It is said that this traditional pastry, which is a clear and cold food, was founded in the Song Dynasty and was commonly known as "Fentuan" at that time. It was not until the Ming and Qing Dynasties that it officially prevailed in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces. However, in folk production, it advocates that vegetarian food should not be meat, and fat meat should be excluded, so as to be linked with Tomb-Sweeping Day in spirit and idea. As for what plants to embody green, I don't pay much attention to it. If there is a shortage of Qingming grass, it is not bad to get some vegetable leaves to stir up. Although there are some suspicions of fraud, it is still healthy green. From the point of view of traditional Chinese medicine, no matter what cotton vegetables, wormwood or bromegrass have medicinal functions. In particular, wormwood, with its special fragrance, can not only repel mosquitoes, but also be an evil thing that the ancients hung on the door. It has the effects of restoring yang, regulating qi and blood, expelling dampness and cold, stopping bleeding and preventing miscarriage, and is affirmed by the Compendium of Materia Medica.
When Tomb-Sweeping Day arrived, the function of offering sacrifices with Qingming Cake has long faded, but it is common to go to a cake shop to buy beautifully packaged youth groups as gifts for relatives and friends. This is almost like muffins and brown seeds. In the alternation of years, it gradually evolved into a fashionable food, which can be tasted for 365 days. Take a bite of the fashionable green ball. Although it tastes good, it just lacks the light grass flavor in the early years.
Legend has it that one year in Tomb-Sweeping Day, Taiping Chen, the right-hand general of Li Xiucheng of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, was chased by Qing soldiers, and a farmer nearby came forward to help, disguised Taiping Chen as a farmer and cultivated land with him. When he got home, the farmer stepped on a clump of wormwood and slipped while thinking about what to bring to Taiping Chen. When he got up, he saw that his hands and knees were stained with green colors. He immediately took care of it, and quickly picked some wormwood to go home, washed it, boiled it, squeezed it into glutinous rice flour and made it into rice dumplings. Then put the green dumplings in the grass and mix them with the sentries at the village entrance. Taiping Chen ate the green ball, and felt fragrant, waxy and non-sticky. After dark, he bypassed the Qing soldiers' post and returned to the base camp safely. Later, Li Xiucheng ordered the Taiping rebels to learn to be a youth league to defend themselves against the enemy. The custom of eating youth league has spread.
In front of Tomb-Sweeping Day, every family in urban and rural Wenzhou grinds glutinous rice flour to make cakes, which are filled with pork, shredded bamboo shoots and the like, or embedded with sweet sugar, commonly known as "Qingming cakes". In mountainous areas, Qingming grass is used as cakes. Qingming grass, namely cotton vegetables, is also called "rice vegetables". The scientific name is "mouse grass", which is an annual plant. In the Qingming season, white capillary leaves will sprout. People pick the top of the leaves, wash and mash them, and mix them with glutinous rice flour. Fresh bamboo shoots, mustard greens and diced meat are used as stuffing to make cakes and steam them. Some people collect wild vegetables or grass from the field, such as cabbage, Malantou, ramie tender brain, etc., cook and dry them first, grind them into cakes, make cakes with rice flour or flour, wrap them with two fragrant leaves, and then steam them in a rice cooker or steamer, which is commonly known as "Artemisia cake". In Taishun, on the first day, steamed bread with cotton leaves or Artemisia scoparia and rice flour filled with sugar is called "steaming". Cotton vegetables are tough in color, not only delicious, but also warm the stomach after being stored for a long time. On Qingming Day, there is no fire, and cold food is the thing to eat. This is the legacy of taking cold food in memory of mesons pushing and burning Mianshan in ancient times.