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 for New Year's to bring about good fortune in the coming year.

But that's the short answer. The long one involves a shared family tradition that celebrates the legume's prosperous 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 New Year's?

"My mother was a person that never bought canned black-eyed peas," chef Christian "Lucke" Bell said. "You would have to soak them overnight first."

Bell can close his eyes and recall his mom's traditional dish.

"They're gonna be savory," he said. "They're gonna — definitely gonna — go over white rice." 

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

"From what I understand, the black-eyed peas are a semblance of coins. It's supposed to be good luck," Bell said. "Our tradition is to kind of take out the New Year in a very lavish way and hopefully that we're also taking 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 New Year's since he was a kid.

"The black-eyed peas represent coins, whereas the greens represent folding money," Miller said.

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

"After doing it for 50-plus years, the results in terms of prosperity are very mixed," Miller said. 

Where did the New Year's tradition originate?

"A lot of cultures will have special foods on auspicious days. New Year's Day for us, Lunar New Year for a lot of cultures in Asia," said Miller. "You're carrying on this culinary tradition that goes back at least a century or more, so you feel connection." 

Some argue 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 periods. 

"A lot of times, black-eyed peas and other foods from West Africa provisioned slave ships," Miller said, adding that enslaved Africans forced to endure the Middle Passage were fed cowbeans and yams. 

"We now know that typically the enslaved were fed black-eyed pea-based dishes during the journey, including black-eyed peas and rice, which typically is often called Hoppin' John," Miller said. 

"I think people really feel a strong connection to the past, especially to their ancestors, and given the experience of African Americans in this country, to have a time-honored tradition that people love – that's positive – I think it's something that leads people to embrace it."

Celebrations on Dec. 31, 1862, may contain more clues about the tradition, according to The National Museum of African American History and Culture. 

On what became known as Watch Night, or "Freedom's Eve," African Americans anxiously awaited midnight for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect. 

Religious services honoring Watch Night still occur today, and according to the museum, the occasion is usually followed by a meal that includes collard greens and Hoppin' John. 

While researching for her cookbook, "Gifts from the Ancestors, Vol. One, Okra and Tomatoes," chef Sheri L. Raleigh, from Waco, Texas, found that black-eyed peas brought about income during the Civil War. She calls the beans an emancipation food. 

"Those foods helped a lot of enslaved Africans and sharecroppers be able to make their way to the North with the great migration," Raleigh said, making another argument for the lasting powers in the dish's soul.

The New Year's tradition, she said, "definitely is us paying homage to the ancestors for all that they endured."

"Even people in the North, like in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia – people who have roots from Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia – they're going to be cooking this." 

In her research, Raleigh also traced the dish's evolution once it spread across the Americas. 

"They had to adapt," Raleigh said about African Americans who settled in different parts of the U.S. "They had to modify based on the indigenous ingredients that they found there."

"You know, cooking just tells that beautiful story," Raleigh said. "If you follow a recipe, it's going to give you that heritage. Ultimately, you'll be able to tie it together and we're a lot more alike than we are different." 

How many people eat black-eyed peas for New Year's?

While it's unclear how many people engage in the New Year's tradition, consumption of black-eyed peas is widespread. Raleigh found that black-eyed peas also brought prosperity to women in northern Brazil, where another port received millions of enslaved West Africans forced across the Atlantic Ocean. 

"This is our cultural history, and I think those things fuse 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 Bahia state, in northeast Brazil. Evanoff chooses lentils for good luck on New Year's, as many South Americans do, but regards black-eyed peas as part of her cultural patrimony.

Afro-Brazilian women prepared Acarajé, a fritter made of black-eyed peas with Yoruba origins linked to Nigeria, to sell in Salvador, Bahia's capital. Research shows street vendors would contribute profits to their masters, but retained 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 in the middle of the year, a deviation from his family's New Year's tradition.

"I told him, 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 since the tradition's origin is not set in stone, neither is the day it's observed. 

"We usually do it New Year's Eve," Chef Christian Bell said. "We have a big kind of seafood fest with black-eyed peas and rice." 

Chef Sheri L. Raleigh is even less attached to the result and the timing.

"I don't know I felt that superstitious about it, but I will tell you this, it's ingrained in me cause guess what I have in my freezer," Raleigh said.