Happy New Year Around The World in Ingredients

If, like us here at Cottage Foods you’re bored of champagne and canapés, consider celebrating the New Year with some of these traditional foods from around the world instead. 

From rice cake soup to lentils, all the food here will bring you luck and prosperity for the year ahead.

12 grapes, Spain

Eating a dozen grapes, one exactly at each stroke of midnight, is a Spanish New Year’s tradition. If you don’t manage to eat all the grapes that’s apparently bad luck. The flavour of the grapes is also a harbinger of fortune, with a sweet one predicting a good one and a sour a less-than-good one.

Raw egg, El Salvador

You’ll be pleased to know that you don’t have to eat this raw egg, but instead crack it into a glass of water a minute before midnight. The following morning everyone decides what their yolk looks like, and the answer will represent what the near year will bring.

Lentils, Italy

With their coin-like shape, lentils are thought to bring prosperity for the year ahead when eaten on New Year’s Day. They’re frequently served with cotechino, a pork sausage, which has fatty and rich qualities that also symbolise future prosperity.

Pomegranate, Turkey

People smash this delicious sweet and sour red fruit onto their doorways on New Year’s. The more seeds that burst out, the more good fortune you will acquire. The seeds symbolises fertility and abundance for the coming year.

Black-eyed peas, greens, pork and cornbread, Southern US

Beans or peas represent pennies, cooked greens such as collard or mustard greens represent folded money, and pork represents general prosperity as pigs root forward when searching for food through the earth. Cornbread also represents wealth due to its golden colour.

Tang yuan, China

These are sweet rice dumplings stuffed with a variety of delicious fillings such as sweet bean paste, sesame seed paste and sugar, nuts or fruit, and they are eaten at Chinese New Year. They are boiled and then served in syrup which is often flavoured with ginger. They are seen as auspicious because the word ‘tang yuan’ is a homophone for ‘union’, so they symbolise togetherness and family.

Kuku sabzi, Iran

A kind of frittata made with egg and fresh herbs, this fragrant and flavoursome dish is traditional at Nowruz, the Persian celebration of New Year which happens at the stroke of the spring equinox. Kuku sabzipromises abundance and fertility for the year ahead.

Which ever way you choose to celebrate this Year, we hope its filled with fun, laughter and some amazing food. 

Happy New year 

Cottage Foods