On 12/27/2011 9:09 PM, Janet Wilder wrote:
> I think some people of Scandinavian origin eat pickled herring on new
> years. This year I'm gonna eat steak in Buenos Aires at a Tango show!

Good for you! I hope you have a wonderful trip.

We are moving starting tomorrow. Hope to have enough stuff unpacked to
make dinner on New Years. My tradition was usually pork and kraut.
Her's is Hoppin' John and cornbread.

We may be so pooped that we end up going out.

George L

On Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:29:55 -0500, "jmcquown" > wrote:

>It's a Southern US thing. Black eyed peas are supposed to bring good luck
>for the coming year....

On New Year's Day, my wife's family (from Oklahoma and Texas) always served
black eyed peas cooked in butter, with vinegar and onions on the side.

-- Larry

"Janet Wilder" > wrote in message
b.com...
> On 12/26/2011 7:59 PM, Judy Haffner wrote:
>>
>> Some of our friends say they always start the new year out with a
>> particular menu, as it is to bring good luck all year long.
>>
>> I think they said they fix pork and sauerkraut and red beans and rice,
>> but not sure if they have all of that on New Year's Day. We've never
>> done anything like that. If we have turkey at Christmas, then we'll
>> usually cook a ham for New Years, or vise versa, but it's never the same
>> year after year.
>>
>> Do you have a certain type of food you fix every single year on that
>> day, and have you even heard of this being done before?
>>
>> Judy
>>
>
> I think some people of Scandinavian origin eat pickled herring on new
> years. This year I'm gonna eat steak in Buenos Aires at a Tango show!

Argentina has some of the best beef in the world.

They have their own cowboys too.


W. Pooh (AKA Winnie P.)

"Cheri" > wrote in message
...
> "Judy Haffner" > wrote in message
> ...
>>
>> Julie Bove wrote:
>>
>>>I buy black eyed peas but I don't do them
>>> with greens. Nobody will eat them but
>>> me though.
>>
>> Would you believe I've never bought black eyed peas, nor have I ever
>> tasted them...that I'm aware of anyway? Never heard of anyone fixing
>> them on New Year's Day, as part of a tradition.
>>
>> Judy
>
>
> I do, every year. It's always been a tradition in our home. I love black
> eyed peas and white cornbread!

I don't think I've ever had white cornbread.


W. Pooh (AKA Winnie P.)

On Mon, 26 Dec 2011 22:44:43 -0900, (Judy Haffner) wrote:

>Would you believe I've never bought black eyed peas, nor have I ever
>tasted them...that I'm aware of anyway? Never heard of anyone fixing
>them on New Year's Day, as part of a tradition.

From today's Washington Post Food Section: "For Southerners, It's Not New Years
without Hoppin' John"

http://wapo.st/s2HBZF

-- Larry

Hoppin’ John, a New Year’s tradition born from slavery
By Tim Carman, Published: December 27

The hoppin’ John cassoulet on his New Year’s Eve menu at the Tabard Inn might
give you the wrong impression about chef Paul Pelt. It might lead you to think
that Pelt believes in random, mercurial luck. He doesn’t. The unusually taciturn
cook — I’d call him shy if it weren’t for his occasional bursts of pointed humor
— believes in divine providence over luck.

“I’ve bought lottery tickets and never won anything,” says the dreadlocked chef.
“Last night we had our employee Christmas party. I’ve never won anything at the
raffle.”

No, Pelt’s interest in one of the American South’s great superstitions — that
annual ritual of eating black-eyed peas to bring good fortune for the new year —
is purely culinary. “I don’t really believe in luck,” he deadpans. “I just like
eating pork and beans.”

If you took a poll, many eaters would probably fall into Pelt’s camp. Few, I
trust, expect to win the Powerball after devouring a dish of hoppin’ John
swollen with slow-cooked black-eyed peas. I suspect any fascination over the
dish is 1 part camp, 2 parts gustatory pleasure and 97 parts tradition. A desire
for black-eyed peas around New Year’s does not automatically assume you believe
in the Deep South version of Jack’s magic beans.

The good-luck tradition tied to black-eyed peas is a curious one, given the
bean’s history. Like the people who first loved the legume, black-eyed peas were
a product of the slave trade. The men and women of West Africa, who were dragged
involuntarily to the United States, were sought for their knowledge of rice
cultivation.

In their search for a profitable crop, Southern plantation owners “tried
everything they could,” says food historian and cookbook author John Martin
Taylor (a.k.a. “Hoppin’ John”), during a phone interview from his new home in
Bulgaria. “Rice happened to do really well there. That’s what then effected the
slave trade. They specifically brought West Africans from rice-growing regions.”

And those West Africans, the literature so often notes, brought their food with
them — except they didn’t, as food writer John Thorne so eloquently points out
in his now-classic essay on hoppin’ John in the “Serious Pig” collection (North
Point Press, 1996): “The only thing Africans brought with them was their
memories. If they were fortunate enough to have been taken along with other
members of their own community and to stay with them (which rarely happened) —
there was also the possibility of reestablishing out of these memories some
truncated resemblance of former rituals and customs.”

