By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
I know for some folks, New Year’s isn’t New Year’s without black-eyed peas. It wasn’t really a tradition I was familiar with until I moved to Texas. But all over the south – including, apparently, some parts of Kentucky – that seems to be the New Year’s meal tradition.
Not for me, though. For me, it’s cabbage.
Why? Because it was cabbage for my parents, and for my grandparents. It’s what we had.
And not just us, apparently. I remember working at the South Shore Foodland when I was in college, and when NewYear’s came around our produce guy would just take a full pallet of cabbage (and a large garbage can for the discarded outer leaves) and place them at the end of the aisle. He didn’t bother to trim and wrap and place them in the cooler like he normally did.
If he had, they wouldn’t have lasted long before they were wiped out. He probably wouldn’t have been able to keep up with demand either, unless he did nothing else all day long. So, instead, he let folks serve themselves.
I’ve heard a couple different stories of where this tradition came from, and I’m not sure which one is correct. But I think it’s safe to say the Irish angle probably has some validity given the number of Scottish and Irish families to settle Appalachia. My Nan – my father’s mother – was a Bailey, and she always made corned beef and cabbage for New Year, with boiled potatoes. (I don’t think you could get any more Irish than that pairing if you tried.)
Not only did she always make cabbage for New Year’s dinner, but she kept a few silver coins to cook in with them. As I recollect, there was at least one Mercury dime, and a silver dollar. She saved these back, and reused them each year to cook in the pot with the cabbage.
The idea was that the cabbage with silver coins cooked in it – and it had to be real silver coins, hence the Mercury dime and pre-1964 silver dollar – would bring the family wealth and prosperity in the New Year.
Now, I’ve never been really superstitious. But after the last couple years we’ve had, I’m not taking any chances. So, when my partner asked me to do some laundry on Saturday morning, I told her I was putting it off until Sunday and Monday. (According to New Year’s superstition if you wash on New Year’s Day you will be washing a loved one away or washing your good luck away.)
And I made cabbage for dinner for the first time in years.
I didn’t do corned beef with stewed cabbage like my Nan would have done. And I didn’t have any real silver coins to cook in it. But I fried some cabbage, with potatoes and diced, left-over pork chops, paired it with a cold Ale-8, and reflected back on the past year as I had my supper.
It was a year that saw my son turn two-years-old, two days before my grandfather – for whom he was named – left this world for his heavenly reward.
It was a year of political turmoil, and widening partisan divisions. A year when even the considerations you might make for your own personal health – and that of your family – was fodder for the political gristmill.
It was a year that we had hoped would be better than the one before, but failed to be in so, so many ways.
And yet, I found I left 2021 hopeful. While it was a difficult year, there were glimmers of light between the clouds. Some indication of a silver lining behind them.
Silver, like a widening swathe of my beard. Silver, like moonlight on the creek below the pasture. Silver, like the coins my Nan put in her cabbage. Silver, for prosperity in 2022.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
