Rice cake is a traditional food and New Year food popular in East Asia.
In the early days, rice cakes were used to worship gods and ancestors, and then gradually became a kind of Lunar New Year food, steamed with sticky glutinous rice or rice flour.
There is an old legend about the origin of Spring Festival rice cakes. In ancient times, there was a monster called Nian, which lived in the deep mountains and forests all year round. When it was hungry, it caught other animals to satisfy its hunger. But in the severe winter, most of the animals hid and went to sleep. When Nian was hungry, it went down the mountain to hurt the people, snatched people as food, and made the people miserable.
Later, a clever tribe called "Gao Clan", every winter, when the monster was expected to go down the mountain for food, he made a lot of food with grain in advance, twisted it into strips, put it outside the door, and people hid at home.
In the Han Dynasty, rice cakes were called "rice cakes", "bait" and "glutinous rice", and in the book Dialect written by Yang Xiong in the Han Dynasty, the name "cakes" was already popular in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties.