Eating black rice before the eighth day of the fourth lunar month is a folk custom in Wuhu, Maanshan, Tongling, Chizhou and Anqing in Anhui, Xuancheng in Anhui, Nanjing, Lishui, Liyang, Yixing in Jiangsu, Longquan in Zhejiang, Huangtian in Qingyuan and Zhukou in Zhejiang. The practice of black rice is to mash the leaves of a shrub called "black rice leaves", then mix its dark juice into glutinous rice (in some areas, lean meat and mushrooms will be added to stir), and cook it through slow fire to make black rice, which is fragrant and delicious, making people's appetite increase. Some make dumplings.

In other places, black rice is eaten at the Cold Food Festival. Some places eat black rice on March 3.

Hot black rice can be mixed with white sugar or brown sugar and lard after it is cooked.

In Liyang, Jiangsu Province, folklore is based on Mulian, a disciple of Sakyamuni. Mulian's mother suffered in the 18-storey Hell Hungry Ghost Road. After practicing the Tao, Mulian went to hell to visit her mother, but every time she prepared food, she was robbed by hungry ghost jailers along the way. Mulian tried her best to feed her starving mother, so she often wandered in the mountains. One day (at that time, it was the eighth day of the fourth lunar month), Mulian, in desperation and irritability, inadvertently picked the leaves from the dwarf tree beside her on the mountain and put them in her mouth to chew bored. She found that the leaves of this tree were fragrant and delicious, and the juice was black. Mulian thought that if she soaked rice with this leaf juice and cooked it into black rice and sent it to her mother, she would not be robbed by the jailer. So Mulian took the picked leaves home, mashed them, soaked rice in leaf juice, cooked them into black rice, and sent them to her mother. Sure enough, the hungry ghost jailers stopped fighting, and Mulian's mother finally had a full meal. Mu Lian finally saved her mother from the hungry ghost road. In order to praise Mulian's filial piety, Liyang people eat black rice every year to commemorate Mulian's filial son. According to Compendium of Materia Medica, Lindera leaves belong to Lauraceae, with mild nature, slightly bitter taste and fragrant leaves, which can be used as medicine, regulating spleen and stomach vitality in the upper part and activating Shaoyin kidney meridian in the lower part.

In Xuancheng, Anhui Province, glutinous rice is soaked with juice from black rice leaves, which can usually be soaked overnight. After the dyed rice is washed and cooked, cooked black rice can be eaten, and raw black rice (black rice: raw glutinous rice dyed with black rice grass) can be made into black rice dumplings (black rice Baba): white glutinous rice is ground into powder, poured with water, dried and kneaded into dumplings. Generally, after each family has done it, they give it to each other.