Happy New Year with Cotechino and Lenticchie
2009 has started, and true to Italy’s reputation of having a special food for everything, New Year’s Day doesn’t escape this tradition. While the year’s end is celebrated with Cenone, a huge dinner not only by name!, it is past midnight that you will be served lentils, often paired with cotechino or zampone. Cotechino is a fresh pork sausage, fairly fat, boiled for hours before being served. Zampone is essentially the same thing, but packed in a pig’s trotter instead of its skin.
Lentils are the true center-stage stealer on New Year’s Day. They have been consumed since before the 1500s on New Year’s Day as a good wish for money in the new year. It was a customary gift to give wallets with a few lentils inside as a wish they could tranform into coins, as lentils look like small coins that need to grow! Nowadays, all over Italy you will have lentils and zampone or cotechino after midnight, as a good wish for the year to come to be filled with money. “Le lenticchie portano soldi“, grandma says!
Happy New Year to all!
Filed under: Traditional Foods
I just found your blog on google. I really liked it and now I will share it with my friends.
Ciao Vanessa, For years my BF recants his fond memories of his mother making lenticchie con cotechino as a New Year meal in his village in Italy. I would love to bring that memory to him. Where do you recommend buying the Cotechino? Grazie Mille.