Does anyone drink nouveau beaujolais other than the week it’s released?
Hey, dayenu, right?*
*Dayenu means “it would have been enough for us.” It appeared in a catchy Passover song about the things g-d did for us that would have been enough, but then did even more.
Well, there are conversation hearts and boxed chocolates and cinnamon imperials for Valentine’s day.
Chocolate Easter bunnies and hardboiled eggs for Easter.
I make lemon angel pie for passover, as well as having matzo, haroset, hard boiled eggs, and sprigs of parsley dipped in salt water that i never do the rest of the year. (And we used to serve gefilte fish, but the people who liked it have died, so this year i didn’t.) But passover is like Thanksgiving. It’s a food-oriented holiday.
I made red velvet cake in honor of Juneteenth, and may make that a tradition.
I usually eat fresh peas on the fourth of July. They have a short season.
Candy corn for Halloween. I eat a lot of milky way bars, too, which i don’t eat the rest of the year.
Skipping Thanksgiving …
I often make a prime rib on Christmas. And some labor-intensive pastry. I’ve been doing a cinnamon star, which is popular with the family.
I like to roast a goose for New Year’s Eve. That’s too much work to do more than once a year.
Peeps has Easter, Halloween, and Christmas themed products, and a few that seem generic.
How could I forget Eat Me Dates at Xmas. No, honestly, they are a real thing - Linky: Results, Object Type: “dried dates box” | National Trust Collections
I think it’s probably a uniquely British thing. I’m sure I have never had Eat Me Dates except at Xmas; and as a child, we had them every Xmas. I just checked and Tesco have them in stock right now.
j
“We are Englishmen, not animals!”
Sometimes on New Year’s day, I treat myself to a can of real abalone. I make soup with the liquid and eat the rest sliced.
It’s a superstition in my family that whatever you do on New Year’s Day affects the rest of the year. So I make sure to eat very well on that day, especially for the first meal, which used to be after midnight at my Auntie and Uncle’s house.
This superstition carries over to what I do on that day. I’ve never left the house in case I get into an accident, except for one year, when my Chinese friends convinced me to have coffee with them since it wasn’t the real new year, which is Chinese New Year’s.
I didn’t dawn on me until decades later, that my parents and I always drove home from my Aunt’s house on New Year’s morning. On the other hand, my cousins would sleep over and no one would even cook to prevent an accident.
When I was a child, we typically had Hot Cross Buns for breakfast on Holy Saturday. I think many would have them on Easter morning.
Although my family didn’t, many of my friends had Lamb Cake for dessert with Easter dinner.
We’d usually have Mincemeat Pie (along with Pumpkin Pie) on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It seems to have fallen out of favor, since I rarely see Mincemeat Pie in the grocer’s bakery section. They do usually have Nonesuch Mincemeat in the baking section. Maybe I’ll make a pie this year.
Does lamb cake have lamb in it? Or is it just decorated to look like a lamb?
Usually just the tails.
It’s a pound cake, baked in a mold that looks like a lamb laying on it’s stomach, and decorated to look like a lamb. If you do a google image search, you’ll find a lot of examples.
My grandmother made a whole range of Christmas foods, not so much for the big dinner as for the season. Iced sugar cookies, candied walnuts, schnitzbrot, stollen, mincemeat cookies from mincemeat she put up herself… more but I can’t remember them all. Gingerbread.
I also associate summer with sweet corn, fresh tomatoes, apricots, blackberries, and fresh green beans, all out of her garden. Winter was pomegranates and persimmons, alas those are not locally available in New England.
My own invented traditions include bastilla for Easter – a Moroccan pie made with phyllo dough, with successive layers of ground sugared almonds, the meat of a whole chicken boiled in spices, and a dozen eggs scrambled in the reduced chicken sauce. It’s a show stopper.
We also eat red beans and rice for New Year, that’s something my husband brought with him from North Carolina.
frozen custard only during summer
Corn on the cob is only sold fresh here from June to September or so.
You can buy frozen corn on the cob year round, but it tastes horrible year round, so doesn’t count.
To move away from the holiday-and-seasonal-vegetables theme…
When summer comes to an end, and the weather starts to cool down, I realize I haven’t had a roast chicken in months, and start to crave chili. At the same time I stop wanting hamburgers. I have roasts and chili all winter into early spring, but nary a hamburger to be seen.
Additionally, I only make and drink switchel in the fall. It’s a harvest drink, though that has nothing to do with availability of ingredients.
These are absolutely dishes that can be made year round, but for me they seem right only seasonally. My daughter wanted hamburgers for her midwinter birthday last year. They were good as always, but…just wrong.
The trick with frozen corn is to boil it first. We have out of season corn on the cob for the few months we can’t get fresh. I boil it (with a little sugar in the water), let it rest for a bit, and then grill it. It’s not as good as fresh, but it’s not horrible. Unlike pasta, you should never add salt to the water, salt after if you must.
Around here you can get frozen custard year-round. In fact, I have a quart in my freezer. Now real peach ice cream is a genuine summer-only treat, and only for a few weeks, at that.
But what I came in to talk about was the Southern tradition of ham and black-eyed peas for good luck on New Year’s. Actually, ham is a watered down, citified version of hamhocks for New Year’s, and hamhocks is the civilized version of the down on the farm hog’s head (yes, literally the head of a hog.) I did not believe that was actually a thing until I was in a Kroger in Kentucky right before New Year’s and saw a collection of hog heads lined up in the meat case.
Oh man… I’ve got a friend who used to live nearby, and she’d have her family up and they’d have a massive Greek Easter celebration every year. Whole lamb on a spit roasting over a pit of coals, souvlaki, moussaka, dolmades, avgolemono, saganaki, etc… And loads of beer, wine, retsina, Metaxa brandy, and ouzo. I learned the hard way not to hang out with her dad (Stavros) and take shots of ouzo later in the celebration. But it was a guaranteed blast regardless; great food, great company, etc…
I’d be curious if there are any traditional non-holiday season (Thanksgiving through New Year’s) dishes that people commonly eat on special occasions. The only ones I can think of are more foods of convenience than actual specific festive dishes. Like hamburgers and hot dogs on the 4th of July, or barbecue on San Jacinto Day/Aggie Muster.
I mean, everyone’s got turkey/dressing/etc… for Thanksgiving and Xmas, and here in Texas, tamales are really common on Christmas Day as well. And so is ham, cornbread and greens on New Year’s day. (the greens are often made with hamhocks, FWIW) My family typically eats ham for Easter, but that’s a general Western European sort of thing, since preserved hams were one of the few meats available early in the spring. Otherwise there aren’t any special dishes associated with Easter in my family.
But are there actually specific seasonal/festive dishes that aren’t just stuff you can cook because it’s not cold outside / because it’s cold outside / certain produce is available?
My landlord does that too. Scarborough apparently has a substantial Greek population rivaling those of Muslims and South Asians.
It kind of depends on exactly what you mean - my family could have made Easter bread or grain pie at any time, just like we can make a ham anytime, it doesn’t have to be Easter. But I could also make a turkey/stuffing/sweet potatoes in February so if the Easter dishes don’t count, neither should the Thanksgiving/Christmas ones.