Traditional New Year's Day "good luck" food

quote:

Originally posted by Sundancer7

Mamaw Smith always cooks blackeyed peas with ham hocks. I can never recall a New Years day without her cooking them.

We plant several types of greens in the garden in the fall and I will harvest some of them today to go along with the Tennessee fried cornbread that we will have tomorrow. We plant mustard, kale and collards. They really tolerate the cold weather very well.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

That's just about what spouse & I are planning for tomorrow; along with some grilled 1.5" smoked pork chops. All I need to do today is get some Martha White's & some buttermilk for the CB. Will probably do corn pone vs. traditional CB, though.

Hoppin John for New Year's is apparently not just a southern thing. My wife's family, which is mainly of Polish/Hungarian background, traditonally celebrates New Year's day with kielbasy and hoppin John. The keilbasy I can understand, but none of them seems to know how the Hoppin John got in there, but they've been doing it at least back to her grandparent's days 80+ years ago. There is no family connection to the south, her grandparents came to NY in the 1910's and stayed there. Thier version of Hoppin John is the black eyed pea version, by the way. --Ken

http://www.rockies.net/~spirit/charlene/hoppingjohn.html

We eat black-eyed peas and collard greens on New Years Day for good luck and money!!!! We talked about legumes/beans in class today. I teach Foods 1, when I mentioned black eyed peas, one student said the singing group and I said no the food you eat!!!