“Each ingredient has meaning and purpose. Black-eyed peas represent coins, collard greens represent dollar bills and cornbread represents gold. Eating each Southern staple on New Year’s Day is supposed to guarantee a prosperous year, ensuring wealth and luck. While, I do not believe in luck, I do believe in the power of tradition.”
– Amber Wilson in her blog For The Love of the South
As far as I know, I had black-eyed peas, collard greens and cornbread only once on January 1. Something bad happened in the days after that and while my parents and their friends discussed the fact that the meal wasn’t a magic charm in my case, I no longer remember what the bad thing was. Must have blocked it out.
Even though I like these things (the collards take a lot of vinegar to disguise the taste and the black-eyed peas have to be fresh rather than baked into a brown mush like many people do), my wife doesn’t like any of them. Well, we both like cornbread and still have some left over from Christmas Day.
Why tempt fate by eating this combination again at New Year’s?
I like a lot of Southern food: boiled peanuts, mullet, fried catfish, hoppin’ John, pumpkin frybread, Vidalia onions and yellow squash, hush puppies, grits, and a ton of stuff from New Orleans. But collards never got into my top 100 things to eat. Neither did black-eyed peas, for that matter.
Maybe we’ll have steak on new year’s day along with a baked potato wrapped up in tin foil and some fake bacon bits ready to go. Of course, if you believe in the whole collards, black-eyed peas and cornbread spell, go ahead an eat it at your own discretion and maybe it will bring you luck for 2017. By the way, if you click on the link above for Amber’s blog, her recipe for this old Southern spell actually looks pretty good.
Happy new year!
Malcolm's Round Table 
No collards or black-eyed peas. But we have beautiful beet greens and organic anasazi beans. Close enough?
Sent from my iPad
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Yeah, that might work.
Happy New Year Malcolm!
You, too, Montucky.
I like black eyed peas and cornbread, but I’d take a pass on the collard greens. When I was a kid, the New Year’s thing was pickled herring just after midnight. Nasty stuff–more palatable in the cream sauce than the straight up vinegary stuff, but still pretty wicked. I haven’t had any since I lived at my parents’ house. Carl buys himself a jar or two every winter because he likes it, but then again, he likes okra, so there’s that.
Do you have a recipe for pumpkin frybread?
The pickled herrings don’t sound great either.
There’s a fry bread recipe here: https://knightofswords.wordpress.com/2015/03/11/seminole-pumpkin-fry-bread/
Thanks! 🙂
Hope you like it.
Happy New Year. I’ll do two of the three….
That ought to help.
Try this kink…..
http://earthsky.org/human-world/why-are-some-foods-considered-lucky-for-new-years
Thanks. That’s a great link. That cornbread in the cast iron skillet is the best tasting cornbread I ever eat.