Festive Curiosities | Why do we eat lentils at midnight?
Festive food is a serious business in Italy, as it should be.
Welcome to our Cabinet of Curiosities, the source for your monthly food digest and discovery of all things curious about the world of Italian food culture!
Christmas and New Year’s Eve are amongst the most commercial festivities that exist in the world. However, thanks to the Italian way of being die-hard lovers of tradition, many unique practices and recipes survive. We’re here to uncover some of them — and make you hungry.
Lentils and Pork for a Prosperous Year
by Marianna Pitonzo: pasta girl, professional eater and Italian food opinionist.
In an attempt to stave off the evil eye, il malocchio, Italians have an infinite number of superstitions, which even if we don’t fully believe, we still generally like to apply in our daily lives (just in case they might work). And what better occasion than New Year's Eve to satisfy our superstitious spirit and try to welcome a bit of good fortune?
On the last night of the year, when the clock strikes twelve, one of our favorite good luck traditions is to eat lentils. Lentils are one of the world’s most ancient legumes and even appear in the Bible. In the Old Testament, Esau gives away all his belongings in exchange for a plate of lentil stew. The tiny legumes are believed to bring good luck and, more importantly, money and prosperity in the new year. This custom dates back to Ancient Rome, when people gifted each other leather purses filled with dried lentils, to symbolize coins due to their rounded shape. The hope was that each tiny disc would magically turn into a coin itself.
Today, like Esau did, we still like to eat our lentils in a stew. On New Year’s, we often also pair them with cotechino or zampone: two kinds of slow-cooked pork sausages from the city of Modena, in Emilia Romagna. Both are made with a mixture of lard, pork rind and spices, but the cotechino mixture is stuffed inside a thin skin casing, while zampone it is stuffed inside the pig’s hind hoof. Any food high in fat used to be considered a sign of wealth and abundance, which explains its consumption around the holidays.
These two fatty and caloric meats might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re looking for a healthy, vegetarian dish this New Year’s, a hot dish of lentil stew is the way to go. It might just make your wallet flourish too!
Love the combination of cotechino and lentils. I had that dish for the first time in Rome, on a rooftop terrace, as the NYE fireworks were going off - magical!