The word pea exists because English speakers misread pease as plural
English originally had the noun pease, as in pease pudding. Because it ended in an s sound, speakers assumed it must be plural and trimmed it to make a singular: pea. Linguists call this back-formation. The older word came from Latin pisum, itself borrowed from the Greek pison.
Linnaeus named the species Pisum sativum, cultivated pea, in 1753. Some botanists now prefer Lathyrus oleraceus, though whether the change is needed is disputed. The word pea also gets attached to other edible legume seeds, such as the pigeon pea, the cowpea and Sturt's desert pea. Botanically the pod is a fruit, since it grows from the flower's ovary and holds the seeds.
Diets have shifted around the pea. Medieval Europeans relied on dried field peas for pease porridge and pea soup, and eating fresh, immature green peas only caught on with early modern cooking. Today immature peas are sold fresh, frozen or canned, and with snow and snap varieties people eat the soft pod as well. A single pea weighs between 100 and 360 milligrams.
This is a cool-season annual. Seeds can go in once soil reaches 10 degrees Celsius, and plants do best between 13 and 18 degrees, flagging in hot lowland summers but thriving in cool tropical highlands. Many cultivars mature about 60 days after planting. Climbing types send out tendrils that coil around anything nearby and reach 1 to 2 metres; gardeners traditionally push pruned branches, called pea sticks, into the soil for them to climb. Some so-called afila types grow clusters of tendrils where leaves would be, and in dense rows plants hold one another up.
Despite its fame in genetics, the pea was hard to sequence because its genome is large, about 4.45 billion base pairs. An international consortium announced a draft reference genome in September 2019, built from the inbred French cultivar Caméor, covering 88 percent of the genome and predicting 44,791 genes. A pangenome followed in 2022.
Source: Pea
