What to eat for the Spring Festival reunion dinner?

What to eat for the Spring Festival reunion dinner?
Eating a reunion dinner on New Year’s Eve is a traditional custom for almost every household. On this day, people who work outside will rush back home as long as they have time. The family will get together, take out the most sumptuous food, and have a reunion dinner. So what do we eat for the Spring Festival reunion dinner? For more details about the 2018 Spring Festival, please visit Fortune Teller.com for consultation. Eating dumplings at the turn of the year is a folk food with a long history and is very popular among the people. There is a folk saying that "nothing tastes better than dumplings". The custom of eating dumplings during the Spring Festival was quite popular during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Dumplings should be wrapped before midnight on New Year’s Eve and eaten at midnight, which is the beginning of the first day of the first lunar month. Eating dumplings means "changing the year and handing over the child". "Zi" means "midnight", and "jiao" is homophonic with "dumplings", which means "joyful reunion" and "good luck". Dumplings have become an indispensable food during the Spring Festival for two reasons: first, dumplings are shaped like ingots. People eat dumplings during the Spring Festival to get the sound of "attracting wealth and treasure". Secondly, dumplings have stuffing, which makes it convenient for people to wrap all kinds of auspicious things into the stuffing to express their wishes for the new year.
Eat rice cakes to symbolize success. Rice cakes are also called "nianniangao", which is homophonic with "nianniangao", meaning higher every year, implying that people's work and life will improve year by year. It is said that rice cakes were originally used for midnight sacrifices to gods and New Year offerings to ancestors, and later became a Spring Festival food. Rice cakes are mostly made from glutinous rice flour, which is a specialty of the south of the Yangtze River. In the north, there are grains as sticky as glutinous rice, the most recommended of which is sticky millet, commonly known as small yellow rice. This kind of millet is hulled and ground into flour, then steamed with water. The flour becomes yellow, sticky and very sweet. The production method is: sift the glutinous rice flour with a silk sieve, add water and honey to make a harder dough, stick dates and chestnuts on the dough, wrap it with bamboo leaves and steam it. This glutinous rice pastry is very characteristic of the Central Plains. There are many kinds of rice cakes, the most representative ones include the white cake in the north, the yellow rice cake in the northern farmers' homes, the water-milled rice cake in the water towns of the south of the Yangtze River, and the red turtle cake in Taiwan. In the north, there are two types of rice cakes: steamed and fried, both of which are sweet. In the south, in addition to steaming and frying, rice cakes can also be stir-fried or cooked in soup, and they can taste both sweet and salty.
Fish is a must-have dish on every family’s table for the reunion dinner on New Year’s Eve. “Fish” and “surplus” have the same pronunciation as “yu”, which means “fish” every year, which means “surplus” every year, for good luck and happiness. There are many fish dishes in various parts of my country, such as the "Pouched Crucian Carp" in Jiangsu cuisine, the "Fried Sturgeon Cubes" in Wussuri cuisine, the "Peppered Crucian Carp" in Sichuan cuisine, the "Fragrant Sea Bass Balls" in Cantonese cuisine, the "Qiyang Pen Fish" in Hunan cuisine, the "Vinegar and Pepper Fish" in Beijing cuisine, the "Korean Silver Fish" in Tianjin cuisine, the "White Pine Salmon" in Northeastern cuisine, etc., all of which are famous fish dishes.
Conclusion Everyone in the world needs to eat, but the rules of eating are different for everyone. During the Spring Festival, the largest and longest "eating and drinking season" in China, food constitutes a prosperous landscape of the festival. The reason why chewing the reunion dinner full of warmth is a happy thing lies in the real emotion, not in the form of "eating". As the old saying goes: "Too much is as bad as too little." At this time when the whole country is celebrating and families are reuniting, we might as well end by reflecting on China’s food culture, and hope that everyone can have a truly meaningful Spring Festival.

<<:  Is it necessary to go home for the reunion dinner during the Spring Festival? What is the origin of the reunion dinner?

>>:  Where is the God of Wealth during the 2018 Spring Festival? How to welcome the God of Wealth during the 2018 Spring Festival?

Recommend

What are the do's and don'ts on the first day of the third lunar month in 2018?

The Fortune Teller website has carefully compiled...

When does the 2018 May Day holiday start? Need to make up for the missed class?

Introduction: Labor Day is an international holida...