[G&G] On New Year’s Day, millions of people will dutifully eat some amount of black-eyed peas with the hope that it will lead to prosperity throughout next year. This superstition has its strongest hold on people with some connection to the South, whether by birth, bloodlines, or current residency. For people who don’t fall into one of those categories, and even for many who do, the tradition is a bit of a head-scratcher. I know that I’m supposed to do it, but I’m not sure why. I’m here to provide answers, and those answers come from a layered culinary and cultural mashup of West Africa and Western Europe. Let’s break this culinary tradition down into its key ingredients.Why on the First Day of January?
First of all, we can thank the Romans, specifically Julius Caesar, that our calendar begins in January. The Roman annual calendar used to begin in March, in honor of Mars, the god of war. Doing what dictators do, Caesar switched things up in 46 B.C.E and started the year in January. Not everyone was on board at first, and many European countries operated with different calendars until Pope Gregory XIII modified the Julian calendar in 1582.
Europeans fully embraced the idea that doing something, or having something happen, on the first day of the year would have year-long consequences. For our purposes, the most relevant example is Scotland’s "first footer," or "first foot," tradition. The Scots believed that on New Year’s Day, you’ll have good luck all year long if the first visitor you get, i.e. the "first foot" in your home, is a dark-haired or dark-complexioned man. Change anything up, like the hair color or the gender, and that’s bad luck, y’all. Sometimes that visitor brought gifts to enhance the prospect of prosperity in the new year, which could include food. Scots, one of the largest white ethnic immigrant groups to British North America, brought the first foot superstition with them to the South.