LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Japanese New Year: Foods
built 658 days ago
Japanese people eat a special selection of dishes on New Year's Day called osechi. Some of the popular foods included in osechi are miso soup with mochi (sticky rice cakes) and vegetables (ozoni), sweetly boiled seaweed wrapped tuna fish (kobumaki), jellied fish paste (kamaboko), mashed sweet potato with marron (kurikinton) and sweetened black beans (kuromame).
Source:
There are many kinds of Osechi for New Year's. Many are wildly expensive ... -- as you can see in one one the pictures -- 2000 yen for a small case of sweet black beans. Other dishes you can see look like goldfish on a stick, but aren't. There are small shrimp strung together, various baked fish, sweet jams, fried foods, etc. In older times women slaved for several days to get everything done, but these days they just go to the supermarket and pay in blood.
Source:
Most stores close for several days at New Year's, so in the days before refrigeration a variety of preserved foods became part of traditional New Year's meals. The most important of these is
Source:
Special dishes eaten at New Year are called 'sechiryoori' and consist of cold items such as pickles, beans, vegetables and fruit arranged in lacquer or plastic boxes. This food is traditionally prepared before New Year and kept so that, for three days after New year, no one in the family has to cook. In reality, few people manage cold food for three days in the middle of winter and the food often doesn't last three days anyway.
Source:
Regional foods help welcome the New Year in various parts of America. In Pennsylvania Dutch country, eating sauerkraut on New Year's Day is said to bring good luck. In the South the custom is to eat black-eyed peas.
Source:
Zoni, a type of soup, and mochi, rice dumpling or cakes... are traditional New Year's foods. The stickiness of the rice cakes teaches the lesson of persistence, said Futoshi Terashita, a Rocky Mountain College student from Chiba, a city near Tokyo.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Foods