The good-luck foods of the New Year

 

Photo by Jordan Alter Burton

Before I get to the good-luck foods of the New Year, I want to say a word about eggnog. I drank a lot of eggnog over the holiday and relished every drop of it. Only prudence and caution confined me to one small glass at a time, but I had eggnog for breakfast every morning in Santa Fe. What a marvelous way to begin the day! My friend, Susan Tweit, brought a big jar of eggnog with rum for the nog when she visited us on Christmas Eve, and Christian, coveting both the eggnog and the container, brought the remaining little bit home with us. So I’ve had it twice for breakfast in the cottage. I did have the good sense to turn it down Sunday morning before we went to church. But this morning, Christian and I split the last little bit and discussed getting more. If anything is going to bring a good year, surely that will do it.

This afternoon, neighbors brought Jordan a cup of Tom and Jerry, a hot drink I always associate with New Year’s. A Tom and Jerry is much like eggnog—egg whites, rum, brandy, spices, and butter. But it’s served warm and is, to my mind, more lethal than cool eggnog. Once again, reason prevailed. I took a sip and said no, thank you. Jordan drank the whole cup and took a nap. Needless to say, I took a nap even without the Tom and Jerry.

The primary traditional food on my mind tonight is black-eyed peas, because I fixed a big pot yesterday and let them sit in the fridge overnight to gather flavors. Then today I cooked them more, cooking down the excess liquid and getting the peas to just the right stage of mushy. After fifty-five years, I consider myself pretty much a Texan (barring some of the things that implies today), but there are parts of me that had a hard time leaving a northern, Chicago background behind. I was in Texas a lot of years before I consented to try black-eyed peas. Then I tried to disguise them, burying them in the rice and tomatoes of Hoppin’ John. But in recent years I’ve come to appreciate the humble pea.

In  Hoppin’ Uncle John, the peas are cooked with a ham hock, onion, celery, garlic, diced tomatoes and served over rice. Tonight I made Hoppin’ John but without the tomatoes (in deference to Christian). I can’t see there’s much difference between plain peas they way we cook them and Hoppin’ John. Even a plain pot of peas gets ham or salt pork or bacon or ham hock along with onions, celery, and garlic. Tonight, everybody else ate theirs with rice, but I had mine plain. So good. Can you believe I actually relish them now?

Probably my study of Helen Corbitt’s life and work had something to do with this. Texas caviar, her iconic dish, is simply marinated black-eyed peas The story is that after three weeks in Texas, at the university in Austin, she was challenged to prepare a banquet menu using nothing but Texas products She invented what she called marinated black-eyed peas. I first remember eating that at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame restaurant in Santa Fe years ago (no relation to the museum in Fort Worth). Today, folks elaborate on Corbitt’s idea and add corn, tomatoes, black beans, avocado. I remain a purist and follow Corbitt’s original recipe.

Of course, if you’re going to have black-eyed peas for luck, you must have greens and cornbread. I draw the Texas line at turnip greens—can’t, won’t do them. But I had leftover creamed spinach tonight. Surely that counts. As for cornbread, I did have that in the Chicago home of my childhood, but my mom was an avid follower of 1950s nutritionist Adelle Davis, which led her to the cookbooks from the Rodale Foundation, a Pennsylvania organic farming non-profit. I remember putting Brewer’s yeast and honey in cornbread. What I fixed today was far different, and like eggnog, most decadent. It’s a recipe that starts with two boxes of Jiffy cornbread mix and adds ingredients, such as two sticks of butter, a cup of sugar, a cup of sour cream—need I say more? It was delicious.

So there we are, starting off the New Year with foods that bring us luck—or so we hope. Let’s hope that 2024 will behave much better than 2023, but we’ve had the lucky foods just in case. You?