NEW YEAR’S
with a hot pepper and flavored with a bay leaf and thyme, served on basmati rice.
Typically, Hoppin’ John is served on plain white rice, but the recipe I used gets great mileage out of the basmati substitution. Even better is this brilliant idea: It uses the flavored water that the beans were cooked in to also cook the rice. These simple tricks elevate an everyday dish to a comforting treat worthy of the new year.
In Italy, the holiday is also often celebrated with a plate of beans, only in this case it is sometimes lentils. The lentils are frequently cooked with sausage, but because that is too close in concept to Hoppin’ John, I decided instead to go the vegetarian route with Polenta with Lentils in Tomato Sauce.
What could be more Italian than that?
It’s a straightforward dish, lentils plus garlic plus mirepoix plus tomatoes on polenta, but I made my own version of it fancier by pan-frying the polenta. All it takes is the forethought to make the polenta the night before. By morning, it can be cut into wedges and then fried until it is crisp and golden on the outside, and creamy on the inside. It’s almost too good for lentils, but not quite.
Finally, I turned to Japan for a tradition that is said to assure a long life. Every New Year’s Eve, many Japanese eat Toshikoshi Soba, a noodle soup. The idea is that the noodles represent longevity, especially when they are slurped up without breaking them.
As with so many Japanese dishes, the base is dashi, a broth you can make yourself from bonito flakes, but I just used boiling water and a powder I bought at an international market. To this I added kaeshi, a blend of soy sauce, mirin and a little sugar that I did make myself. Combined, the two have a marvelous umami taste that is the perfect backdrop for soba noodles, which are made from buckwheat.
If you want, you could just serve the dish as is, but much of the fun of Toshikoshi Soba is deciding which ingredients to add into it. Chopped green onions are almost required, but I also added spinach leaves, a very popular seven-ingredient red pepper spice called shichimi togarashi and thin, dried seaweed called nori.
In Japan, it is often served with fishcakes called kamaboko, which I once saw described as a Japanese version of gefilte fish. And I know one Japanese native who adds a raw egg, allowing the heat of the broth to cook it. That’s not necessarily typical, but she does it because she likes it.
Isn’t that how traditions begin?