Why Certain Foods Define Our Winter Holidays By Sandra Garson

Why do we all eat the same thing on the same day?

Beef is never on the Thanksgiving menu because the Pilgrims didn’t serve it at Plymouth in 1621. Instead the whole United States eats turkey with winter squash, cranberries, corn something and pumpkin pie. Our traditional Thanksgiving dinner is a replica of that first one in the New World to remind us when and how the United States was born and what made it different from the Old World. Turkey, cranberries, squash, corn and pumpkins were not the only never-seen-before foods the colonists discovered, but they were the last the natives harvested, so we ritually eat them every year on the fourth Thursday of November. In the same way, at the dawn of spring, on their holiday called Purim, Jews eat a triangular pastry filled with poppy seeds. They’re called Hamantaschen, Haman cakes, after an ancient Persian villain who plotted to destroy Israel’s tribes—those seeds—and they’re eaten with glee as a reminder that Haman was foiled and destroyed by the valiant Jewish queen Esther. Many cultures have special foods like these that define their winter holiday.

Cranberries

Cranberries are one of the three native North American fruits early European colonists discovered in the New World. (The other two were wild blueberries and Concord grapes.) Cranberries come from a heather plant that grows in chilly bogs, particularly around Massachusetts Bay where native tribes used them for dye, food and medicine. Their traditional harvest time has always been early October, the very end of the New England growing season. Thus the Plymouth Colonists saw these God-given-- i.e. easily foraged, fresh, local, seasonal –crimson colored fruits as a perfect celebration of their survival in the New World. Because they served cranberries at their first an end-of-harvest Thanksgiving dinner, almost 400 years later, all Thanksgiving tables offer them too: as sauce or chutney, in cornbread stuffing or apple pie, with Brussels sprouts or that other native American bog specialty, wild rice. Everybody eats them on Thanksgiving to remember America’s founding, but many won’t eat them again.

Yule Log

Europeans traditionally end their Christmas dinner with a cake that looks just like a fireplace log. Buche de noel, as the French call this iced jellyroll, commemorates the ancient Northern European tradition of celebrating winter solstice by burning the largest available log in the fireplace to create enough heat to cook a feast and warm the party room. When large houses gave way to apartments without fireplaces, the Yule log morphed into a sweet dessert that symbolizes light at the moment of most darkness, heat in the time of great cold, and comfort at such a bitter moment. Buche de noel recipes range from a simple chocolate jellyroll sprinkled with powdered sugar that looks like snow to complex brown cakes filled with chocolate ganache and iced with chocolate raked to look like wood. Some “logs” even have small cocoa-sprinkled meringue mushrooms attached.

Yomari

Yomari are delicate molasses-filled dumplings eaten in Nepal during the coldest month of the Himalayan winter, particularly on its full-moon day, a special holiday called Yomari Punhi. The word yomari combines two words in the language of Kathmandu’s native people, the Newars: "ya", "to like", and "mari", which means a "special delicacy." Yomari are believed to heat the body as they metabolize, and are thus a gift to help fight winter’s cold. Their flagrant sweetness is meant to counter the harsh bitterness of winter, and their shape symbolizes the Hindu goddess Saraswati, light of wisdom in this moment of most darkness. Rice flour yomari are so soft and delicate, they have to have a doughy “tail” to be picked up. The Newar people believe the longer that tail is, the shorter winter will be.

Epiphany Cake

An Epiphany or Kings’ Cake is served on the 12th day of Christmas, January 6, in many European and Spanish speaking cultures as well as in the American South, and in England on its eve, Twelfth Night. Epiphany commemorates visit of the three kings of the Orient, the Magi, to the baby Jesus. Traditionally a fava bean is baked into a rich cake, and the one who finds it in their slice is king for a day. Nowadays instead of the bean, tiny crowns or ceramic infants are baked into the cake. In the South, Kings’ cake is continually served from Epiphany through Mardi Gras and whoever finds the symbolic trinket in their piece has to pay for the next cake. Several recipes are used: a thin round cake made from alternating layers of puff pastry and frangipane, a thin butter rich single layer cake with sugary fondant icing, and, especially in Mexico, an oval brioche cake decorated with dried fruits that symbolize jewels on a king’s crown.

Potato Pancakes

To celebrate the eight days of Hanukkah that memorialize the miracle of a small cruet of oil keeping temple lamps lit for the eight days it took early Hebrews to fend off captors, Jews eat foods fried in oil. Chief among them is the potato pancake or Eastern European latke, probably because the Eastern European potato crop was harvested around Hanukkah time, and probably because traditional Hanukkah food had to be meatless. Cheese is also served to commemorate how, bite by bite, the temptress Judith fed the Assyrian general, Holofernes, so much cheese, he became thirsty for wine. When he was finally drunk enough, she cut off his head, thus freeing the Hebrews from their worst enemy.

Dumplings

In northern China, people traditionally eat dumplings on their New Year's Eve because their word for the dumplings, jiaozi, sounds remarkably like their word that means “to bid farewell to the old and usher in the new.” The meat dumplings are always made before midnight and eaten during the last hour of the old year and the first hour of the new. Sometimes people stuff a coin into a few dumplings, and those lucky enough to get one are supposed to get good fortune in the year to come. The night before their New Year, when Tibetans serve guthuk, their special pulled noodle soup, every bowl gets one obviously fatter thumb-shaped noodle. This mini dumpling shrouds a small slip of paper presenting the word that describes its recipient’s dominant character trait for the year ahead: butter for generosity, chili for sharp-tongued, coal for black-hearted, wool or cotton for warm-hearted, salt for lazy.

Chocolate Hearts

The particular Saint Valentine now associated with our midwinter holiday is supposed to have secretly performed Christian weddings for Roman soldiers forbidden to marry because the Emperor Claudius II believed married men made poor soldiers. According to this legend, Saint Valentine cut hearts from parchment to remind soldiers of God's love and encourage them to be faithful to Christ, which is why hearts became the symbol of February’s St Valentine’s Day. Nowadays the most precious holiday hearts are made from chocolate, cake or candy, for very logical reasons. Chocolate is rich with the world’s favorite psychoactive drug, caffeine, which causes the brain’s dopamine and adenosine receptors to release pleasure-producing chemicals. It contains certain fatty acids that, like a few drinks, cause the brain and muscles to relax. Even more appropriately for this holiday, chocolate is full of phenylethylamine, the same chemical your body releases when you fall in love.