peas and rice
- noun
- peas and rice with chicken
- black-eyed peas and rice
- eyed peas and rice
Examples
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Boys, I got some field peas and rice cooking.
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For dinner, we eat hamburgers, peas, and rice, which I know how to make, and for dessert, a refrigerator pudding which I also know how to make.
Fiction book (1997) -
For lunch, I had a simple dish of peas and rice that reminded me of home.
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Many families enjoy peas and rice as a quick and nutritious weeknight meal.
-
At the potluck, she brought a large bowl of peas and rice for everyone to share.
Antonyms
How Simple
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase literally lists two food items ('peas' + 'and' + 'rice') and therefore denotes a dish made of those ingredients; its meaning as a simple meal is directly compositional and predictable. This construction is cross-linguistically common and involves no idiomatic shift, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words will understand it.
Etymology
Peas and rice comes from a simple, everyday dish where peas are cooked with rice in one pot. Because both foods were cheap and common in many homes, the name now suggests 'a plain, basic meal'.