Thomas Jefferson here.

Do you know what my favorite variety of vegetable is?

It's the one that ripens first in my garden each spring.

David> In every heirloom seed lies a story of survival, of resilience, a flavor forgotten by the modern world.

Join Charleston chef Kevin Mitchell and me, food historian David Shields on our mission to preserve the long lost flavors of the South.

We are "The Savers of Flavor."

♪ David> Here it is, the garden book of Thomas Jefferson.

I remember reading this years ago.

Thomas Jefferson and his neighbors every spring would hold a contest to see who could supply the first plate of fresh garden peas.

Despite the fact that Thomas Jefferson grew 15 varieties of peas, his neighbor George Divers usually won.

Mr.

Divers planted an earlier variety of pea.

Thomas Jefferson> It is the beginning of spring and the peas have come to table.

They arrived first from my neighbor, Mr.

Divers.

Per usual.

He confided that he planted the early frame pea in February underneath a cold frame.

He won again, and we celebrated with a delicious plate.

Mr.

Cocke and I will try again next year.

Savor the flavor of Madeira.

Mr.

Divers, you have triumphed again.

♪ David> Well, Kevin, we're off on another adventure.

I got a call from a magazine editor who's doing a special issue on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The editor wanted to know whether there were any foods that the signers would have eaten.

Back in 1776 that are still available and taste the same in 2026.

Kevin> Okay.

And I said, we can do better than that.

Thomas Jefferson was the chief author of the Declaration of Independence, kept a garden book, and we know from its pages his favorite vegetable were early spring garden peas.

Kevin> You know, what's really interesting to me is that through time, we've lost a sense of flavor for fresh vegetables.

We're so used to this convenience of popping peas out of a can into a pot and cooking them until their putrid gray green.

I think back, the cafeteria lady would just plop these canned peas and carrots on my tray.

With instant mashed potatoes.

Wouldn't it be great?

We can just go back to when we can eat peas fresh in May, in butter, in tarragon, in salt, pepper, and they're beautiful, bright green.

And they have some texture to them.

They're not mushy and disgusting, just putrid.

You know.

♪ David> There is a pea that has surfaced in the Dutch Fork of South Carolina, and I think that it was the pea that Jefferson loved.

Jefferson wanted the first pea that ripened and that first.

He was called the early frame pea.

Kevin> Okay.

David> Some people call it the old timey English pea.

Some people call it the May pea.

Some people call it the Dutch Fork autumn planted pea.

If you take a look at its characteristics, I'm convinced they're one and the same.

Kevin> This address you've giving me a little mountain, this is the house of Rodger Winn.

So I'm assuming he has this pea?

David> Yes.

He's a famous seed saver.

And he has got a little white pea, and he calls it the Dutch Fork.

Autumn planted pea.

♪ Rodger, I see that you've, prepared a welcome for us in the form of a forest of, tree jars here and chock full of seed.

And I'm sure that this is only a fragment of your trove of treasure.

Rodger> A very small fragment.

I actually had four freezers that were full of stock seed that I've collected over my lifetime.

These are some of my my favorites.

Some South Carolina heirlooms, plus some others that have sentimental value to them.

David> Talking about, your lifetime of collecting.

One of the things that I'm sort of curious about is how and when you began collecting seeds.

Rodger> Probably before I was even in elementary school.

Like collecting maple seedlings in the spring.

Planted them and then sold the little trees for a dollar apiece.

So there's maple trees out there that are 55 years old, 60 years old.

[laughs] David> The saving of seeds is very much a family enterprise.

Passing down from grandparents, and when you marry into a family, those family seeds get connected to your seeds.

Is that how it is around here?

Rodger> I guess it is.

That was one of the fascinations I had with my wife when I first met her, and then went to meet her family.

They saved seeds.

They had a big vegetable garden.

I knew right then and there.

She was the person I wanted to marry.

[laughs] David> That's great.

Kevin> This here, I'm very curious about.

Which one is this?

Rodger> This is an okra.

I spent 20 years in the Navy, in submarines, and when I would go out to sea, I brought seeds with me.

Typically beans, because of the multiple patterns.

And, it just gave me something to look at.

I also brought seed catalogs.

I had a good friend, early 90s, when we were home.

He was from Mamou, Louisiana, and he went back home and was telling his grandmother about this guy that grows all these unique vegetables.

He came back from Christmas vacation with a sandwich bag with this okra seed in it.

Said it was from his grandmother.

And she said that if, I since I was into the old timey seeds, I needed a good old timey gumbo okra.

Good flavors.

Definitely not like you would find an okra in the farmer's market or the grocery store or whatever.

