Sea Island Red Pea Salad

📝 Notes: Also known as: Cracker Field Pea Salad · Miz Kathi's Sea Island Salad The concept: Classic: field pea salad. Vector: Terroir swap (Sea Island red peas, a true Lowcountry heirloom variety, replace generic field peas or black-eyed peas). Sauce translation: the dressing is a benne vinaigrette rather than a standard oil-vinegar, tying two heirloom Southern ingredients together in one dish. Hero ingredient: Sea Island red peas — a genuinely rare heirloom legume most guests will never have had, cooked simply so their nutty flavor carries. Components: Cooked Sea Island red peas — soak dry peas overnight, simmer 45–60 min until tender but not blown out, cool. Plating: Serve chilled or room temp in a small bowl, extra benne seed scattered on top. Pro upgrade: cook the peas in ham stock instead of plain salted water for a rounder base flavor. Prep efficiency: this salad holds and improves over 24 hours refrigerated — a genuine make-ahead item for catering. Cross-utilization: toasted benne seed batch shared with Benne Seed Green Beans and Cracker Potato Salad. Failure modes: overcooking the peas turns the salad to mush with no textural interest — pull them at just-tender, they'll continue to soften slightly as they cool. Scaling: At 4x: soak and simmer times hold regardless of batch size — this is a volume, not a time, scale. At 10x: simmer in two pots; peas at the bottom of an oversized pot cook unevenly against the ones on top.