Waiting for the Golden Peas Grown Above the Clouds | Yi Guo Shi Tai’s Communal Table
I. The Elusive Golden Peas
I have loved peas since childhood. Every year when they come into season, I must eat them over several meals in a row to satisfy my craving. So when I heard that my good friend Jinzi had grown peas at her farm high in the mountains of Xiaojin, Aba, using biodynamic farming, I could hardly wait to order some — and I christened them “Golden Peas”: heirloom yellow garden peas that Jinzi grows on the hillsides of Xiaojin County, Aba Prefecture. Alas, in previous years I never quite managed to get any.
The Golden Peas come into season around late July or early August, with only a two-week window for shipping — right in the middle of summer holidays. At that time, I am either joining my son Lemo’s holiday activities as a parent, or running community teaching sessions for students on break, or hearing about it too late, or failing to order enough to meet Jinzi’s minimum delivery threshold. One thing or another, this “midsummer sweetness” has been missed year after year.
This summer, my routine settled into a steadier rhythm, and my dining buddies A Xia and Yueliang were calling out in our group chat, saying, “We can’t stand takeaway any longer!” So I simply reopened the Communal Table ahead of schedule.
Ten-year-old Lemo was thrilled at the reopening. He was spending his summer in Chengdu, where we take turns cooking (he has come to stay for two consecutive winter and summer holidays, helping me in the kitchen, and can now prepare simple dishes independently). With the Communal Table back in session, he could slack off a little — simply take on the role of summer taster for Yi Guo Shi Tai’s Communal Table, without having to work the stove as usual, at most clearing the table and washing up after meals.
With so many mouths to feed, I felt emboldened to place an order with Jinzi for a portion of peas (3 jin, about 1.5 kg). After submitting the order with glee, I spotted the shop’s special note: “If the harvest does not yield enough, we will not ship — and will issue a refund.” So Jinzi can no longer guarantee supply?! A wail rose in my heart, and I found myself praying, “Please let there be enough peas in the field to fulfil the order,” while also steeling myself: “If I still can’t get them this year, then I’ll just have to wait until next.”
A few days later, on a Friday, just as I was about to leave the house, a beautifully packaged parcel suddenly arrived. After unboxing, I felt plump, thick-skinned pods at my fingertips, and I seemed to catch the scent of wind and sunlight from above 3,000 metres. My salivary glands kicked into automatic. I could barely contain myself — I wanted to shell them all and get them straight onto the stove. But I had a swimming lesson booked and could not rearrange it, so I dashed out the door and hurriedly poured the pods into the fridge.
The next day, while Lemo was doing his homework, I sat down to slowly shell the three jin of peas, listening to music as I watched each round, plump bean plop into the lunchbox, gradually crowding it. My heart swelled with joy, and I quietly plotted the pea menu — pea rice, stir-fried mince with peas, and if I made steamed pork, it should have peas underneath…
After shelling, while they were still fresh, I scattered a handful beneath the chicken cutlet Lemo loves and steamed them together. I saved a small handful in a little bowl for pea rice at the next meal, and stored the rest in lunchboxes in the freezer, to share with everyone at the Communal Table on Monday.
I owe these dining buddies a debt of gratitude for letting me enjoy this year’s Golden Peas. Jinzi sells her peas at 65 yuan for 3 jin, and buying them just for myself feels rather too extravagant. Without my dining buddies calling out, I would never have had the patience to shell them all — so many pods, close to an hour’s work — and I would have gone without the “Golden Peas.”
So I am certainly devoted to my dining buddies, beyond doubt. For it is only love that can make one’s strength infinite — or, rather, that makes one so endlessly patient.
Fifteen minutes later, the chicken cutlet was steamed. As I had expected, the peas stole the show over the meat.
The braising juices from the cutlet drew out the fresh fragrance and gentle sweetness of the heirloom yellow peas to an even richer depth. These pods had been picked a little late, their maturity high, each bean plump and firm, and when chewed slowly they crumbled into a soft, sandy smoothness that carried me back to childhood. Lemo could not stop eating. The way he kept poking one pea after another with his chopsticks was exactly like those people obsessed with cracking melon seeds caught red-handed.
I told Lemo that these peas were grown by Jinzi up in the mountains of Aba Prefecture. For a moment he struggled to remember who Jinzi was, since it had been several years since she last visited his family to do a hügelkultur experiment, and they had not seen each other since. But Lemo knew why Jinzi’s peas tasted so good — not only because they came from ecological farming, but because “up there, the sunshine is abundant and the temperature swing between morning and evening is great.”
II. Heirloom Garden Peas Grown Above the Clouds
Like many fellow ecological farmers, Jinzi began by improving the soil, spreading wheat straw and lucerne across the fields. While the soil was settling, she renovated the cottage she rented to suit her own needs — building a rocket stove bed for heating and upgrading the traditional pit latrine into a urine-diversion “fertiliser bank”.
