Japanese Mochi (sweet rice) Cakes for New Year’s

Photo: Mochi (Sweet Rice) Blondie

In looking through notes I took years ago on special occasion foods, I came across an interesting Japanese tradition. Japanese Americans make mochi (sweet rice) cakes for New Year’s. The rice made me think about the historical links in which Asian traders introduced new species of rice to Africa long before the start of the African slave trade. As mentioned in earlier post, for U.S. Southerners, especially Carolinians, there is no New Year’s celebration without rice based hoppin John (and rice pudding). Likewise Mochi cakes, made from layers of sweet rice steamed and shaped into cakes and seasoned, sometimes with coconut, represents the yearly culinary high point for Japanese Americans.

Sweet Rice-Flour and Coconut Mochi Cake Recipe (and many other mochi recipes):
http://www.grouprecipes.com/sr/14086/mochi-cake/recipe/

New Year’s Traditions in and out of the Kitchen

Photo: homemade cranberry sauce; it’s really easy to make.

I am fascinated with the traditions that develop around holidays like New Year’s. I wrote about how In Guatemala City locals set off fire crackers on Christmas. Well they also set them off on New Year's. I found a source that talked about similar traditions in the Mississippi Delta. On New Year’s Day black families would eat a traditional dinner including black-eyed peas and shoot out the old year and shoot in the New Year with their guns. “All over you could hear guns going off,” says one Delta native. Then on New Year’s Day black folks would eat right at twelve noon insuring a favorable new year. The men might go hunting while the women folk stayed in the kitchen making deserts, candied yams, and homemade cranberry sauce. My friend Bryant Terry, author of Vegan Soul, http://basicbooks.com/perseus/book_detail.jsp?isbn=0738212288, insists that making homemade cranberry sauce is very easy. Here are recipes you can use for your New Year’s feast:

http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/cranberry_sauce/

http://www.vegfamily.com/vegan-recipes/sides/cranberry-sauce.htm

Why Some Folks Eat Collard Greens on New Year’s

Frances Warren was born in Atlanta in 1928, but spent most of her childhood in Miami, Florida. She noted that, during her childhood, most families in the South ate hoppin’ John and collard greens especially at midnight on New Year’s. For an unknown reason, some southerners, and folks from the Caribbean I interviewed in research for my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/excerpt, believed the peas represented coins and the greens dollars which if eaten would bring in economic prosperity for the New Year. In other parts of the world folks have traditionally eaten lentils on New Year’s with a similar rational as eating black-eyed peas. Also, I grew up with mother and maternal grandmother guarding the belief that a man must be the first to enter her house on New Year's if the coming year was also to go well. God forbid if you were that sister trying to come in before a brother showed up at my grandmother's house. You'd have a better chance of getting into the White House to see the president. As for prosperity for the coming year, I suggest spending less than you earn. Below is my own collard green recipe for your New Year’s meal.

Collard Green Recipe:
Wash the collards good in plenty of slightly salted water
Start out with 3 bunches which will serve 6 people, they are big but they cook down like spinach. I steam mine in a pressure cooker for 10 minutes until the fibrous leaves are easy to eat. Steaming preserves the water soluble vitamins that are killed when you just boil the greens down like most of my ancestors have done for years.Remove the collards from the pressure cooker and save the water to make the pot-licker. Season the water with 3 cubes of vegetable bullion, dried bay leaf, dried red pepper flakes, little vinegar, and some honey. Had a little liquid smoke which most grocery stores sell if you like that smoked meat flavor (the traditional recipe calls for a smoked ham hock or a hunk of smoked fat back). The pot-licker is full of vitamins and great seasoning for the greens. Sauté the steamed greens with chopped onions and garlic in olive oil with your preferred seasonings like pepper, salt, etc. Add sautéed greens to the pot-licker and let them marinade for 30 or more before serving

Pork and New' Year's Day Culinary Traditions

North Carolinian Reginald Ward said, “I don’t care where you are, in New York” black folk on New Year’s Day are going to eat “strictly pork.” Tradition calls for cooking “black-eyed peas, hog head, a whole hog head now, pig tails, pigs feet.” He goes on to say, “You can go just about anywhere, and people who were born in the South, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee,” cook pork on New Year’s Day. Having lived in California in the 1960s, Ward noticed that, “everybody born in the South was looking for pork” on New Year’s. As a result, the price of smoked and pickled pork parts like pigs’ feet and hog maws in California supermarkets became expensive around New Year’s. Historically this how southerners both black and white ate on New Year’s; and this tradition has caused a lot of serious health problems because folks ate a lot of pork on other days of the year too. Dr. Elijah Saunders, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center who specializes in hypertension and coronary disease in black populations, insists that “pork organs and extremities” such as chitlin’s and pigs’ feet are also very high in saturated fat and increase one’s risk factors for an aneurysm or heart attack. Thus my message based on Dr. Saunders’s findings is ease up on the pork this New Year’s day and for the coming year. Over the next couple of days I hope to show that we can celebrate the New Year and eat healthy good tasting soul food too.

Hoppin’ John and New Year’s Food Tradition

When they relocated to places like New York, St. Louis, and Chicago, Southern migrants brought with them a tradition of church membership and Watch Night services (see yesterdays post for the etymology of this term) which was a well-attended service where down-home southern cooking was available in abundance for free. Southern superstition established the tradition of serving hoppin’ John, black-eyed peas (cowpeas common to Igboland in West Africa) and rice, in addition to other traditional dishes depending on where the southern migrant community was from. Hoppin’ John was black-eyed peas and rice, beans, red peppers, and salt pork cooked to a stewlike consistency. It is probable that hoppin’ John evolved out of the rice and bean mixtures such as dab-a-dab (the rice, beans, vegetables, meat, palm oil, and pepper dish) that West African slaves survived on during the middle passage. Many southerners believed that the black-eyed peas symbolized coins and eating them insured economic prosperity for the coming year. Here are two recipes for Hoppin’ John one traditional and one vegan.

Traditional hoppin’ John recipe: http://dining.discoversouthcarolina.com/famous-flavors/hoppin-john.aspx

Vegan hoppin’ John recipe: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recipes/recipe.php?recipeId=406