Greens and peas
By DAN LANGFORD
Eating greens and peas on New Year’s Day is a Southern tradition many believe stretches back to the time of the Civil War. After the Yankees invaded Georgia, very little was left in the way of foodstuffs. My own grandmother, alive and well at 89, remembers her grandmother (who witnessed a well-documented skirmish of the Battle of Atlanta in her front yard at age 9, and who died at 81 in 1936) saying her family subsisted on turnip and collard greens, sweet potatoes, and dried apples, and peas for the better part of a year after Sherman’s scorch. A lot of Southern families have similar memories, and that is why one is still hard-pressed to find even a single bunch of collard or turnip greens in metro-Atlanta groceries at the last minute on New Years Day. Better buy ‘em early, because eating greens and peas on New Years is a way of life for us. We are a people of long memory and tradition, and our New Year’s fare is a big part of that.
A pone of cornbread is the bread of choice for one’s New Year’s meal — cook whatever meat you want (I prefer pork roast, personally) to accompany the veggies, but eating greens and peas without good buttermilk and bacon-grease cornbread is almost sinful.
Happy New Year to all, and start it off the right way — with greens, peas, and cornbread.