My Big Fat Greek New Year Involves Shoving Coins into Cakes

If, like me, you're only a tiny slice "ethnic" and like to make it sound a bigger deal than it is to justify your super-foreign name, Christmas and New Year's is really when you get to make hay. "It's a Greek thing," I'll respond smugly, sounding Greeker than Socrates when friends question family activities in December and January. What I could just as easily say is: "It's some mad thing my dad likes to do because he thinks he has to, probably because his dad once did it for him and he's just passing on the punch." Ahhh, our rich cultural heritage.

Anyway, I am proudly one-quarter Greek, and in the annual perineum between Christmas and New Year's, the only thing to do is make a vasilopita. Oh, you don't know what that is? It's a Greek thing…

Specifically, it's a delicious Greek cake, which is loaded with brandy and orange zest and has a coin hidden inside it. Whether homemade or store-bought, the cake is cut on New Year's Day, and the "lucky person" gets the slice of cake that contains the coin. You have to make it yourself because the store-bought ones might look glossy and pretty, but they unfailingly taste of moth balls and the whole lot gets chucked in the bin after the winner has found their coin, and everybody else has just started coming round to the idea that this year might be every bit as God-awful as the last one.

Afterward, depending how Greek my dad's feeling, he'll get a religious icon, a rock, a pomegranate, and a jug of water, and smash the pomegranate on a tray in front of the icon using the rock and say, "As the pomegranate is one but made of many parts, may our family be the same." Then he pours water over it, and says, "As water flows, may money flow through the house" (10/10 for all-Greek sentiment) and then we all eat a few pomegranate seeds and decide this year definitely already tastes the same as the last one and maybe we should just go back to bed.

I literally cannot find anybody else on the internet who does this pomegranate-smash-water-thing. Not one person. And this is the internet–a database of fake stories and people overstating their other-ness. As far as I can tell, my dad's routine is loosely based on the tradition of hanging a pomegranate above the threshold of the front door and smashing it to ring in the new year. Greeks know how to party, right? So, maybe my dad just made up the ritual when he was hungover one year, and it's stuck. Whatever the truth is behind it, I like it—it makes sense to me and I know I'll make my kids do it, too.

To get to the bottom of wacky Greek food traditions, I asked Nikos Nyfoudis, managing director of The Life Goddess, a Greek deli and restaurant in London, what the truth is behind the cake thing.

"The custom of having vasilopita goes back to ancient Greece," Nyfoudis says. "That's when people were sacrificing food or animals to the gods to gain their favour."

So this is why you have to cut one slice of the cake for God, one for Christ, and one for the house, then? "Yes. Today each vasilopita hides a golden coin called a 'floure.' Some people say that if you find the lucky coin in the cake, you have to get it to the church the first Sunday of the year and offer it to God." Shame creeps in–I won it loads of times when I was little (my Greek grandma obviously spoils us and it unfailingly turns up in my slice or one of my brothers', even though I am 27). I never gave it to church.

But this isn't the only theory behind the New Year cake: "Earlier stories describe Saint Vasilios, or Saint Basil, and his effort to save the city of Caesarea, in modern-day Israel, from the enemy," Nyfoudis says. The people hid gold coins in bread, and when the city was saved, Saint Basil gave a loaf of bread to every house.

But even if myths and traditions aren't your thing, or you can't lay claim to being even as tenuously Greek as I am, here's The Life Goddess' recipe for vasilopita. You should definitely make baking this a new yearly thing.