BY DON NAPIER
Crossville Life Magazine
On New Year’s Day, you’ll find people throughout the South eating black-eyed peas and greens. Many former Southerners have spread this tradition to other parts of the country. This is a tradition I grew up with. As long as I can remember, my grandma cooked hog jaw, black-eyed peas, turnip greens (or mustard, or creases), and hoe cakes for “good luck” on the first day of the new year.
Eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s has been considered good luck for at least 1,500 years, according to a portion of the Talmud written around 500 A.D. Common folklore tells that the tradition spread after the Civil War. The Northern Army considered black-eyed peas to be suitable only for animals, so they didn’t carry away or destroy the crops.
There are a variety of explanations for the symbolism of black-eyed peas. One is that eating these simple legumes demonstrates humility and a lack of vanity. The humble nature of the black-eyed pea is echoed by the old expression, “Eat poor on New Year’s, and eat fat the rest of the year.” Another explanation is that because dried beans greatly expand in volume, they symbolize expanding wealth.
Clearly, a lot of people closely associate good luck with monetary gain. That’s where the greens come in (in case I need to spell it out, green is the color of U.S. currency). Any green will do, but the most common choices are collard, turnip, or mustard greens. Golden cornbread is often added to the Southern New Year’s meal, and a well-known phrase is, “Peas for pennies, greens for dollars, and cornbread for gold.”
There’s no single official way to prepare your black-eyed peas on January 1. My menu was as follows: pan-fried hog jaw (bacon), thick sliced and slow cooked; black-eyed peas, cooked with a piece of hog jaw for seasoning, turnip greens, boiled eggs, vinegar for seasoning, fried apples, baked sweet potatoes, onions and hoe cakes. I cook this meal myself for the family and I must say that one of my two teenage daughters loves this kind of food. She is obviously a “smart cookie.”
