6 New Year's Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What's the best meal for new year's Eve? ›

Whether your New Year's dinner ideas include broiled lobster tails, spice-crusted steak or buttery grilled shrimp, the last meal of the year is sure to be a memorable one. Some of our favorite festive New Year's Eve menu ideas are deceptively easy to make, like oysters Rockefeller and seafood-stuffed mushrooms.

Greens, pork, and cornbread, as well as black-eyed peas, cowpeas, or beans, are some of the typical symbolic foods served on New Year's Day. When planning your dinner menu, add the Southern foods that some say bring good luck and avoid those that may do just the opposite in the new year.

Looking for prosperity? As Southern tradition dictates, black-eyed peas, greens, and cornbread represent pennies, dollars, and gold, respectively, so eating them together on New Year's will keep your purse full all year long.

Meanwhile, cabbage leaves are thought to bring prosperity to those who eat them on New Year's Day. Long believed to be an antidote to an overzealous night on the town, menudo is part of many holiday celebrations, especially breakfast on New Year's Day.

White Foods

Tofu, eggs, rice, cauliflower, white cheeses—say goodbye to them for the night. Instead, fill your New Year's table with other colorful foods. Greens of all kinds are said to bring wealth into your life, while anything yellow (think cornbread or lemon curd) is supposed to foretell prosperity and happiness.

A ubiquitous New Year's Day good luck food in Europe and the United States, leafy greens from kale to collards are eaten to represent money and wealth. In the American South, collard greens especially are eaten with two other New Year's good luck foods, black-eyed peas and cornbread, for some extra fortune.

In the South, that means a meal of collard greens, hoppin' John, black-eyed peas, cornbread, and pot likker soup. For an auspicious year, we've rounded up some of our favorite traditional New Year's Day recipes. We have all the traditional New Year's recipes, from Southern-style collards to classic Hoppin' John.

What meat are you not supposed to eat on new year's Day? ›

Good luck is an elusive thing, and wings can help good luck just fly away. It's doubly important not to eat chicken on New Year's Day. Not only do chickens have wings, which as you have learned, can make your good luck fly away, they also eat by scratching backward.

Traditional Southern New Year's Day meal consisting of ham, black-eyed peas, collard greens and cornbread. OK – so maybe you aren't superstitious, but New Year's Day brings with it a traditional dinner which can – possibly – bring you a prosperous New Year. Have you ever watched a pig rooting?

Don't Clean the House on New Year's Day - You will wash away any good luck coming your way.

Specifically in the South, eating a bowl of black-eyed peas and collard greens has become the standard on New Year's Day. Many celebrating the new year might just be going along with the offered dishes without the context. A few culinary experts have some clues how this tradition came to be.

Taking a bath on New Year's is not necessary, but it is a personal choice. Different cultures and superstitions have varying beliefs about bathing on New Year's Day.

Black-eyed peas are an ingredient in a popular American dish called Hoppin' John. The dish includes a mixture of rice, pork, and black-eyed peas with a side of cornbread. Most legends believe eating them with greens, cornbread, and pork ensures the luck stays throughout the year.

There's a wide range of New Year's Eve and New Year's Day food that graces family tables across the African Diaspora, but Hoppin' John or black-eyed peas and rice are high up on the list, especially among Southern African-American families. Black-eyed peas are thought to represent coins or good luck.

Everyone knows that in the Philippines, food abundance is king. In December, we celebrate a very special feast on the eve of the New Year. In “Bisperas” — as Filipinos would call it — we ready ourselves for another gastronomic journey to the special event called Media Noche.

Cattle graze while standing still, so if you eat beef on the holiday you may be cursing yourself to a year of stagnation. That leaves pork as one of the only “safe” proteins to serve for New Year's. Pigs forage while moving forward, and beans and greens cooked with pork are considered classic New Year's dishes.