Americans eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day to bring good luck in the coming year.

But that’s the short answer. The long tradition is a shared family tradition that celebrates the pulse’s prosperous heritage 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?

“My mother was a person who never bought canned black-eyed peas,” said chef Christian “Lucke” Bell. “First you would have to soak them overnight.”

Bell can close his eyes and remember his mother’s traditional dish.

“They’ll be hearty,” he said. “They will – definitely – go over white rice.”

The chef at Atlanta’s popular global soul food restaurant Oreatha’s At The Point said the beans were part of his family’s way of ringing in the New Year when he was growing up in Chicago.

“As far as I know, black-eyed peas are a type of coin. “It’s supposed to bring good luck,” Bell said. “Our tradition is to celebrate the New Year in a very generous way and we hope to carry that with us into the New Year.”

Soul food historian and James Beard Award-winning author Adrian Miller has been eating black-eyed peas at New Year’s since he was a child.

“The black-eyed peas represent coins, while the green peas represent folded money,” Miller said.

“My mother is from Chattanooga, Tennessee. My father is from Helena, Arkansas. So even growing up in the suburbs of Denver, we still keep the tradition,” Miller said.

“After more than 50 years of practice, the results in terms of wealth are very mixed,” Miller said.

Where does the New Year tradition originate?

“In many cultures, there are special foods on auspicious days. For us it is New Year’s Day, for many cultures in Asia it is Lunar New Year,” Miller said. “You’re carrying on this culinary tradition that goes back at least a century or more, and you feel a connection.”

Some argue that the tradition is more about honoring the past than evoking future wealth, and in the case of the black-eyed pea, the connection goes back to darker times.

“Often slave ships were supplied with black-eyed peas and other foods from West Africa,” Miller said, adding that enslaved Africans enduring the Middle Passage were fed cowpeas and yams.

“We now know that the enslaved were typically fed black-eyed pea-based dishes during the journey, including black-eyed peas and rice, which is typically often referred to as Hoppin’ John,” Miller said.

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

According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the December 31, 1862 celebration may contain other references to the tradition.

On what was known as “Watch Night” or “Freedom Evening,” African Americans eagerly waited for the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect at midnight.

Services honoring the vigil are still held today, and according to the museum, the occasion is typically followed by a meal of kale and Hoppin’ John.

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

“These foods helped many enslaved Africans and sharecroppers reach the North during the Great Migration,” Raleigh said, making another argument for the enduring power in the soul of the dish.

The New Year’s tradition, she said, “is definitely paying homage to the ancestors for everything they had to endure.”

“Even people up north, like in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia — people with roots in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia — will cook this.”

In her research, Raleigh also tracked the dish’s development after its spread across America.

“They had to adapt,” Raleigh said of African Americans who settled in different parts of the United States. “They had to adapt to the local ingredients they found there.”

“You know, cooking just tells a beautiful story,” Raleigh said. “If you follow a recipe, you get that heritage. Eventually you’ll manage to connect it, and we’re much more alike than we are different.”

How many people eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day?

While it’s unclear how many people participate 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 millions of enslaved West Africans were driven across the Atlantic at another port.

“This is our cultural history, and I think these things merge together so you can identify with the people.”

Raleigh swaps recipes and stories with Sandra Rocha Evanoff, who lives near Seattle, Washington, but was born in the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil. Like many South Americans, Evanoff chooses lentils for good luck at New Year’s, but considers black-eyed peas to be part of her cultural heritage.

Afro-Brazilian women prepared acarajé, a fritter made from black-eyed peas whose Yoruba origins are linked to Nigeria, to sell in Salvador, the capital of Bahia. Research from the University of Chicago shows that street vendors contributed profits to their masters but kept a portion for their own social mobility.

“Acarajé was a food that enslaved women in Bahia in Brazil sold on the streets to purchase 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, initially questioned since their wedding was in the middle of the year, which was a departure 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 expert who eats black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, says the origin of the tradition is not set in stone, nor is the day on which it is celebrated.

“We usually do this on New Year’s Eve,” said chef Christian Bell. “We’re having a big seafood feast with black-eyed peas and rice.”

Chef Sheri L. Raleigh places even less emphasis on outcome and timing.

“I don’t know if I felt superstitious about it, but I’ll tell you this: It’s ingrained in me because guess what I have in my freezer,” Raleigh said.