Lentils, or the Grammar of Beginning

Lentils are never celebratory food.They arrive without spectacle, without aroma meant to seduce. They do not announce themselves. And yet, for more than two millennia, they have been placed deliberately at the threshold of time—served when a year begins, when accounts are reopened, when continuity must be invoked rather than proclaimed.

In the Roman world, lentils were not festive. They were foundational. Alongside farro and chickpeas, they belonged to the everyday architecture of sustenance: portable, storable, resilient. But Rome, meticulous in its symbolism, rarely allowed food to remain merely practical. Lentils entered the civic imagination through form. Small, round, flattened—uncannily similar to bronze asses and later coins—they became edible metaphors for wealth not yet accumulated, but hoped for. By the late Republic and early Empire, the association was already established: lentils eaten at the turning of the year as a gesture toward prosperity. Not abundance in excess, but sufficiency multiplied. This is a crucial distinction.

Roman prosperity was not imagined as indulgence; it was imagined as continuity—granaries full, legions paid, households stable. Lentils belonged to that moral economy. As the Empire dissolved, the symbol survived the structure that created it. Medieval Europe inherited lentils not through imperial administration, but through monasteries and peasant tables. Their meaning quietly shifted. Where Rome saw coins, the Middle Ages saw humility. Lentils became penitential food, suitable for Lent, fasting, restraint. And yet—here lies the paradox—they never lost their association with beginnings. They were eaten at the start of liturgical cycles, at moments of moral recalibration.

Italy preserved the older layer most clearly. Lentils at Capodanno, often paired with pork—another symbol, this time of abundance—encode a tension that runs through European food culture: restraint and hope on the same plate. The lentil promises prudence; the pork promises fullness. Together they articulate a worldview that distrusts excess but refuses austerity as an end in itself. Elsewhere, variations emerged without breaking the grammar. In parts of France, lentils from specific terroirs became markers of regional pride, still carrying their quiet symbolism. In Central Europe, they appeared in New Year soups. In Jewish traditions of mourning and renewal, lentils—round, unbroken—signified the cycle of life, death, and return. Different calendars, same instinct. What is striking is not how much the recipes differ, but how little the meaning does. Even today, in an age allergic to symbolism, lentils retain their place. They appear in New Year’s menus not because people believe literally in culinary magic, but because the ritual persists where language fails. No toast, no resolution, no manifesto says as much as a bowl of lentils eaten deliberately on the first day of the year. It is a way of saying: we choose continuity over rupture. This may explain why lentils resist modern reinvention. They do not perform well as spectacle. They do not submit easily to trend. They remain what they have always been: food that looks backward in order to move forward.

To eat lentils at a beginning is to acknowledge something uncomfortable and necessary—that prosperity is cumulative, that time compounds slowly, that the future is built from small units repeated patiently. Lentils do not promise transformation. They promise coherence.

And perhaps that is why they endure. In a culture obsessed with dramatic beginnings, lentils remind us that most true beginnings are quiet, almost unnoticeable. They look very much like what came before. They simply continue—with intention.