about ten days before the festival, people began to be busy shopping for new year's goods, such as chicken, duck, fish, tea, wine and oil sauce, roasted seeds and nuts in the north and south, and fruit with sugar bait. It is the custom in the south of the Yangtze River to prepare New Year's rice in advance before the New Year's Eve, and put it in bamboo baskets, with fruits such as red oranges, Wuling, water chestnuts and gold ingot cakes on them, and insert pine and cypress branches, which is called "New Year's rice".
New Year's dinner in northern China is made of golden, silver and white rice, decorated with dates, chestnuts, longan and fragrant branches, and inserted with pine and cypress branches. Northerners eat jiaozi in the Spring Festival. Some stuffing in jiaozi is filled with sugar, which is intended to make New Year's Day sweet. Some stuffing put peanuts (called longevity fruit), the intention is to eat people can live longer; There is a dumpling stuffing with a coin, the intention is that whoever eats it will be "prosperous." Jiaozi is shaped like an ingot. In the New Year, the inner strips are cooked with jiaozi, which is called "Gold thread wears an ingot".
Chinese New Year's food should be in auspicious terms. People in the south of the Yangtze River make tea for guests in the New Year, and put two olives in the tea tray or bowl cover, which is called "treasure-free tea". When eating in the new year, there must be fried vegetables, saying that eating "kissing hot"; Must eat bean sprouts, because soybean sprouts are shaped like "ruyi"; You must eat fish heads at every meal, but you can't eat them all, which is called "leftover fish".
you must eat rice cakes in the new year, and the north and south share the same wind. Eat rice cakes to wish life "high year after year" Sweet-scented osmanthus sugar rice cakes in Suzhou, Shuimo rice cakes in Ningbo, jujube rice cakes and Baiguo rice cakes in Beijing are all good cakes for the New Year. Many areas in China pay attention to eating rice cakes during the Spring Festival. New Year's cakes, also known as "New Year's cakes", are homophonic with "high every year", meaning that people's work and life are improved year by year.
As a kind of food, rice cakes have a long history in China. In 1974, archaeologists discovered rice seeds in the Hemudu matriarchal clan social site in Yuyao, Zhejiang, which shows that our ancestors began to grow rice as early as 7, years ago. People in the Han Dynasty called rice cakes "rice cakes", "bait" and "glutinous rice cakes". The ancients also had a development process from rice cake to flour cake. In the 6th century AD, the cookbook Shiji contained the method of making rice cakes "white cocoon candy", which said, "If rice is cooked and cooked, and it is hotter than Chu Jiu's, it must be cooked extremely well, so as not to have rice grains ..." That is, after the glutinous rice is steamed, it is boiled into rice, and then cut into peach pit sizes.
The method of milling rice into cakes is also very early. This can be proved by Qi Min Yao Shu written by Jia Sixie in the Northern Wei Dynasty. The production method is that glutinous rice flour is sieved with silk, and then added with water and honey to form a hard dough, and dates and chestnuts are attached to the dough, and then wrapped with bamboo leaves and steamed. This kind of glutinous rice cake has the characteristics of the Central Plains.
rice cakes are mostly made of glutinous rice flour, and glutinous rice is a specialty of the south of the Yangtze River. In the north, sticky grains like glutinous rice exist, and sticky millet (commonly known as millet) was first introduced in ancient times. This kind of millet hulled powder, after steamed with water, is yellow, sticky and sweet, and it is a delicious food for people in the Yellow River valley to celebrate the harvest. The article "A Brief Introduction to the Scenery of the Imperial Capital" published during the Chongzhen period of the Ming Dynasty recorded that Beijingers at that time would "eat millet cakes on New Year's Day of the first month and celebrate the New Year's cakes". It is not difficult to see that "New Year's cake" is a homonym of "sticky cake" in the north.
There are many kinds of rice cakes, such as white cakes from the north, yellow rice cakes from farmers in Saibei, Shuimo rice cakes from water towns in the south of the Yangtze River, and red turtle cakes from Taiwan Province. Rice cakes have different flavors from north to south.
There are two kinds of northern rice cakes: steamed and fried, both of which are sweet. In addition to steaming and frying, southern rice cakes are also fried in slices and boiled in soup, which are both sweet and salty.
It is said that the earliest rice cakes were used to worship the gods in the New Year's Eve and for ancestors in the New Year's Eve, and later they became food for the Spring Festival.
The rice cake is not only a kind of holiday food, but also brings new hope to people. As a poem in the late Qing Dynasty said, "People's hearts are high, and food is made in harmony, so that the year is better than the year, so as to pray for the year."