venetian cowpea is different. Its neat, bushlike growth makes it an ideal small garden crop, and its production of pods is prolific, which is even better for the cook because all parts of this plant are edible: the young shoots, the green pods (which can be harvested like string beans), the young peas, and the ripe seeds (which can be cooked like any common cowpea). They also grow fast, which is a boon to northern gardeners because many types of cowpeas require a long, hot summer.

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