Lucky New Year's Menu

My family was not big on celebrating New Years. Usually my parents might have some wine and we might watch an unimpressive ball slowly glide down a stick on the telly. The calendar America uses is such a modern calendar, speaking in terms of man's history, so it never actually occurred to me that there were more traditions associated with this holiday. So, oddly enough, I'm just now discovering the wonders of New Year's Lucky foods.

As with any holiday, there's a bunch of silly explanations for things that have little to do with reality (collard greens 'cause they're green like money, black-eyed peas 'cause they look like coins...what?), and then there's the actual reason, which is generally less impressive.

Lentils

The only one of our lucky foods that actually might have something to do with money. The association with luck comes down to us from the Romans. Their coins did look a bit like lentils. I've used French lentils cooked in coconut milk with oregano.

Black-Eyed Peas

No they're not coins, and their claim to luckiness may only be a slip of the tongue. In Jewish writings there are five foods that one should eat for Rosh Hashanah. This is actually the Jewish new year, but their calendar - more lunar than solar - puts it several months away from the Roman new year. A mistranslation mixed up fenugreek seeds and black-eyed peas. These beans brought over with the African slaves became quite popular in the new world, and the general Southern way to cook them is with collard greens. I've used spinach instead for a member of my family dislikes the collards...she's not Southern.

Sauerkraut

Really just an accident of nature that this is pulled into the New Years tradition. Cabbage is harvested most in the fall. After that the processing and fermentation takes us about to New Years. The sauerkraut is nice and ready now. I've not made mine from scratch, but I'm trying out a new brand. Farmhouse Culture has a couple of nice flavors of raw (got to be raw) kraut. The one pictured is Garlic and Dill with pickle bits. Das war köstlich!

Dead Pigs - especially sausage

While November is the traditional murder season for pigs, due to the cold weather coming on, there may be more to this tradition than meats the eye. 

 

In Italy the sausage is sliced in a coin shape and cooked with the lentils, while in your Germanic countries the pig itself is considered a symbol of moving forward in life - onwards and upwards. Compared to your barnyard fowl, who scratch backwards, and the cows, who meander, the piggies smush their faces into the ground in a forward motion. 

This is how I roll

As the "responsible" part of my "Responsible Debauchery", I don't kill things for my own pleasure, so my sausage is soy-based. Trying out a new brand of vegan sausage from Earth Fare, which was the perfect complement to all the rest. 

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So that's my New Year's dinner. What was yours like? For more details about the history of lucky foods I highly recommend the Serious Eats article by Sara Bir. It was the inspiration for this post.