Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Wolf Moon

January moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new and so is the year! We have entered the year 2006 in the Gregorian calendar, and we have also entered the lunar cycle known as The Wolf Moon in the Old Farmer's Almanac.

This was a time of year when country folk and farmers could hear the hungry winter howls of wolves in the distance, and begin to feel the metaphorical wolf at the door of their farmhouses. Either the stores of food were still well-provisioned from the harvest, or they were beginning to run low.

This is a kind of annual scarcity that I did not see as a child. By the time I was born in 1968, the supermarkets of America were brimming with factory-grown, factory-produced, packaged, shipped, imported, and frozen foods, and they were filled all year long. Compared to my agrarian ancestors, there was little sense of an annual cycle around food. I did not await blueberry season, because I did not know when it was. I did not tire of dried beans and sauerkraut in winter, because we never had to rely on these cold-weather staples to keep the wolf from our door.

Those few examples I did have of annual rituals around food I utterly cherished. We always dyed eggs on Easter, had picnics on the Fourth of July, and roasted turkey on Thanksgiving. And there was one other annual food ritual that my family enjoyed that I cherished more than any other -- because it was the strictest, the most special, the most arcane, the most superstitious, and for me, the most fun.

On New Year's Day each year, we would go to the house of my parent's good friend, Nancy. Nancy grew up in North Carolina. She has beautiful red hair and a lovely warm drawl -- lightened by years of living in the Washington DC area but never fully gone. She also has three daughters close to me in age and we grew up in the manner of cousins and extended family. When my grandfather died in 1981, it was Nancy who was at my grandparent's house helping with food and offering hospitality after the funeral. When my grandmother finally followed him in 2003, it was again Nancy who traveled a good ways out of town to lay out a buffet for hungry funeral-goers. She has an old-fashioned Southern sense of what is right and proper and gracious, combined with a life-long love of the arts and a passionate political commitment to social justice and freedom of expression. It is an irresistible combination.

On January 1 of each year, we would all pack up and go to Nancy's. There we were each required to eat five foods that would guarantee our good fortune for the coming year:

When we arrived on that cold day -- rubbing our eyes from lack of sleep and the late night before, Nancy would be shuffling around her kitchen in her unhurried Southern way, smoking a cigarette and pulling steaming pans out of the oven. I remember it as a casual affair, with grown-ups often hung-over and everyone exhausted from the holiday season, tired of pretense, wearing jeans and letting the bags under their eyes go without make-up -- a far cry from the glitter and lipstick of the night before.

We were strongly encouraged to have at least a bite of each food to ensure that we wouldn't be poor, lovesick, unlucky, impatient, or unwell in the year to come. My childhood palate never particularly liked the turnips, even though Nancy cooked them as a rich gratin with plenty of cream. But I liked the black-eyed peas and loved the cornbread and peach cobbler and had no objection to cabbage or onions.

Nancy always made two pots of black-eyed peas: one with pork and one vegetarian. As an omnivorous child I ate the one with pork, as a vegetarian teenager and young adult, I ate the other. When, as an adult, I was trying to find information on the origins of these New Year's Day traditions, the one most easily found was the tradition of eating pork but never poultry on the first day of the year. The reason for this is said to be that hogs cannot look backward, but only forward. Chickens, on the other hand scratch backward. Avoiding chicken but eating pork ensures that on New Year's we look forward to the future and move into it without regrets or dwelling on the past. The Pennsylvania Dutch tradition for New Year's is pork roast and sauerkraut.

Legumes such as Black-eyed Peas are commonly eaten on New Year's because they symbolize coins and therefore money. (Think of the phrase "bean-counter"). Italians often eat lentils on New Year's. I've read that some kind of greens, such as cabbage, collards, or turnip greens are often eaten because greens are green (like money) and their flat leaves resemble dollar bills. As for the peaches and onions -- these seem to be less common and the origins more obscure.

When I moved to the West Coast thirteen years ago, I missed Nancy's New Year's Day tradition so much that I figured I'd better recreate it myself. I got the list from her of what to cook and what each food meant, and I began inviting friends and neighbors over to eat all the good luck foods and ensure prosperity and abundance in the coming year. I never make the foods the same way from year to year, but I always make sure that each food on the list is on offer in some form or another. As my cooking style changes and expands, so do the ways I prepare the foods.

Cabbage and turnips both lend themselves well to lacto-fermentation, and so this year I had both sauerkraut and sauerrüben in addition to coleslaw and roasted turnips. When I make the cornbread now I nixtamalize the cornmeal with limewater and let the flours leaven overnight with yogurt or buttermilk. This year I used some of my sourdough starter as well. The cornmeal was mixed with a locally grown, low-protein whole wheat flour, sweetened with sorghum molasses and sucanat, and I was thrilled with how it came out. The turnips, cabbage, and onions were all grown on local organic farms, purchased a couple of weeks ago because the farmers markets were on break for the holidays, and kept cool in a makeshift root cellar. The non-vegetarian black-eyed peas were cooked in a broth made from smoked pork trotters that I got from a local rancher who pastures his free-range heritage Tamworth pigs on property not an hour away from me. The broth simmered for three days in a crockpot as I was engaged fulltime in tiling my kitchen. It is so rich in gelatin that the leftover has hardened to aspic in the fridge.

One of the things I enjoy most about the day is that the food is mostly ready before people get here. I set it out on a buffet, with the peas keeping hot in electric crockpots and the rest just room temperature. This year I baked successive pans of cornbread so that we could enjoy it hot -- or at least warm -- from the oven. Once during the day I chopped a couple of turnips and roasted them, and my basic recipe follows. Believe it or not, these turnips are one of the most popular items on the buffet.

The guests are a mixture of dear old friends and nearby neighbors -- some of whom I barely know. As one couple arrived, I greeted them and welcomed them and hugged them before I was able to figure out who they were. They must have found my exuberance a bit overwhelming, but this is California and hugging between strangers is not unheard of. By the time I hugged them goodbye the gesture was genuine. Although I will never be able to channel Nancy's unhurried Southern pace, if I can embody even a shred of her welcoming open spirit I am doing well.

Wishing you all a blessed New Year -- may the wolf of hunger be far from your door and so too poverty, loneliness, ill-luck, impatience, and illness. May we all feel the generous abundance that can come with renewal, and still carry on the precious traditions that connect us to our past, and to those who came before us.

Jessica's New Year's Day Roasted Turnips

Ingredients:

• Large local, organic, yellow or purple turnips
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 450°
2. Cut turnips into a medium-large dice (1/2-3/4 inch)
3. Spread a thin layer of olive oil over the bottom of a sheet pan (cookie sheet) or cast-iron pan.
4. Put the turnips in the pan and douse them with olive oil.
5. Rub the turnips with the olive oil by tossing them with your hands and spreading them out over the bottom of the pan. The ideal quantity is to have enough turnips to cover the surface of the pan but not so many that they are piled on top of each other. The turnips should be in a single layer only.
6. Sprinkle salt and freshly ground pepper over all the turnips.
7. Put pan in the oven and roast until golden brown and soft inside -- about 20-30 minutes. It's not a bad idea to scrape up the turnips with a spatula about halfway through the cooking and shake the pan to settle the turnips back into a single layer, then return it to the oven. This will help them roast more evenly.