Last Call: Have You Made Your Lemon Pig For The New Year Yet?

J. Pereira - Art Carving
By  Gwen Ihnat

Lots of people have traditions to kick off the New Year with a fortunate omen, from making resolutions to eating black-eyed peas. Over the past few years though, it seems like there's a new tradition: making a lemon pig. According to Gastro Obscura, the habit kicked off last year when the retro food Twitter account @70s_party promised that carving a lemon piglet with a coin in its mouth would bring good luck in the year to come.

But Gastro Obscura discovered that the tradition goes back even further than that: "An 1882 magazine story described a nearly identical lemon pig, and newspapers in the 1890s instructed readers how to make them." There are even YouTube videos that show how to make a lemon pig, which seems simple enough as long as you're as adept with a knife and a lemon as Blake Lively's Emily is in A Simple Favor. But we're hoping for lots of luck in the new year, and the loss of a lemon, a coin, and a few cloves seems like a small price to pay. [Gwen Ihnat]

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