Eating for luck

I find the New Years Day food tradition fascinating. People who would never dream of touching a collard green in the South smile and eat it on New Years Day—for luck. And it’s the same thing all over the world, just with different ingredients.

In years past, particularly when we lived in the North End of Boston, we adopted the cotechino as our good-luck food—or a variant called the zamponi. Increasingly I’ve been switching it up, though, as a real Italian butcher has become harder to find in the suburbs.

For the last few years we’ve cooked Sea Island red peas, on the recommendation of Greg. Last year I made a pretty delicious soffrito of root vegetables and cooked the peas in it. This year I went back to the same recipe and, reading it more closely, realized that the intent was to use the vegetables to flavor the broth, then discard them. Whoops. I followed the recipe this year, with the small exception of adding a slice of double smoked bacon in small dice (since I didn’t have any ham stock handy), and served them over plain rice since I had used all the Carolina Gold last year. (Mental note: remind me in June to reorder from Anson Mills.)

But was that all we had? Reader, it was not. One of the other classic New Years Day good-luck foods in Asian countries is dumplings, particularly the kind that look like purses full of money. And one of our son’s favorite food groups is dumplings of any variety. So we made tsak sha momos, and other than forgetting the salt they were great! And because we had to go to HMart to get some of the ingredients, we ended up with a smorgasbord of accompaniments, including udon noodles, some bao baos, and bulgogi. With our dishes of red peas alongside. Not a bad way to ring in the New Year.