Why do we eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s? Here’s how the tradition is said to bring good luck.

Americans eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s to bring good fortune in the coming year.

But that’s the short answer. The length implies a shared family tradition that celebrates the legume’s thriving legacy in Africa and the Americas.

But first, a practical tip: it’s time to start soaking the beans.

Why do we eat black-eyed peas for the New Year?

“My mother was a person who never bought canned black-eyed peas,” said chef Christopher “Lucke” Bell. “You should soak them overnight first.”

Bell can close his eyes and remember his mother’s traditional dish.

“They’ll be salty,” he said. “They will definitely go on top of white rice.”

The chef at Atlanta’s popular global soul food restaurant Oreatha’s At The Point said beans were part of how his family brought in the new year when he was growing up in Chicago.

“From what I understand, black-eyed peas are like coins. They’re supposed to be good luck,” Bell said. “It’s our tradition to ring in the new year in a very luxurious way and we hope to bring that into the new year as well.”

Soul food historian and James Beard Award-winning author Adrian Miller has been eating black-eyed peas during the New Year since he was a kid.

“The black-eyed peas represent coins, while the green ones represent folding money,” Miller said.

“My mom is from Chattanooga, Tennessee. My dad is from Helena, Arkansas. So even growing up in the suburbs of Denver, we still observe the tradition,” Miller said.

“After doing this for more than 50 years, the results in terms of prosperity are very mixed,” Miller said.

Where did the New Year’s tradition come from?

“Many cultures will have special foods on special days. New Year’s Day for us, Lunar New Year for many cultures in Asia,” Miller said. “You’re carrying on this culinary tradition that goes back at least a century or more, so you feel a connection.”

Some argue that the tradition is more about honoring the past than invoking future wealth, and in the case of black-eyed peas, the link goes back to darker times.

“Many times black-eyed peas and other foods from West Africa supplied slave ships,” Miller said, adding that enslaved Africans forced to endure the Middle Passage were fed cows and yams .

“We now know that enslaved people were typically fed black-eyed pea-based dishes during the voyage, including black-eyed peas and rice, commonly called Hoppin’ John,” Miller said.

“I think people really feel a strong connection to the past, especially to their ancestors, and given the African-American experience in this country, to have a time-honored tradition that people love, that’s a positive thing, I think it’s something that guides people to embrace it.”

The celebrations on December 31, 1862 may hold more clues to the tradition, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In what became known as Watch Night, or “Freedom’s Eve,” African Americans anxiously awaited midnight for the Emancipation Proclamation to go into effect.

Religious services honoring the vigil night still occur today, and according to the museum, the occasion is usually followed by a meal that includes cabbage and Hoppin’ John.

While doing research for her cookbook, “Gifts from the Ancestors, Vol. One, Okra and Tomatoes,” chef Sheri L. Raleigh of Waco, Texas, found that black-eyed peas generated income during the Civil War She calls beans a food of emancipation.

“These foods helped many enslaved Africans and sharecroppers make their way north with the great migration,” Raleigh said, making another case for the dish’s soulful powers.

The New Year’s tradition, he said, “is definitely paying tribute to the ancestors for everything they went through.”

“Even people up north, like in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, people who have roots in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, they’ll cook this.”

In his research, Raleigh also traced the evolution of the dish once it spread across the Americas.

“They had to adapt,” Raleigh said of African Americans who settled in different parts of the U.S. “They had to modify based on the native ingredients they found there.”

“You know, cooking just tells this beautiful story,” Raleigh said. “If you follow a recipe, it will give you that heritage. Ultimately, you can tie it together and we’re a lot more alike than different.”

How many people eat black-eyed peas for New Years?

Although it is not clear how many people participate in the New Year’s tradition, the consumption of black-eyed peas is widespread. Raleigh discovered that black-eyed peas also brought prosperity to women in northern Brazil, where another port received millions of West African slaves forced across the Atlantic Ocean.

“That’s our cultural history, and I think those things merge together so you can identify with people.”

Raleigh trades recipes and stories with Sandra Rocha Evanoff, who lives near Seattle, Washington, but was born in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. Evanoff chooses lentils for New Year’s luck, as many South Americans do, but considers black-eyed peas part of his cultural heritage.

Afro-Brazilian women prepared Acarajé, a fritter made from black-eyed peas of Yoruba origin linked to Nigeria, to sell in Salvador, the capital of Bahia. Research shows that street vendors would bring benefits to their master’s degrees, but would keep some for their own social mobility, according to research from the University of Chicago.

“Acarajé was a food that enslaved women in Brazil used to sell in Bahia on the streets to buy their freedom,” Evanoff said.

Evanoff even had black-eyed peas at her wedding, which her now-husband George, a white man from Tennessee who grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, questioned at first, since their wedding was mid of year, a deviation from his. New Year’s Eve family tradition.

“I said, why not? I love black-eyed peas,” Evanoff said.

Do you eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day?

Adrian Miller, the soul food scholar who eats black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, says that because the origin of the tradition isn’t written in stone, neither is the day in which it is observed.

“We usually do it on New Year’s Eve,” said chef Christian Bell. “We’re having a big seafood feast with black-eyed peas and rice.”

Chef Sheri L. Raleigh is even less tied to the outcome and the moment.

“I don’t know that I felt so superstitious about it, but I’ll tell you this, it’s ingrained in me because guess what I have in my freezer,” Raleigh said.