New Years Day is a natural inflection point, a time to reflect on a year past and on the road ahead. It’s no surprise then that food traditions crop up accordingly. One of our favorite of them is the practice of eating greens on the first day of the year.
Photo credit by timsackton, on Flickr
File this one squarely under the “looking forward” portion of the program. Greens are a metaphor for paper money — even in countries whose bills aren’t green like ours — so eating them is meant to bring prosperity in the new year.
In Germany, sauerkraut is the order of the day. This is a tradition we can definitely get behind. Heck, hardly a day passes that we don’t crack into a new jar of kraut here at the Foodzie kitchen, so New Years Day it will be just par for the course.
The Danes make grønlangkall, a dish of stewed kale in a cream sauce that they sweeten specially with sugar and cinnamon on New Years Day, and in Croatia and Slovakia, ground meat is wrapped in cabbage leaves. But here in the U.S., the most common tradition stems from the South, where collard greens are the order of the day. They’re usually stewed down with ham hocks (à la doyenne of Southern food herself, Paula Deen) until soupy if not swampy. We, on the other hand, like them to have a little tooth still, so we prefer to have them lightly sauteed with garlic and lemon.
