From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
A small, edible, round green legume, which grows in a pod on a vine, originating in Persia about 10,000 BC, spreading to Asia Minor, Palestine, Greece and then Rome. The earliest peas were very different from those we eat today. They grew wild in bogs and were as large as marbles and probably as tasty. Archaeologists believe they were always eaten toasted and peeled, like chestnuts. In 1865, Austrian botanist Gregor Johann Mendel was studying peas and pollination when he discovered that various dominant recessive characteristics depend on certain basic units, which science would later name "genes." See also black-eyed pea, chickpea, snow pea, sugar snap pea.