It's hard to, some flavors, it's hard to describe, but, definitely a nice okra.

And especially like the, sentimental attachment to it.

David> While Hurricane Helene inflicted some damage on his farm, it's always a pleasure catching up with Rodger and touring the farm, but we came to see if he has seeds that are a direct descendant of the Jefferson frame pea.

♪ I think that this jar here is, perhaps the reason why we've come here.

Rodger> The star of the show.

<Yes> A lot of people call it the Thanksgiving Day pea, because it was always planted at Thanksgiving.

My great aunt over in Saluda County always planted this and had it in her garden.

When I met my wife, her family grew this pea, planted it on Thanksgiving Day.

David> And this would overwinter, right?

Rodger> Right.

It would come up, usually get 2 or 3 inches tall.

I had asked people, you know, why plant it in the fall when most people associate planting sugar peas or English peas in early spring, February.

Actually late winter.

And nobody had a good answer.

They were like, I don't know.

We always plant it on Thanksgiving.

David> And how many peas do you get in a pod?

Rodger> There's a good many.

It could be 6 or 8 or down to four, but it's a lot.

And it takes a lot of peas to make a meal.

You'll you'll sit there for a while shelling them out.

Kevin> Well, let me ask.

Did you eat them fresh?

Were they in a can or milk or cream?

...little salt or pepper?

Rodger> Salt and pepper.

You know butter.

Most people around here just cooked it with with noodles, salt, pepper and butter.

Nothing.

Nothing fancy.

And it was something to look forward to for about 4 to 6 weeks in the spring.

Rodger, thanks for having us here at your farm in the Dutch Fork in Little Mountain.

Rodger> I appreciate ya'll coming out.

David> We now follow the path of the pea to just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, where perhaps the most famous of all gardeners, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, cultivated his beloved seeds at Monticello.

You know, Monticello means, little mountain in Italian.

So we're going from Little Mountain, South Carolina, to Little Mountain, Virginia.

Kevin> Fantastic.

♪ David> Kevin, here she is.

My friend, Peggy Cornett.

Peggy> Hi, Kevin.

So nice to see you.

How are you?

David> This is Kevin Mitchell, chef scholar.

Peggy> I see you that, Yes.

Kevin> Thank you for having us.

Peggy> Yeah, well, thank you for being here.

David> So, Peggy, what is the mission here?

Peggy> Well, Monticello, it's a historic site, and we're preserving and educating the public about Thomas Jefferson and his gardens at Monticello, collecting seed and growing crops that Jefferson grew that he documented in his garden book, his letters and memoranda.

David> We're talking a period around 1760 to Jefferson's death in 1826.

Peggy> That's right.

Yeah.

And he kept remarkable records.

We think he grew over 330 different varieties of vegetables and herbs just in this garden, not all at one time, but throughout his lifetime we, were counting.

Yeah.

The garden itself was really a laboratory.

He was growing vegetables from all parts of the world, tomatoes and potatoes from South America, and cold crops from Europe and and of course, peas were very important to Jefferson.

That was one of the first crops he would plant in the garden every spring.

I mean, it was sort of a rite of spring to go out and plant peas in the garden.

Kevin> About how many varieties of peas did he grew?

Peggy> Well, we believe he grew about 15 varieties at last count.

So we should go and look at some.

Kevin> Yeah, let's do that.

<Okay> Peggy> So this is a Prince Albert.

David> So this is the famous pea that supplanted the early frame in the grand scheme of things.

Why do you think that it prevailed in the 1840s?

Peggy> Well, I think it was the more vigorous pea that would, you know, repeat bloom so you could continually harvest from it after the first picking.

I think the taste was probably similar.

David> The problem with the early frame is that once it's ripened and you pick the pods, Peggy> The whole thing just goes.

David> It wilts.

It dies.

It turns yellow.

Peggy> So the Prussian blue pea, notice the bluish cast to the foliage, which gives it that name.

And also the pea itself is definitely a historic variety, so it's not one you're going to find very often.

But it's very important for us to preserve this in our collections.

Some of these things we let go to seed so much that I don't really get to taste them.

Kevin> Yeah, this is really good.

Peggy> We'll just eat them all.

<Yeah> I don't think we're going to save any.

Kevin> While Jefferson may be known for his meticulous record keeping in the garden, he was also very influential in the culinary world.

James Hemings, whose story I'm very fascinated with, he was a slave.

And, you know, Thomas Jefferson sent them to France to really try to understand and learn the beauty of French cuisine, because, you know, we know that Jefferson was this huge Francophile.

He loved everything French, food, wine, so on and so forth.

