Foods That Bring Luck in the New Year

By Sandra Garson

There’s more to good luck than a rabbit’s foot or four-leaf clover. As the year changes, we pull out all our superstitions about super foods to eat on New Year’s Eve and Day to supersize our chances in the year ahead. In Peru, for example, people believe eating gold-colored food like papas a la huanchaina, potatoes colored by turmeric or a local saffron-like spice called tadillo, will bring money to their pocket. People in the South serve cornbread for the same reason. Here are some of the New Year’s most popular and traditional lucky foods.

Sandra Garson is the author of Veggiyana, the Dharma of Cooking and How to Fix a Leek and Other Food From Your Farmers’ Market. As a longtime student of Tibetan Buddhism and well-known cook for Dharma centers from Maine to Mongolia, she became the first food historian to explore the Buddha’s influence on how the world now eats. This led to exploration of more religious beliefs about food.

Black-eyed Peas

People in West Africa, the Caribbean and the American South call these lucky peas because they seem to resemble coins. The most famous and traditional way to serve them is slow cooked with ham hocks or salt pork and rice into a dish called Hoppin’ John. Southerners believe eating something humble like this as the first food of the New Year, say at the stroke of midnight, rewards your lack of indulgence and arrogance with riches in the months to come. The actual saying is: Eat poor that day, eat rich the rest of the year. Rice for riches and peas for peace. Whether served alone or in Hoppin John, lucky peas are usually accompanied by three other lucky foods: pork, collard greens and cornbread whose color symbolizes wealth from gold.

Pork

People associate progress with pigs because in contrast, say, to lobsters that crawl backward and chickens that scratch behind, pigs only move ahead. They put their snout to the ground and dig forward without ever turning back. So pork is believed to be a perfect food to propel you into the New Year. Plus, the pig’s fat signals abundance. That’s why Italians serve sausage with their lentils and American Southerners put ham in their lucky peas. The traditional centerpiece of an Austrian New Year’s feast is a whole roast suckling pig and in England or Scandinavia it’s a whole ham. People also consider pork a lucky New Year’s food because having a pig to slaughter at the end of the year used to guarantee the good fortune of food in the new one.

Winter Greens

Collards, cabbage, kale… these greens are excellent promoters of good health, and also the color of paper money. So the more greens you eat on New Year’s Eve and day, the more greenbacks and good luck the year will bring. Sometimes people mix their greens with beans and lentils that represent coins. In the South, Hoppin’ John is traditionally served with a side of collards. In Germany and Pennsylvania Dutch country, the New Year is greeted with ham and pickled cabbage, aka sauerkraut, because accepting sourness is supposed to encourage Fate to balance it with a sweet year. Also the long strands of sauerkraut symbolize long life ahead. It helps that these greens blend well with yet another food believed to bring prosperity, pork.