LENTILS FOR A NEW YEAR, A NEW YOU

Italian lentils look like tiny chips of colored marble

It’s been many long decades since I spent a New Year’s Eve in Rome and I don’t know whether it is still celebrated with the noisy abandon that once obtained, but if so, it’s a holiday to approach with caution. That’s because, precisely at the stroke of midnight, in a cherished tradition that some say goes all the way back to ancient times, windows fly open all over the old city as Romans heave out onto the streets and alleys all the year’s accumulated rubbish. Out the windows goes anything that’s over and done with, broken beyond repair—scorched, dented, and blackened pots and pans, broken plates, jugs and lamps, even small pieces of furniture, sometimes large ones too (a small refrigerator? yes!)—and guai a chi sta sotto, beware, all ye who pass beneath!

One year, celebrating in a friend’s third-floor apartment just off Campo de’ Fiori in Vecchia Roma, we watched as promptly at midnight the bells of all the churches pealed a jubilant cascade for the new year. On and on they rang, one died down and another sprang to life in a true ode to joy. And as they pealed, windows sprang open, shutters were flung back, and rubbish of every shape and dimension began to crash down onto the sanpietrini cobblestones of via dei Cappellari. But our friend, an old Roman of British descent, quickly pulled us inside when across the narrow passage he spied a neighbor with a pistol, taking aim to shot out the street lamp and plunge the street into darkness. Such was Roman anarchy nearly half a century ago. And such it may be still.

sampietrini of Rome under light winter rain...

Chastened, we went back to the table and continued eating our lentils.

Lentils for the New Year

Lentils for the New Year is an old Italian custom that may well go back even before the tradition of throwing trash into the streets. In fact, as a reformed archeologist, I can assure you that lentils are one of the earliest cultivated crops to garnish our ancestral tables. (Remember Esau, scorning his birthright for a mess of pottage? It was lentils in that bowl.) Exactly when they became linked to good fortune in the year ahead is not clear, but in Italy the little grey-green disks, tarnished with a bronze patina as if they were buried treasure from a pirate’s chest, still signify small coins. The more you eat, the more treasure you stand to accumulate in the year ahead. So on San Silvestro, New Year’s Eve, along with tossing trash, we also consumed large quantities of lentils, often with zampone, a succulent, savory pork sausage encased in a pig’s trotter that bathes the lentils in its unctuous fat and juices. And we continue to eat lentils for new year’s luck to this day.

Lentils for a New You?

By the time you read this, New Year’s may have come and gone and the last ring of sausage juice will have been licked clean from my platter along with the last little lentil, but that’s no reason to give up on these tiny, nutritional treasures. If you’re like me, and like 92.5% (I’m just guessing) of American adults, you have made several New Year’s resolutions, at least one of which was to lose weight, improve your diet, and go to the gym twice a week. Skip the gym if you will, but why not begin a new diet with lentils? Low in fat, low in calories, high in protein and fiber and minerals, they will add punch to your resolutions.

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