The festival of cold food and Qingming originated from the festival set up in Jin Wengong to commemorate the sage Jietui, who made great contributions, and it is one of the most influential ancient traditional festivals in China. The Cold Food Festival is the 115th day after the winter solstice, which is generally one or two days behind Tomb-Sweeping Day. Because of their proximity, people often regard these two festivals as one. Do you want to know what Beijing did on this day in Tomb-Sweeping Day? If you are interested, just walk into Beijing culture with Xiaobian and have a look.
The traditional "Cold Food Festival", also known as "Fire Exchange Festival", means that every household's hearth, which has been burned for a whole winter, needs to be put out and cleaned after the spring, so the family will cease fire for a day or two and can only eat cold food. Therefore, in the old days, many families in Beijing prepared the next day's food, mostly snacks, on the day before the Cold Food Festival, which gradually evolved into the thirteen unique cold foods in old Beijing.
The so-called "Thirteen Exceptions of Cold Food" is actually the food ordered at a cake shop outside Chaoyangmen when Tomb-Sweeping Day, a family member of Prince Rui's family, went to the grave to offer sacrifices in the Qing Dynasty. At the time of sacrifice, it was placed in a ladder-like thirteen-story, which was called "Thirteen Steps". This practice was later spread to the Eight Banners Barracks in Haidian, and it was called the "Thirteen Musts". People in Manchu Eight Banners Barracks used 13 kinds of ordinary snacks to form the "Thirteen Musts".
what are the thirteen unique cold foods? There is a saying that the "thirteen unique skills of cold food" specifically include: hoofed sesame seed cake, screw-turn, glutinous rice dough twist, shredded ginger fork, snowballing usury, sugar-baked fire, Aiwowo, sugar-rolled jelly, sugar ear, pea yellow, inby, hard-faced cake, sesame paste sesame seed cake. Another edition of "Thirteen Unique Cold Foods": Fried Cake with Cream, Twist with Screws, Braised Twist with Ginger Slices, Rolling on a Donkey, Baked with Sugar, Aiwowo, Noodle Tea, Sugar Ears, Pea Yellow, inby, Hard Noodle, Sesame Sauce.
In the old days, Tomb-Sweeping Day also paid attention to offering four kinds of cakes, each with four pieces; Flowers are also an indispensable element for Qingming to entrust acacia. Based on four kinds of flowers, the traditional flower rhyme has been restored: four kinds of sacrificial cakes, namely, chrysanthemum sends acacia, cold swallow announces spring, silver ingot makes wealth, and bergamot blesses, which respectively represent four connotations of acacia, auspiciousness, wealth and happiness. The four products are homophonic "Sipin", which is a good product for Qingming to pay homage to relatives and friends.