Good Luck Was on the Menu

I’ve become convinced that sometimes you just have to bring the magic yourself.

No sawing ladies in half, mind you. More the sort of magic that happens when you decide a dinner party deserves an unnecessary amount of thought and research.

For several weeks, I'd been planning a dinner for two dear friends, Fabio and Lauren, both of whom have had a thoroughly lousy first half of the year. And no, Fabio does not have flowing blonde locks or appear on the cover of a romance novel, though he is a delightful gentleman.

The premise was simple: a dinner centered around good luck.

This sent me tumbling down several culinary rabbit holes. Every dish carried some tradition, some symbol, some edible wish for happier days ahead.

Before guests arrived, I took a break and wandered to a nearby coffee shop.

There, behind the counter, was a barista wearing a t-shirt from Old Bethpage Village Restoration.

If you didn't grow up on Long Island, that sentence means very little. If you did, however, it may have just unlocked a deeply buried elementary school memory.

Old Bethpage was essentially Colonial Williamsburg's smaller, humbler Long Island cousin. I immediately told the barista about being assigned to the blacksmith shop as a child, making a nail, receiving fake colonial money, and spending it on sarsaparilla because apparently that was my second-grade life ambition.

She lit up too. We introduced ourselves – her name was Ruth – and it turned out she'd gone there as a child as well and was wearing the shirt because she loved the place. Nobody had ever commented on it before.

The whole exchange was delightful.

Then I brought the story to dinner.

As it turned out, two guests had been there as children as well. One revealed she'd milked a cow to earn her spending money before purchasing her sarsaparilla, which frankly made my nail-making efforts look pretty weak.

The table dissolved into laughter.

This is one of the things I love most about gathering people around a meal. The food is important, of course, but it's really a delivery system for stories. One memory sparks another and before long you're discussing childhood field trips, colonial economics, and the relative merits of nail-making versus dairy farming.

The centerpiece of the meal was a platter of gloriously long noodles, which symbolize longevity in Chinese culture, dressed in a cold sesame sauce. Alongside them were grilled shrimp skewers, marinated with a collection of Asian ingredients and honey. Shrimp are associated with happiness and prosperity in many Asian traditions, while honey carries its own associations with sweetness and good fortune in Jewish culture.

There were also cold Sichuan-style cucumbers.

Now, if you're going to build a menu around good luck, it turns out cucumbers have quite a résumé. In parts of Japanese culture, cucumbers have long been associated with healing and spiritual practices. Meanwhile, German-American folklore gave us the wonderfully odd tradition of the Christmas pickle – a hidden green glass cucumber ornament tucked deep within the branches of a Christmas tree. The first child to find it receives an extra gift and a year of good luck.

Needless to say, cucumbers earned a place on the menu.

There were other lucky foods on the table, but what I remember most isn't the symbolism.

It's the laughter.

It's the stories.

It's the fact that a t-shirt in a coffee shop became part of the evening and connected a table full of people through memories of nails, cows, and sarsaparilla.

I stopped by the coffee shop again today.

Ruth was wearing the shirt.

I told her how much joy it had brought to the table, and by the end of the conversation we'd agreed that a group trip to Old Bethpage is clearly necessary.

Maybe I'll make another nail.

Maybe I'll learn to milk a cow.

Maybe we'll all spend fake money on sarsaparilla.

Either way, that's the kind of good luck I'm happy to have.

Just here - bringing the magic.