Eating for Luck on the First of January

On the first morning of January, the kitchen stove does work it will not do again until the next January rolls around. A ham hock goes into a pot of field peas at first light. Collard leaves pile beside the sink. Cornbread batter waits. On counters from Richmond to the Gulf Coast, and in a hundred cities where that cooking traveled, the first meal of the year is already shaped like the year to come: slow, pork-flavored, and green.

The calendar turns at midnight with noise—horns, football, the old year poured into a glass. But January begins in earnest the next morning, in the steam of a bean pot. The old rule, carried across regions and altered in fifty dialects, is that what goes into the mouth first on January 1 spends the rest of the year in the body's company. A meal that looks like money, the thinking goes, is a year that handles money well.

By the last week of December, the grocery shelves have been rearranged to show the way. In the South, bags of black-eyed peas appear near the registers; in Pennsylvania, sauerkraut shares the refrigerated aisle with pork roasts. The markets know what the calendar is about to ask.

The Pot of Peas

Hoppin' John is the centerpiece of the Southern New Year's table. Its names change with the landscape—black-eyed peas, crowders, cream peas, purple hulls. They are field peas, descendants of cowpeas that came from West Africa, and they had long practice surviving heat and poor soil before they ever met a ham bone. Simmered slowly, they turn the color of old copper and give off a thick pot liquor that is nearly as important as the beans themselves. Spooned over rice, they are the foundation of the meal.

Alongside them, nearly always, come greens. Collards, turnip greens, or mustard greens, cooked down to a dark green tide, served in a bowl with the pot liquor, often sharpened with pepper vinegar. Cornbread follows the greens into the oven and comes out with a crust the color of a gold coin. That is the entire code, read aloud by grandmothers and church cookbooks: peas are pennies, greens are folding money, cornbread is gold.

Field peas are not expensive, and that is part of their ceremony. The luck they carry has nothing to do with extravagance. It is a matter of starting the year with enough, and enough in the pot looks exactly like what it is—a full bowl, dark and steaming, with a corner of cornbread balanced on the lip.

Some households put a coin in the pot before the beans are served. The person who finds it in their bowl has twelve months of luck. Other tables leave the coin out and let the meal make the argument on its own. In many Black churches, New Year's Eve is marked by Watch Night services that run from the old year into the new. When the service is over, the first pot of January is already a plan. It is a difficult meal to eat fast.

The Pig That Roots Forward

Pork runs through every one of these kitchens. In the South, it is the smoked hock or ham bone inside the bean pot. In Pennsylvania Dutch country, it is not an ingredient but the main event: pork and sauerkraut, cooked slow on the first day of January and served in big bowls, the meat falling apart under a spoon, the pale sour cabbage tangled in the broth.

The logic travels with the dish. A hog roots forward when it feeds; it makes its own way into the field and does not step backward. A chicken scratches backward. For that reason, some families refuse to serve chicken or turkey on New Year's Day, not wanting the year to scratch in the wrong direction. A hog is honest about the direction of things.

Sauerkraut is the Pennsylvania partner in this marriage. Made the previous fall, when the cabbage came in, it stays sour in crocks and jars all winter. On January 1 it goes into the pot early in the morning, because it deserves hours. The house smells like a canning shelf and a smokehouse, and the plate comes out pale and glistening. In the Ohio Valley, where German and Pennsylvania Dutch settlers carried the habit west, the same dish marks the same date. The meal says that the new year will move forward, above ground, with a full belly.

The dish does not ask for much else. A boiled potato may appear, split open and steaming, and sometimes applesauce to cut the kraut's sharpness. The plate is beige and green, a January plate, and it satisfies in a way that the sweets of December no longer can.

Elsewhere, pork is more abbreviated. In the Southeast, ham appears on biscuit plates, and some cooks fry hog jowl to go with the peas, an indulgent cut of meat. The point of all of it is a hog on the first day, because a hog does not turn around. That, more than any recipe, is the tradition.

A Silvery Fish and a Bowl of Lentils

Not all luck needs a pig. In the Upper Midwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan's Upper Peninsula, wherever Scandinavian settlement left its mark on the supper table—the New Year's table may begin with pickled herring. The jars come out of the refrigerator first thing in the morning. Silvery fillets, swimming in vinegar, wine, or cream with onions, are set out on rye crackers. It is a cold dish, from a cold country, eaten fast before the coffee finishes. But it carries the same blessing as the bean pot: small shining pieces, many of them, as if a coin purse had been spilled onto a plate.

In Italian-American kitchens, the first day of January belongs to lentils. The round legumes, brown or green, are cooked with sausage and tomatoes into a thick stew, and their shape explains their popularity: a bowl of lentils is a bowl of tiny coins. Some tables eat them after midnight, within minutes of the new year; others wait for the big meal at noon. No matter the hour, the dish is bookkeeping. A full bowl is a year with something in the ledger.

The Arithmetic of the First

Across all these tables, the nouns repeat. Something small and numerous. A piece of pork. A green leaf. A piece of bread that comes out of the oven gold. The ingredients change by watershed, but the sentence stays the same: the first meal of January is a deposit in a bank that opens one morning a year.

The meal need not be expensive. It rarely is. The elegance of the tradition is that the first day's foods store well, keep well, and multiply when put before a crowd. January is the month of short daylight and cold weather. The kitchen is the warmest room in the house, and the stove holds the only heat that asks for patience. In every kitchen described here, the first of the month produces the same small ceremony: a pot, a lid, a fire, and a plate of things that look like money. The rest of the year is unknown. The first meal is not.

Photos: I Am birdsaspoetry.com, Keith Williamson (CC BY 2.0)