During the busy farming season she worked the fields with urgency; in the slack season she knitted jumpers and wandered the village. She described herself as “a farmer with a fallow period”. Through her landlady and the villagers she made friends, took the time to learn about local customs and ways, and earned the trust and all kinds of help from the community. Slowly, in that village above the clouds, Jinzi came to live the life she had always dreamed of: two cats for company, a flock of chickens, rows of vegetables, fruits and herbs, rising with the sun and resting at dusk.
Once the farm had taken shape, Jinzi set herself a modest goal: to reach break-even within five years. To achieve it, she had to do more than grow — she had to run a business. For her produce to become a product, she had to think through the harvest schedule, the picking, packing and transport, and adjust next year’s planting plan based on customer feedback.
She chose to focus on peas and tomatoes as her main offerings for sale — partly because she loves eating them, but also because they travel well by courier, making them easy to share with the consumers who support her, such as ourselves.
Seeds know how to find a place to take root and sprout, while humans know how to find the right seeds to scale up planting. Jinzi — “Gold” — in Xiaojin, “Little Gold” County, meeting her “Golden” Peas, and taking this heirloom garden pea that has flourished in Aba Prefecture since the People’s Commune era and sharing it with urban consumers: it all feels as though fate had written it that way.
The last time she came down from the mountain, we sat at a roadside café chatting, and she remarked how most people in the city are unwell in body and spirit, and how urgently they need more contact with nature — more learning from the land, from plants, from animals. She told me she was redesigning the farm and might one day open spare rooms to women who might need a retreat. I signed up on the spot, volunteering to go first as her test guest.
I also encouraged her to write, sharing mountain scenery and farming days online. I had already thought of a name for the column: “Letters from the Mountain.”
III. Waiting for “the Right Food” on Nature’s Timetable
A true hero is one who recognises good food!
He craved peas not only because they were genuinely delicious, but because he knew that everything his ecological-farmer friends grow is “the right food” — the kind of food that, once missed, means waiting another year. When an opportunity arises, you must seize and savour it. As he had read again and again this summer in The China Study: “The human body naturally extracts the nutrients it needs from the right plant-based foods, without our having to agonise over what to eat. It is a carefree way of eating: give the body the right food, and the body will do the right thing.”
This quiet equanimity of his, this easy acceptance at such a tender age, makes him a delight to be around, and it leads me to wonder: how much of a person’s temperament is inborn, and how much is shaped over time?
All these years, this circle of farming friends around us — ourselves included — have been working the soil and living to nature’s seasons and rhythms on our own plots. The produce that must ripen on schedule, coming without fail season after season, provides Lemo with the nourishment his body needs while cultivating his rich, sensitive palate and his grasp of the world around him, shaping him into someone at home with waiting, at peace with it: if all things have their season, why should I be in a rush?
Thank you, nature, this great school that restores not only adults’ vitality and innocence but also grants young people optimism, open-mindedness, and patience.
IV. Bonus: A Summer and Winter Guide to Pea Rice
Jinzi’s peas arrive at the height of midsummer, and this is the first time I have had pea rice made from tender peas in summer.
The summer version is simple. After rinsing the rice, toss in a handful of shelled young peas and a pinch of millet, and cook them together into “Bean Rice” — a refreshing bite on a sweltering day, and a nourishing boon when your appetite flags. This “Bean Rice” is wonderfully easy and perfect for summer. Once the rice is done, simply blanch a handful of sweet potato leaves or water spinach, drizzle with blanching sauce, and it is ready to serve.
For the winter version, take a cue from the cured pork, pea, and glutinous rice dish that every farmhouse and little eatery on the Western Sichuan Plain makes each winter. Rinse an appropriate amount of glutinous rice, dice cured pork with its layers of fat and lean, then take a bowlful of pea seeds (the word “seed” here refers to mature peas dried and set aside for planting), rinse them as well, and toss everything into the rice cooker — press the cook button.
Those who have never tasted it can picture it as zongzi — sticky rice parcels wrapped in bamboo leaves — only unwrapped. I imagine making this at the Communal Table in winter would be even less of a hassle: no need to blanch any greens at all. Just tuck into a few strands of spicy pickled cabbage on the side — it whets the appetite, cuts through the richness, and aids digestion.
In Jonathan Silverton’s The Story of Seeds, he writes: “The technology of cooking seeds is a great movement, slyly diverting to our own use the gifts that plants leave for their offspring.”
The truth is, long before reading The Story of Seeds, I was like so many people — I grew up on a bowl of pea rice, loved every variety of bean rice for reasons I could never quite name, and felt especially soothed by ones enriched with mixed grains and pumpkin, yet never once asked “why”. The secret, it turns out, lies in a discovery made by our ancestors: cereals and legumes complement each other, each supplying the amino acids the other lacks, balancing the diet so that even those who rarely eat meat or cannot afford it can achieve nutritional completeness.
Thank you, sly ancestors of ours, for placing seeds upon the plate and setting humanity and seed on a shared evolutionary journey.
Images: unless otherwise noted, all photographs are supplied by the author
Editing: Xu Youyou