"new years food history" news and stories

Considering how many Americans will spend much of 2010 looking for a job, the "help wanted" pages might make the perfect New Year's Day snack.

Feasting on foods that symbolize an eater's desires for the coming year is a longstanding global tradition: Jews traditionally serve honeycake on Rosh Hashanah to guarantee a sweet year, Peruvians indulge in turmeric-dusted potatoes that share a hue with the gold they hope to acquire, and Italians eat coin-shaped lentils. A Japanese belief holds that anyone who can swallow an unbroken soba noodle without chewing will enjoy a long life. (Unless, of course, the celebrant chokes on the noodle.)

But in most of the U.S., such practices were derided as quaint and misguided for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While a few first-generation immigrants observed traditions imported from their homelands -- serving pork and sauerkraut as the Germans and Swedes did or baking sweet Greek cakes -- the leading New Year's foods were the dishes of luxury: oysters, sweetbreads and sparkling wine were staples of the well-to-do holiday table throughout the 1800s.