Which heath pea would that be?
Over at another place, I’ve been looking into the botanical confusion surrounding that essential of Roman cooking, mentuccia, which is not pennyroyal. And lest people are tempted to say, as they have before, “Get a life,” here’s another splendid example of the perils of common names. And these are in the same language.
Luigi noticed this strange website which is both touting the benefits of and seeking supplies of a plant it calls the heath pea. Why? Well, there are records of Scottish highlanders suppressing their appetites during hard times by eating the heath pea’s tubers. The heath pea site helpfully provides loads of pictures and other information to help people identify the correct species. But here’s the thing. There are at least two plants that occasionally go by the name heath pea: Vicia ervillea and Lathyrus linifolius. Both are also sometimes called bitter vetch. And I certainly wouldn’t have known the difference had it not been for a blog post by one ferrebeekeeper, ‘fessing up to having got the two mightily confused.
Vicia ervillia is one of the founder crops, first domesticated in the Middle East all those years ago, and still cultivated there. But Lathyrus linifolia is the one the Scots should be looking for.
Doubly confusing, it seems that the Vicia causes lathyrism and the Lathyrus doesn’t. As it happens, we have an expert on Lathyrus and Vicia among our regular readers, and I don’t doubt that he’ll be along in just a second to sort things out properly.
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
Hi!
I’ve been growing and researching Bitter Vetch (lathyrus linifolius) for some 5 years now so its a subject I can bore on for hours. One small pedantic correction is that the two plants share the common name Bitter Vetch, but not the name Heath Pea.
Vicia Ervilia is a drought resistant forage crop of north Africa and the Southern Med, the seeds of which can be best described as being like a combination of a large grape seed and a chick pea – because they are quite substantial in size, in times of famine people have resorted to eating and feeding the seeds to livestock with the net result that it causes lathyrism.
By comparison the seeds of Lathyrus Linifolius are tiny, spherical and about 2mm in diameter. Each year I hand harvest the seeds from my bitter vetch crop and eating them simply wouldn’t be worth the effort. They also seed in May/June whereas the Vicia Ervillia I grew (in northern England) produced seed in late summer.
Besides the shared common name, one further reason for the two plants regularly being conflated into a muddled “hybrid” is that they both come to the fore in times of food shortage. As it grows Lathyrus Linifolius produces a series of tubers which, when dried, taste like a sweet licquorice – chewing on this suppresses the appetite. In the days before the potato, Scottish Highlanders used to harvest and dry the tubers so that if the crops failed they had something to take away the hunger pangs as they struggled through the winter.
I’ve eaten the tubers and they are every bit as effective as the history books suggest.
Hope this helps