The traditional foods of the ancient cold food festival include glutinous rice cheese, wheat cheese and almond cheese, which can be prepared in advance for the cold food festival, so there is no need to light a fire for cooking.
At present, the youth league is made of green wormwood, and some are made of bromegrass juice and glutinous rice flour and stuffed with bean paste. It has been circulated for more than a hundred years and is still an old face. People use it to sweep graves to worship their ancestors, but it is more important to try new things, and the function of the Youth League as a sacrifice is weakening day by day.
The legend of the youth league:
There is a legend about Tomb-Sweeping Day's custom of eating green _, which is recorded in The Story Volume of Jiaojiang City in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, an Integration of Chinese Folk Literature.
Once upon a time, there was a young man named Jin Lan. After his father died, he lived by his mother spinning and weaving at home. Jin Lan was arrogant and lazy since he was a child, and he even beat and scolded his mother. However, the court ordered that the abandonment of land should be put to death, so he had to bite the bullet and go to work in his ancestral field.
Jin Lan accidentally saw a ewe nursing a lamb in the wild, and suddenly realized that she was determined to repay her mother's kindness. When his mother came to deliver the meal with a bamboo basket, he took the initiative to meet him.
The mother mistakenly thought that she was late for the meal delivery, and her son was going to beat her up and scold her, so she couldn't take it easy and threw herself into the pond. Jin Lan immediately jumped into the pond, but only touched a board. He took the board home and offered it in front of the hall. It is said that this is how the memorial tablet came.
In memory of his mother, he picked back the weeds growing in the place where his mother put the rice basket and made them into bitter cakes. The story also says that this day is a day when young people are sober and sensible, so they call it Qingming. And every year on Qingming Day, he brings bitter cakes to the roadside near the pond to worship. Later generations called it going to the grave.
Because cakes and other foods were also called "_" in ancient times, later generations called this cake made of "green" by Jin Lan "green _". Later, it became a custom to go to the grave to eat green on Qingming Festival, which has been passed down to this day.