It was in all likelihood the slave traders who started to import black-eyed peas
to the United States as some sort of backhanded charitable act to appease their
unhappy charges during the long and often deadly journeys across the Atlantic.
In the American South, with both rice and black-eyed peas available, the natives
of West Africa could prepare a dish that reminded them of home: a humble
combination of rice and beans that eventually became known as hoppin’ John.

Much has been written about the origin of the name. Most of the theories, as
Taylor wrote in a recent essay about the dish for Gastronomica, are merely
“fake*lore,” because “they are based on neither fact nor historical record.” One
such theory supposes the dish earned its name from children hopping around the
table before they could eat their beans and rice. (Please.) Another describes a
hobbled man by the name of Hoppin’ John who sold the dish on the streets of
Charleston, S.C. Thorne believes the name is a corruption of the French term for
pigeon peas, “pois a pigeon,” while the late food historian Karen Hess thought
the name derived from “the old Persian bahatta kachang, meaning cooked rice and
beans,” Taylor wrote in his essay.

If writers and scholars disagree on the origin of the name, at least they have
something to argue about. There are virtually no established theories about how
hoppin’ John came to symbolize good luck, or how eating it would provide good
luck for the coming year. Some point to the notion that the peas resemble coins,
which would be true if our pocket change looked like jellybeans. Others note
that hoppin’ John typically is served with braised collard greens, which
popularly symbolize paper money.

Taylor suggests that the tradition might (emphasis on “might”) have started
during that fallow period between Christmas and New Year’s Day, when slaves were
given time off. The harvest season was essentially over, the planting season yet
to come. It was a good time to give thanks for past crops, Taylor says, and
raise expectations for the coming season. Such a ritual could have developed
into a good-luck tradition, with the slaves’ favorite dish of hoppin’ John as
the centerpiece.

Then again, as Taylor notes, “a historian of belief systems, superstitions and
traditions I’m not.”

The historian stands on firmer ground when discussing what, to me, is the most
fascinating part of the hoppin’ John story: the dish’s migration from slave
table to slave owner table. Taylor believes it was a natural evolution, given
that slaves often served as cooks to the plantation owners. “These wealthy
families, they weren’t eating the grand food” every night, the historian says.
“They would have been eating hoppin’ John and corn pone and grains.”

Hoppin’ John has that ability to worm its way into your life, even if it wasn’t
part of your family’s tradition. Perhaps the combination of rice and beans is so
universal, so nutritious and so satisfying that, on some level, the human body
just craves it. In one form or another, rice and beans can be found on tables
from Africa and India (try the black-eyed peas and pumpkin dish at Passage to
India in Bethesda) to the Caribbean and the American South.

Tabard Inn’s Pelt, 52, didn’t grow up eating hoppin’ John. He’s a Chicago native
whose parents were born in the Second City. Southern cooking was not a regular
part of his diet, even though Pelt’s grandparents, on both sides of the family,
were from the South. Pelt moved to the District in 1973 to live with his father,
who had a healthy appreciation for food and was known to prepare a plate of
collard greens from time to time. Pelt fell into the restaurant business along
Pennsylvania Avenue SE, busing tables, washing dishes and doing prep. Like so
many in the industry back then, he worked his way onto the kitchen line.

Pelt eventually landed a cooking job in the 1990s at the Tabard Inn (the first
of two runs for him there), where chefs Stacy Cosor and David Craig took the
untrained cook under their wing. They encouraged him to read as many cookbooks
as he could get his hands on. “I always liked cooking, but reading made me start
thinking how American food got to be what it is — all the different influences
on what we cook.”

The book that really deepened Pelt’s appreciation for Southern food was Heidi
Haughy Cusick’s “Soul and Spice” (Chronicle Books, 1995). “It’s about the
cooking of Africans in the Americas,” he says. “Around the same time I got that
book, I went to Nigeria for the first time, for like three weeks. . . . That was
really an eye-opener for me: just the history of how the slave trade affected
what we eat and what people eat in the Caribbean, what people eat in Brazil and
the American South.”

Many years later, Pelt is creating his own fusion of cultures with his hoppin’
John cassoulet, which combines African and American traditions with the classic
French stew. Aside from substituting black-eyed peas for the more traditional
cannelloni or flageolet beans in cassoulet, Pelt also puts a Southern twist on
the proteins in the dish. He retains the Toulouse sausage and duck confit but
replaces the lamb and roast pork with ham hocks and pork shanks. The result is a
deep, smoky, satisfying winter dish: perfect, I’d say, for many other occasions
besides New Year’s.

There’s just one ingredient missing from Pelt’s chef-driven hoppin’ John: the
rice. He says the grains are a casualty of his multi-course New Year’s Eve meal.
“Because it’s an appetizer,” he says about his cassoulet, “I don’t want to make
it too filling.”

So given Pelt’s feelings about luck, will he include a mention of the hoppin’
John tradition on his New Year’s Eve menu at the Tabard Inn?

“I’ll tell the waiters the story: that people believe, or that people used to
believe . . . that it’s good luck,” Pelt says. “But I won’t say, ‘Hey, it really
is. You guys should eat some before you go out there tonight. You’ll make a lot
of tips.’ ”