Ready for a Lucky Year
Maybe Not So Lucky for You
Years ago I learned that certain New Year’s Day meal traditions originated with a belief in eating the right food for good luck. Being unwilling to pass up a chance for good luck, I plan my New Year’s Day meals very carefully. During the first few years of lucky menu planning I made dishes that included black eyed peas and collards. The black eyed peas represent coins, and the collards are for dollars. These are the traditional lucky foods of the south. Joe and I like collards, anyway, and the black eyed pea recipes I found were good.
But then, one year, I realized it was kind of silly for me to cook lucky food that didn’t belong to my own culinary heritage. I guess since my mother never worried about lucky food, I didn’t really connect some of our favorite dishes to this New Year’s day tradition. But lentils are the equivalent of black eyed peas, and escarole is a favorite Italian leafy green, so it can stand in quite well for the collards.
Some years I have served expensive cuts of beef with these two vegetable dishes, since you don’t want to skimp on New Year’s day – sets a bad precedent for the year, you know? But this year I added pork and ham to the menu instead. I’ve heard that pigs are considered lucky, so that worked just fine for my meal. The baked ham is obvious in this photo, but there were also prosciutto ends, thanks to my sister-in-law, adding a ton of depth and flavor to the lentils and pasta. You can see one of the ends peeking out of the lentils in this photo.
Naturally we had prosecco with the meal – you need some kind of bubbly for the spirit of fun on New Year’s Day in any culinary tradition.
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Does the amount of lucky food you eat effect your good luck? Obviously I would think the more you eat the luckier you’d be.
Never heard anything about that. My guess is that anything is good and lucky up to a reasonable point! Overdoing it, maybe not so much.