Old Beijingers attach great importance to "New Year", so they have: "Wife, don't be greedy. After Laba, it is the New Year, and Laba porridge will be drunk for a few days. Twenty-three, twenty-three, honeydew melon will stick, twenty-four, clean the house, twenty-five, fry tofu, twenty-six, stew mutton, twenty-seven, kill cock, twenty-eight, make noodles, twenty-nine, steam steamed bread. Laba porridge, fried tofu and stewed mutton listed in folk songs are all delicacies during the Spring Festival in old Beijing. Today, these are commonplace, but in the fifties and sixties, you can only feast your eyes on Chinese New Year.
There are only the above kinds of food during the Spring Festival, which is definitely not rich. For example, the cakes used to worship gods and ancestors in ancient times-honey and Saqima-are not only the food of Manchu and Mongolian minorities in Beijing, but also the necessary food in Beijing. Some wealthy Beijingers used to eat fish on New Year's Eve. Fish must be carp, which originally appeared in the name of offering sacrifices to the gods, and was later associated with the auspicious words of "auspicious celebration is more than enough". Fish is both delicious and sacrificial.
As for jiaozi on New Year's Eve, vegetarian jiaozi is used to worship God, and everyone eats meat. People who are not rich are stuffed with meat and vegetables. Even the poorest families will eat jiaozi's "program" during the Chinese New Year. Besides jiaozi and rice cakes, people in "old Beijing" will try "bean paste", a cold dish made of skin, dried bean curd, soybeans, green beans and watercress, which is amber in color and similar to "frozen meat". In addition, there is "mustard heap", which is a cold dish used to accompany wine and appetizer. People eat a lot of greasy food in festivals, which is easy to "make a fire" and "produce phlegm". These cold dishes can make up for this defect.
When all kinds of vegetarian dishes are ready, Beijingers will also prepare sweets, dried fruits, melon seeds and "assorted fruits", which are today's assorted preserved fruits. At that time, these snacks were delicious food when people sat around the fire and died.
Today, almost all the offerings and traditional foods in the name of offering sacrifices to ancestors and gods have been preserved, but they are not so conspicuous. As for today's Spring Festival, the dining table can only be summarized by the word "abundance". What Sichuan and Shandong dishes and raw seafood will appear on the table of ordinary people on New Year's Eve? People who talk about the "new school" will go to big restaurants to "grab food" to welcome the Spring Festival!