Who doesn’t want to welcome a little luck into their lives for the coming year?
Now that 2021 is ending, we’re left with a lot to look back on and emotionally process. It’s been a rough year, so whether you believe in luck or not, let’s admit that we as a society could use some luck for 2022.
But why bother with luck if it’s just superstition? For one, few of the surviving superstitions around New Year’s Eve are harmful. They’re mostly just wealth and longevity-related superstitions that involve food items and the occasional coin.
The second reason? It might be good for your professional and/or academic life to adopt a superstitious belief system of your own. According to psychologist Stuart Vyse, author of “Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition,” people who create an illusion of control through magical beliefs like keeping four-leaf clovers or doing things in sets of [insert lucky number], can actually perform better on certain tasks because that sense of control boosts their confidence. It’s another form of the self-fulfilling prophecy principle.
So maybe traditional beliefs are onto something when they have us throwing rice and coins around the house on New Year’s Eve or at weddings. Still, it sounds a little too wasteful for a prosperity tradition so why not go with these lucky New Year foods that will help you welcome fortune and health into your life while filling up your belly?
1. Soba Noodles Symbolize Longevity in Japan
Soba noodles are one of the less popular choices on Japanese restaurant menus. Everyone always goes for the more familiar ramen, sushi, or gyoza, leaving this chewy noodle dish forgotten. Soba noodles are commonly served cold, the “zaru soba” way pictured above, which explains its lower rank on the popularity chart for Japanese cuisine. If you haven’t tried it yet, here are a couple of reasons to: it’s surprisingly delicious and it’s lucky.
Soba noodles are served year-round in Japan but on New Year’s Eve, or ลmisoka (ๅคงๆฆๆฅ) as the Japanese say it, you’ll often find them served warm with chives and kamaboko fish cakes.
This kind of soba noodle dish is called “toshikoshi soba.” Like every traditional dish, this Japanese New Year staple has some variations depending on who makes it. Some cooks will jazz it up with raw eggs or tempura while others might leave it as just its regular, no-frills version.
“Toshikoshi” means “year crossing noodle” which is a rather poetic way of describing the start and end of a year. The noodles symbolize longevity, standing in as a food-based way to wish for a longer life for yourself and your family members.
It’s a common superstition in noodle-eating cultures as the same idea shows up in Chinese and Korean cuisine as well as other parts of Asia. Just One Cookbook has a killer toshikoshi soba recipe based on the one shown in Midnight Diner: Tokyo Series, a Netflix series centered around a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo called “Meshiya” that bears witness to the touching stories of its diners.
2. The Germans Eat Lucky Marzipan Pigs
Pigs are one of the most common New Year foods I’ve ran into while researching this topic. Everyone seems to have a variation of suckling pig that they use as the centerpiece of their holiday spreads. I get it, suckling pig looks amazing in photos.
There’s nothing like having a massive roasted animal on your table to tell everyone that you can afford all that and that you’ll keep on affording it throughout the year. Personally, I’m more of a Peking duck gal, but I get that a dead animal might not be everyone’s idea of a happy New Year.
Enter the Marzipan pig. Despite its name, the Marzipan pig has zero pig in it, making it a possible vegan or vegetarian alternative to suckling pig. Maybe a massive one will be enough to fill the suckling pig’s role in the NYE spotlight? Whether it can actually do that or not doesn’t really matter because the Marzipan pig still manages to be a yummy treat.
Marzipan pigs are made of ground almonds and sugar. In its native German, its name is Marzipan Glรผckschwein and its association with luck comes from the German phrase “Schwein gehabt” or “having a pig” because early Germans, who lived off the land, considered having pigs a symbol of wealth, much like how many agricultural societies today measure wealth by the size of a herd of animals a person has.
Apparently, Marzipan pigs are also popular in Norway where they’re sold by the Nidar chocolate factory. Red Ted Art has a full step-by-step guide on how you can make your own little New Year piggies.
3. New Year Is Simpler in Spain Where They Eat 12 Grapes for Luck
This New Year food tradition has some rather non-linear origins. The concept of lucky grapes shows up in a number of former Spanish colony countries like Puerto Rico. The Twelve Grapes of Luck or “Las doce uvas de la suerte” sound like they could be magical items in a fantasy world, kind of like New Year’s Eve dragon balls that you can eat. But they’re really a Spanish tradition that supposedly traces back to around the 1800s.
There are two stories behind this fruity tradition. One says that it’s a manufactured superstition popularized by grape farmers in Alicante, Spain when they realized they had too many grapes and not enough people to buy them. The region is still known for its fine wines and juicy, big grapes today, lending some credence to the story.
Another version of the twelve grapes origin is that it comes from a French upper-class custom of drinking grapes and eating champagne at the start of a New Year that was then copied by Spanish elites, leading to a cultural trickle down to the not-so-elite twelve grape eaters of today. It sounds weird, sure, but if you know your history, you might remember a few historic trends that only trended because they were French in origin.
