New Year’s Day means parades, college bowl games and black-eyed peas. No January 1 is complete without the bean, since tradition holds that eating it brings good luck all year. No one knows the exact history of this dish. The recipe fi rst appeared in a 1847 cookbook called The Carolina Housewife by Carolina Rutledge.

The beginning of the New Year brought to mind a reminder that in our family it was unthinkable not to have a dish containing black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. One of the traditions was that if you eat some of these peas on the fi rst day of the year, you would have good luck all year.

On our farm, the way to cook them was to soak two cups of the small dried peas with about four cups of water over night, pour that off the next day, add new water with a chunk of ham hock and simmer for about two hours.

Later in my life, we would cook what we called Hoppin’ John. This was a dish cooked with rice. There was no recipe at our house for this. We just used a large cooking pot, put in about four cups of water, one cup of small black-eyed peas, one chopped onion, one smoked ham hock, and simmered for one and one-half hours. Then we added 1 cup of white rice, covered and simmered for another 20 minutes. This was removed from the stove and allowed to steam for ten minutes. This dish was fl uffed with a fork before serving.

One New Year’s Day a couple of friends came by our house while this dish was cooking. One of them smelled the aroma and lifted the lid of the pot and exclaimed, “What in the world is this?” They were invited to stay and eat with us. We shared the way the dish was cooked and this became one of their New Year’s Day meals.