New Year's Day fixins
This was a plateful of the good eats my aunt and mom fixed in the Denton area on New Year's Day. In the South, a lot of people probably had this same menu -- there's a saying that if you eat poor on New Year's, you'll eat fat the rest of the year.
The menu:
Hoppin' John (or black-eyed peas and rice): There are complicated recipes out there for this, but the easiest way to make it is to simply mix your cooked rice in with black-eyed peas that have been cooked with a ham hock. My aunt made the peas in the crockpot. In my family, the peas are eaten for peace and the rice is for riches. It's never proved to be successful -- I'm still a poor journalist married to a poor teacher. I read somewhere once that you have to eat 365 peas to guarantee that you will have good luck each day of the following year -- too bad I really don't like black-eyed peas much at all!
Greens: This is another traditional food that is supposed to bring prosperity in the coming year. The more greens you eat, the more green dollars you'll find in your pocket. They should be cooked with hog jowls, which are supposed to bring joy.
Ham: I actually don't recall a tradition in my family associated with ham, we just always have it. But according to foodtimeline.org, we're doing it right. "For people of several nationalities, ham or pork is the luckiest thing to eat on New Year's Day. How did the pig become associated with the idea of good luck? In Europe hundreds of years ago, wild boars were caught in the forests and killed on the first day of the year."
Cornbread: Apparently this brings luck and wealth, too; I just always thought it wasn't a Southern meal without the cornbread!
Comments (2)
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True story!
When we moved to North Carolina 20 years ago, I decided I was going to cook like a native. So I bought all the necessary items for a Good Luck New Year's Day dinner. The children looked at the Collards and Hoppin' John and turned up their noses. My husband and I would have too, but we were trying to make a point with the kiddies and dove right in.
Fast forward to January 2.
I nudged my husband and said, "You have to get up with the children. I'm sick."
An hour or so later he crawled into bed and said, "Your turn. I'm sick too."
The kids were fine. We grown-ups concluded we were suffering from food poisoning, probably from poorly cooked fatback in the collards. My son went off to kindergarten the next day. When asked about his holiday he said, "My mommy and daddy are sick. They have Cholera."
Some luck!
Posted on January 5, 2006 12:26 PM
That's a great story :-) When we were kids, we always refused to eat the greens and peas, too -- although I don't remember it ever saving us from Cholera ;-)
Posted on January 5, 2006 3:04 PM