I love lady peas, the most pale and delicate of the Southern peas, including the earthy purple hull, the black-eyed pea and and other forms of what are known as “field peas” (Pisum arvense), designed to be used dried, but if you have them fresh, I say just cook ‘em.

I bought a pound of lady peas at the Memphis Farmer’s Market, and they are, I’ll admit, more expensive than the other peas, six dollars a pound. The package I bought had to be rinsed and picked through carefully; the peas were filled with bits of stems and bits of leaves and specks of dirt and a few brown ones. How natural can you get?

I always treat the various peas as potential soup, so I simmered the lady peas with chopped carrots, celery, green onions and mint, trying to make them all as thin and tiny as possible. I was going to throw in some pancetta or guanciale (Italian cured hog-jowl) to give the broth body and flavor, but what I thought we still had in the refrigerator had apparently been used for something else — a pasta or pizza — and you know what? As a purely vegetarian effort, the soup didn’t need the influence of meat and fat. It was delicious the way it was.

LL had flown in from Minneapolis late Sunday and was a little hungry, so I gently heated the pot of lady peas, spooned them into little bowls, topped them with quarters of tiny pale yellow tomatoes — brought from his garden by Benito, the local food and wine blogger (wine-by-benito.blogspot.com) — and poured us each a glass of rose wine. That made a nice extemporaneous supper.