Whether the tradition is actually lucky or not isn’t a big deal since you don’t have to cook to enjoy this New Year’s good luck meal. Though, it really should be asked, can we replace the twelve grapes with twelve bottles of wine?
4. Armenians Bake a Delightfully Coin Shaped Bread
How do you start your day? For most of us, the answer is with a cup of coffee or tea followed by a part two sometime after lunch. There’s just something so comforting about dividing your routine between cups of warm coffee or tea and a snack. So if you start your day with coffee, why not start the year with a coffee cake?
Gata is an Armenian bread slash cake that combines a healthy serving of walnuts, butter, and Greek yogurt into one hearty snack. Well, that might not be an accurate way to describe it as gata is one of those traditional treats that vary from region to region and household to household. So, if you’re Armenian and this isn’t your grandmother’s gata, please have mercy on my soul.
Like soba, gata is served year-round and can often be found outside of churches and monasteries where it’s sold by elderly women. Gata is a common good luck symbol in Armenian culture and it’s used in weddings to bless the newly wedded couple by breaking the bread over their heads. On New Year’s Eve, though, a coin is hidden in gata and whoever gets the coin in their share of the special bread will have the best luck of all the members of the family that year.
5. In China, Dumplings Are Shaped Like Historical Money
It’s hard to pick out a single lucky food tradition from China what with China being China. Anyone who’s had some exposure to Chinese culture, whether it’s from the mainland or its diaspora populations, knows how intense it can be when it comes to luck-related superstitions. For one, Chinese drivers tend to avoid having license plates that end in the number 4 because the number in Chinese sounds like the word for death. This superstition has led to heavy traffic in Beijing.
On New Year’s Eve, often the Lunar variety, you can expect about seven different luck-related meals on a Chinese family’s table. According to China Highlights, these dishes are fish, dumplings, spring rolls, good fortune fruit, sweet rice balls (tangyuan), longevity noodles, and glutinous rice cake (nian gao).
For this one, let’s focus on just the dumplings or else we’ll be here all day. Chinese dumplings or jiวozi are pretty much your typical dumpling dish. It’s a piece of dough stuffed with minced meat, vegetables, and herbs that can be served steamed, fried, or boiled. The magic in this superstition comes in the way the jiวozi is shaped. Lucky dumplings are curved to look like silver ingots from the Qing dynasty called “yuan bao” which have a boat-like appearance.
6. In the Philippines, Sticky Rice Cakes Make Your Luck Stick
The great thing about food traditions is that they’re so easily shared. In the Philippines, home to the first Chinatown, one of the most prominent symbols of the New Year is “tikoy” or nian gao as other Chinese diaspora groups might call it. Tikoy is a sticky rice cake made of only three ingredients: sugar, water, and glutenous rice flour.
The version that’s popular in the Philippines comes from the Hokkien-speaking group of China that originates from Fujian province. Today, the Hokkien-speaking Chinese-Filipinos (locally called “Chinoys”), can still be reliably distinguished from recent Chinese immigrants as the latter group tends to speak Mandarin.
Because of how long the dish has been part of a shared Chinoy culture, tikoy has purple yam (ube) and pandan flavors that are popular with locals.
Tikoy’s name comes from the Hokkien words “ti” and “ke” which together mean “sweet cake.” According to legends, the Kitchen God Zao Sheng watches members of each household to see who’s been naughty or nice. If a family behaved badly, Zao Sheng rats them out to the Jade Emperor who punishes the family with a year of bad luck.
What’s this got to do with tikoy? Because the tikoy shuts Zao Sheng up. The notoriously sticky dish is believed to glue the god’s mouth shut, preventing him from making a report to the Jade Emperor. Why he wouldn’t just write it down is a mystery but maybe it’s so good, the tikoy also functions as a bribe.
This meaning is lost on many locals now due to the waning popularity of Buddhism and Chinese folk beliefs. These days, most locals will just tell you that the tikoy attracts and traps luck to your household which is just as good a symbol as any.
7. Singapore and Malaysia Both Toss Salad for Good Luck
Prosperity salad or “yee sang” is another Chinese lucky dish brought by Chinese traders to other parts of Asia. Yee sang is a Chinese New Year and regular New Year dish served in Malaysia and Singapore, two countries with a local Chinese population.
Its name “้ฑผ็” means “raw fish” but because the “fish” in this phrase sounds like “abundance,” the dish became a symbol of prosperity for the new year. Most Malaysians eat salad on the 7th day of the Chinese New Year at Chinese restaurants. The colors of the dish give it a ton of festive flair but it’s the tossing part that really brings families together.
Two hands will do, but when it comes to yee sang, members of the family will dip in their chopsticks to help toss the salad, making it a fun lucky tradition that helps strengthen family bonds.