The New Year's plate built around hog jowl — the smoked, fatty cheek of the hog — cooked with the black-eyed peas and greens for luck. The jowl symbolizes the forward-rooting motion of the hog and the richness of the year to come, and seasons the whole pot.
On rural Black homesteads, the hog killing happened in the cold of late fall, and the cured jowl was saved for the New Year's pot. Using it on January 1 was a way of carrying the household's own hog into the new year's prosperity meal — self-provision as celebration.
Honesty here: hog jowl is a high-fat, high-sodium cured pork — closer to bacon than to lean meat — and it is the indulgent anchor of this plate, not the nourishment. The nourishment is in what it seasons: the black-eyed peas and greens it flavors carry the fiber, folate, and potassium. The rehab is to treat the jowl as a flavoring agent the way the ancestors treated all precious meat — a small piece for the pot, not a slab on the plate. A tablespoon of rendered jowl in a big pot of peas and greens is tradition; a plate piled with fried jowl is a sodium and saturated-fat load the Black heart can't afford weekly.
Hog jowl sliced and rendered or simmered into the pea and greens pot; some fry slices crisp like thick bacon. The rendered fat and salt season the whole one-pot. Cornbread alongside.
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