So having an enslaved person go to France to learn that cuisine is really fascinating to me.

His influences have lasted hundreds and hundreds of years and influences chefs today from what he did then to where we are now.

♪ Peggy> So I want to introduce you to my colleague Michael Tricomi.

He's a curator of historic gardens at Monticello, <Hello> and he's been working on this special project to grow the, David> We've been in email contact over the years.

So, it's, great to see you, face to face.

Michael> Nice to meet you in person.

Yes.

So here we have the early frame tea, and we're experimenting with growing it here and trying to get as much seed from it as possible so we can propagate it in Jefferson's garden.

David> I've encountered descriptions of people planting in England, this in November, having it overwinter, and the plant reactivate.

Have you heard about this sort of method of propagation of peas around here?

We haven't done that here on the mountaintop.

Michael> We've definitely been successful in overwintering quite a bit of lettuces and greens and brassicas, cabbages and things like that.

We haven't done it with peas.

If we had a cold frame with a lid, we probably could do that.

<Sure> In the garden, which is what they do a lot of times in Colonial Williamsburg there been doing that sort of thing.

David> I guess that's where the name of the pea comes from.

<Early frame> The early frame pea that had a cold frame.

I noticed that there is a double blossom here, and there was a distinction made among some early frame peas in terms of single blossom versus double blossom.

So there were two varieties grown.

I wonder if this is a double blossom.

Peggy> Sure looks like it.

<Yeah> David> Well, you know why the people would love that you double the pods, too.

Peggy> When you were growing this specifically here so you could surround it with chicken wire.

Michael> Yes.

We wanted to make extra sure that we, are protecting these because it's such an important variety and we have such little seed, like you said.

So making sure that these, are able to fruit and we can harvest is very important.

Kevin> There's another one behind you, too.

Peggy> Yeah.

They're all double.

David> That nails it down.

It's got to be the early frame double blossom pea.

Kevin and I are headed over to Tufton Farm, the site of the Thomas Jefferson Center of Historic Plants, where Peggy archives plants and seeds at Monticello.

Peggy> Well, I want to introduce everybody to Roger Gettig, director of horticulture at Monticello.

And he's here with me at the center for Historic Plants.

Where we propagate and grow a lot of the plants.

Roger> Nice to meet you.

Welcome.

David> I see we have.

Peggy> Well, I wanted to show you the peas we were enjoying in the garden.

The blue Prussian pea.

<Yes> Kevin> This is my new favorite pea.

Peggy> That's right.

We're going to be growing this pea.

So basically, we just kind of open it up and, there's about what we decided about 20 seeds in a packet or more.

Roger> There's different size scoops for different seeds.

Peggy> The largest scoop the number 17 and we'll show you the others.

Actually you don't have to lick it.

<I don't?> It's self Sealing.

Yeah.

You just bend it over and press.

Kevin> This work you're doing with seeds.

Why is that important?

Peggy> There's a great movement to preserve, native plants.

But in some ways, these cultivated plants are just as much, if not more endangered because you have to keep them growing in order to preserve them.

Roger> You tasted this and you love it, but it was replaced over time with other peas, by Prince Albert and things like that.

So, whenever we grow peas and we don't want them to mix, we grow them in different years or different ends of the gardens or different gardens, so we can make sure that the bee is not mixing them because we want to keep the strains pure.

Peggy> The main thing about saving seed, just keep it dry.

You don't have to put it in the freezer.

Roger> Don't put it in the freezer.

Peggy> In fact don't do that.

And, you don't have to refrigerate it.

I mean, we keep them cool for, you know, the ones that we preserve here.

It's the humidity that won't lose the viability of seeds.

Roger> Right?

So if you want to save something, it's the opposite of growing it.

So, cool, dark and dry.

<Yep> It'll stay fine.

Warm, moist and sunny.

It'll start to germinate.

So you want, you can be in a cellar in a sealed jar.

You don't want it in your refrigerator in case there's a leak, the ethylene from your ripening fruit in the refrigerator might impact the seeds.

David> Could we actually see your seeds storage?

Peggy> I think we could take you out there.

So we're in, what we call the cool bot.

And so here we have the Monticello seeds.

These are seeds collected from the gardens.

These packets were painted from live plants that were grown in the gardens at Monticello.

So it's a local artist named Tim O'Kane who made these beautiful paintings for us.

This is another flower that's named after Meriwether Lewis.

It's Lewis' Prairie Flax.

And again, this is painted from plants in the garden at Monticello.

[sound of truck engine] David> Now that we found and actually picked some of the rarest peas in the world, it's time for chef to get to work.

