Southern Fare for the New Year: A Lucky Meal

There are some constants in the traditional Southern family, like roses for Mother’s Day, barbecue on the Fourth of July, the Thanksgiving homecoming, Jack Daniel's for enhanced football enjoyment, church service on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day food.

Blackeye Peas, Collard Greens and Cornbread is a New Year's dining tradition.Photo byDown South Today

Richard Lewis, a Mississippi native and LSU grad is a Virginian now, a transplant who knows the Southern food preferences like a country preacher knows Holy Scripture. With New Year’s Day just around the corner, Richard’s expertise on Southern dining traditions are instructive.

“Among traditional Holiday feasts in the South,” he told me, “the most overlooked and underrated meal is surely the New Year’s Day dinner. It may be the most important meal of the year, for eating it is said to ensure good luck, good fortune, and good health for the consumer over the following 12 months.”

Richard Lewis, a respected authority on Deep South dining traditions.Photo byDown South Today

Far humbler than the Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas ham, he continued, “the New Year’s luck-o-matic menu includes three essentials: black-eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread. This Southern trifecta of deliciousness is rich in flavor and richer still in symbolism. The peas have come to traditionally symbolize coins. The greens, being green, symbolize cash. The yellow cornbread stands for gold. They say money doesn’t grow on trees, but it sure grows on vines and stalks on New Year’s Day in the South.”

Lewis, a retired Virginia tourism executive, draws on his rich reservoir of Southern cultural knowledge. “Like many of the best Southern things,” he said, “poverty gave rise to the popularity of the three main New Year’s dishes. The peas can be grown in poor soil, and thus became a staple of the rural diet. In the coastal regions of the Carolinas and Georgia, peas might be cooked with rice and vegetables and seasoned with pork. The resulting dish gained the name Hoppin’ John and remains a New Year’s favorite.”

Collards, according to Lewis, is a subject not to be overlooked, and can “be grown in a truck patch for market or in the kitchen garden. When properly seasoned with a smokey ham hock, the dish teems with porky goodness and has found its way from backwoods cabins to some of the South’s best restaurants.

Lewis advises that good Southern coarse-ground cornbread (“not the sugar-laden, cake-like kind made elsewhere”) is a natural companion for peas and greens. “If the Hoppin’ needs soppin’, Lewis added, “Martha White has been standing ready for more than 100 years. And not much goes together better than crumbled cornbread and collard greens pot liquor.”

Richard Lewis volunteered a few customs new to me. “In some households,” he revealed, “coins – often dimes – are placed in the peas while they cook. Some families go all out, putting lots of small change into the pea pot. Those who greedily dredge for gold best be prepared to eat all the peas that also come up. That’s a requirement or else the coins go back in the pot.”

This year on New Year’s Day, Richard Lewis advises one and all to “rub the magic cast-iron pot and a magic genie (named Bubba) will pop out, spreading the promise of good luck in the year to come. Eat a heapin' helpin,' and then go fishing. Buy lottery tickets. It’s a sure bet you can take to the bank.”

HAPPY NEW YEAR!