Pease Porridge Hot ...

The other night, I was just thinking and wandering around on the internet (as I am wont to do) and I suddenly remembered an old children's rhyme that I learnt around (it has been that long) 50 years ago. Boys and girls used to chant it, but the versions were slightly different, and the girls had a clapping game that went along with it. The whole version went like this:

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.
Can you spell that with four letters?
I can: T-H-A-T.

The thing is, that the girls never learnt the last bit of the rhyme, because they used it for their clapping game. The boys all used the last two lines because the whole purpose was to find another boy who didn't know the rhyme and trick him, hopefully in front of his friends. I wondered whether or not this rhymes was still around, so I asked customers about it all night last night.

I found that most men or women about forty or above were familiar with the rhyme, and that some of the men knew the last two lines, while none of the women did. When I asked younger customers, in their twenties or thirties, I found that only a few of the men were familiar with the rhyme at all, whereas over half the women were. None of the women I spoke to were familiar with the last two lines.

I have made pease porridge before, and felt nostalgic for it. If you have never had pease porridge (it is virtually unknown in the Southern United States), it is a thick pea soup, usually made with split yellow peas, onion and spices, including cardamom, which gives it flavour. I decided to look up a recipe for it and found one on the internet, and, oddly enough, was redirected to a page for Some Like it Hot, a 1959 Billy Wilder comedy starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. The title was taken from the children's' rhyme. I never knew that.

The story is essentially a farce which deals with two musicians who witness a mob hit and are pursued by the mob (including George Raft, who played gangster roles in the 1930's). They hide from the mob by dressing in drag and joining a women's orchestra, after which all kinds of highjinks ensue aboard a train.

Wilder had the worst time with the young Marilyn Monroe, who was always forgetting her lines, so that pieces of paper with her cues on it were stashed around the set, on pieces of property, behind cabinet doors or anywhere she would be, out of the shot. He swore he would never work with her again. The film garnered six Academy Award nominations, but lost out to Cecil B. De Mile's spectacular, Ben Hur.

All that from a children's rhyme. When I get paid on Thursday, I am going to collect the ingredients and make up a pot of pease porridge. The rhyme about it being in the pot "nine days old" is accurate": the stuff will last forever in the fridge.