Residents of the United States enjoy a wide variety of New Years Eve food traditions to ensure prosperity in the coming year. The Old World contributed many traditions to the “melting pot,” but one food item reigns: pork.
Eating Black-eyed Pea "Coins" Meant Wealth
In the southern United States, black-eyed peas have long been a New Years Eve staple. The shape and abundance of the legumes was compared to coins; eating the ‘coins’ symbolized gaining wealth. Southerners also considered pigs to be lucky, and usually ate ham with the peas, or hog jowls if the previous year had been unlucky.
Sylvesterabend Lucky Foods
Jim Boyd, a writer with the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard, shed some light on pigs for prosperity when he described the Austrian New Years Eve celebration. Austrians call it Sylvesterabend, after St. Sylvester whose feast day is Dec. 31. At a Sylvesterabend dinner, staples include pink pig cookies.
But actual pork is also essential. Boyd wrote, “Pigs are considered lucky because they always root forward… Rarely will an Austrian eat lobster for Sylvesterabend, because crustaceans move backwards.”
Italian Lucky Foods
In nearby Italy, pork is also important, as are legumes. There, however, it is not the humble black-eyed pea that reigns on New Years Eve plates with the pork sausage; it is lentils. Like the black-eyed peas, lentils symbolize money. Plus, they are green. And the fatty pork sausage signifies, naturally, fattening wallets. Americans of Italian descent often eat these lucky foods.
Americans of German or Polish descent think of another protein for New Years luck; the herring. Pickled in brine or served as rollmops—pickled and then wrapped around onions—it must be eaten at the stroke of midnight. Herring, in North Atlantic waters, are abundant. The fish are silvery, too, thereby easily signifying abundance on two counts.
Not Pigs, But Cows for Baltimoreans' Good Luck
Pork is not the good luck food for Baltimoreans of German descent, though. They prefer sauerkraut and beef shortribs, rather than pork, as a good luck dish for New Years. And they, like most Americans who use “cabbage” as a slang term for money, will often eat some cabbage on New Years Eve.
If you wanted to ensure all the good luck you possibly could for the coming year, you might plan a dinner around the lucky foods. Here’s one menu for a dinner beginning at midnight (to ensure eating the herring at the proper moment):
- Appetizer: Pickled herring, herring in sour cream sauce, or herring salad
- Black-eyed peas and ham, or sauerkraut and beef shortribs.
- Cole slaw or other cabbage salad of choice
- Dessert of pig-shaped cookies, or, alternatively, a plain cake into which a coin has been baked, the Greek food for prosperity on New Years Eve.
Two Baltimore Good Luck Recipes
Here’s an easy Baltimore recipe from the late Cathy Schultz Tiley for a shortribs and sauerkraut dinner:
- Buy 3 or 4 pounds streaky shortribs.
- Braise until well browned in butter or oil in a dutch oven, adding and removing ribs until all are well browned.
- Put all back in pot and add 2 large plastic packages sauerkraut.
- Add a lump of butter to taste, some celery seed, a large grating of fresh pepper, three or four tablespoons brown sugar; then stir, and cook over low heat, below simmering, for an hour or so until flavors meld. Remove bones when done (when the meat falls away), rearrange and serve.
Here’s the Schultz family's way with Herring Salad:
- Make a bed of torn greens.
- Drain the liquid from a jar of herring and cut herring into bite-size pieces.
- Mix with sliced pickled beet, chopped celery, chopped apple, thinly sliced onion.
- Place atop greens.
- Sprinkle with mustard seed and place one or two quartered hard-boiled eggs on top. All amounts according to taste, number of diners, and personal taste.
Sources:
Family handwritten recipes
Boyd, Jim. (December 29, 2004) “A New Year’s Viennese-Style,” Eugene, OR: The Register-Guard, p. E1.