Kevin, you have a wonderful array of ingredients here.

Tell us what you are going to prepare for us.

Kevin> I got a couple surprises for you, so we're going to do two dishes featuring peas, Of course.

One will be more historical and one is going to be a little bit more contemporary.

So the first thing we're going to do is a cup of this Moruga Hill rice.

We have one cup of rice.

David> Jefferson brought Hill rice over from West Africa in 1787.

Kevin> Two cups of water, we throw in some bacon, a little bit of butter and then I like to do a little bit of pepper.

David> That idea of boiled bacon is a very 18th century cooking idea.

You know, that's old school cooking.

Kevin> I like it nice and crispy, fried.

So, we'll cover this up a little bit, and we'll let that go.

Now on to the second more contemporary dish.

We've got bacon.

[sizzling sound] You hear that?

That's what you want to hear.

All right.

Nice sizzle.

I want to add just a little bit of butter.

That's going to add a little bit more additional fat to this.

But this is going to be kind of fried but still a little bit of boiled, too when we add the the add the water to it.

Now for this I like to add some shallots to it.

As soon as you get that aroma it's good to go.

And so now I'm going to add my rice.

Beautiful Carolina Gold rice.

This will go in.

And then what we're going to do here is we're going to do a process called toasting the rice, where basically what we're doing is we're covering each grain of rice in fat.

Because the key to this rice is once it's cooked that the rice is separate.

It's not like sticky rice or sushi rice.

And when you can kind of start to smell the rice browning, that's when you can add in your water.

Just enough to cover.

This will come to a boil and then we'll cover it and we'll cook this for about 12 minutes.

But halfway through I'm going to throw in the peas.

Now these peas, just regular English peas blanched in boiling salted water.

Bring the water to a boil.

Drop your peas in.

It comes to another boil instantly out of that hot water into some ice water.

I'll just throw these peas in there.

And then I'll check on the others.

So we do about three tablespoons of benne in here.

Toast the benne here.

What I can do now is add the early frame peas here.

<All right> And we have some.

<Beautiful> So about a half a cup.

But, these are really good.

We definitely do more than that.

Just leave them in here long enough so they kind of warm through and they soak up some of that moisture here.

Time to check on the benne seeds.

David> That's lovely looking.

Kevin> So now we're just going to pour them in this mortar and pestle.<Wow> Then I will add the chili or what we're using here are jalapenos.

Just small dice.

Got a little bit of the seeds in there because you want, you do want a little bit of spice.

And that's where the spice is.

<Yep> A little bit of salt.

Little chopped cilantro.

And then just.

David> Grind it up.

Peggy> Wow.

Look at that.

That looks so good.

Kevin> All right.

Clean as you go.

So we're going to, I'm going to dish this up for you guys.

♪ That's enough.

Yes.

Peggy> Oh yeah.

Kevin> All right, all right <That is amazing> like I said we're going to, <the difference> going to leave that bacon on there.

♪ Peggy> Thank you very much.

David> Put a lot of that on for mine.

Kevin> Yes, sir.

David> That'll be okay.

Kevin> Here you go.

Bon appetit.

Bon appetit.

Enjoy.

Yes.

David> There's a smoky quality to this red rice dish.

<Yeah> And the benne provides this little crunchy topping.

It's wonderful.

And the undercurrent of bacon is, it gives it a little slipperiness.

And the peas, well they're wonderful.

Peggy> They're cooked just perfectly I think.

David> Well chef, I think it's time to award you the Madeira bottle here.

♪ ♪ With the rise of globalization and the dominance of the supermarket, we've lost sight of why heirlooms like the early frame pea matter, their ability to thrive in cold weather and their exceptional flavor truly go hand in hand like two peas in a pod.

♪ Gardeners are known for having a poetic streak and, I found a wonderful pea poem by a gardener named Peter Burn, written in 1885.

It's called "Sow Afresh."

Two Cottagers in gardening, skilled in early spring.

There are acres tilled, and raising fruit was known full well.

Each sought the other to excel.

Yet there existed twixt the two a friendship, honest, firm and true.

Green peas, a favorite dish was then, and so it was now among most men.

And he who first this dainty raised was loudly by his neighbors, praised.

The time by these men was set on which they should their seed peas get and got they were, and it was said the same day, saw them duly led.

Not many weeks had they been sown one low an inch or more had grown, each viewed with pride his little plot.

Each boasted of a noble lot.

But came a frost and morning found both growths of peas struck to the ground.

Friends, if these fellows had had a cold tolerant pea like the early frame pea that contest would have continued to the end.

But as the poem's title says, so again.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