Food Notes: 12/30
Lentils, shellfish, caviar, and more!
It’s the end of the year, and the start of another, so obviously we’re eating lentils.
Five years ago, when my wife was pregnant with our first child, we traded traveling internationally over the New Year for cooking quietly in a cottage on Cape Cod. We’ve created some newer traditions for the holiday, and incorporated some older ones too.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll have read about the Feast of The Two-ish Fishes, and how I never really had a seven-fish feast at Christmas. Fish was one thing I decided to incorporate into our New Year’s Eve.
Since we’re on Cape Cod, we have access to great local seafood like oysters, scallops, lobster, and clams. Our local seafood market also sources high quality fish products that aren’t local, like shrimp. We’ll also get filets of fish like Haddock (local), tuna (not local) or salmon (not local) and turn that into a main protein.
Each year, we’ve also been making our own stuffed pasta. One year we made an entire tray of tortellini. Ravioli are easier, because they don’t need to be twisted by hand.
We’re planning on making a squash ravioli this year — a filling neither of us have ever worked with. But that’s sort of the fun of New Year’s Eve. We have a day to cook and all night to eat. It’s not like we drink all night long — the bottle of champagne we bought last year was still unopened in the refrigerator later in the summer because who wants to be hungover with a wilding out three-year-old.
But then there are the lentils.
Humble lentils are an ancient legume native to Italy, and eating them on the New Year is linked to good fortune.
The lentils are said to look like coins, and consuming them linked to wealth in the coming year.
In 2017, my wife and I spent the New Year in Rome. We had scheduled a multi-course prix fixe dinner at Ristorante Ambasciata d’Abruzzo, and as the meal was drawing to its conclusion just before midnight, the waitstaff went around to every table to serve out portions of lentils.
Italian New Year’s Eve lentils are often served with pork. Cotechino sausage, made from pork, rinds, and a unique spice blend, is traditionally served over the lentils. Cotechino should be cooked slowly because of the high fat and off-cuts used in the sausage.
Traditional Italian recipes call for making a soup-like consistency. The recipe works well as a stand alone dish, or as the sauce for the ham, sausage, or other pork products.
We updated things a bit and make this lentil salad instead.
My wife sourced the idea from from David Lebovitz who offers up the recipe for Salad of Lentilles du Puy. We’re planning on using brown lentils from Puglia rather than green lentils from France, but the idea is the same.
New Year’s Eve 2026 Menu
Below are the recipes we’re planning on following, or at least referencing, while cooking up our New Year’s Eve dinner.
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