Main traditional New Year's Eve dinners, such as: Yue Yue buckwheat, Yujie cooking, miscellaneous cooked rice cakes, rice cakes with red beans and sweet soup, rice cakes with masha and seven grass porridge.
In China, buckwheat is a Japanese food in dark days. Just like the meaning of longevity noodles, it seems to mean the slender life. The big dark day is the last day of every year. Usually, on this day, by noon, everyone will finish all the preparations for the New Year, and go to a family reunion for dinner, which means good health in the coming year.
In fact, the royal holiday lunch was a dish dedicated to Shen Nian on the first day of the New Year, and it was taken down the next day to worship the five zang-organs temple. There is another meaning for Japanese to eat this, that is, to get something to eat from Shen Nian, hoping to bring good luck to the new year. The arrangement of Yujie's cooking is very particular. A special lunch box has three floors, mostly some lucky dishes. For example, red and white shredded radish represents auspiciousness and happiness, kelp rolls represent joy, Satsuma taro chestnuts represent life is sweet, black beans represent diligence, and herring seeds represent the prosperity of future generations.
New Year cake is a must-have food for every Japanese family in the New Year. People will hammer glutinous rice into rice cakes in a stone pestle with a mallet. Some of the cooked rice cakes are offerings to Nian Shen, which are called mirror shapes. Some of them are made into a kind of rice cake soup called miscellaneous cooking on New Year's Day. Mixed cooking is a kind of rice cake with soup. It is cooked with chicken soup in Kanto and white miso in Kansai. Ingredients include vegetarian dishes, radishes, chicken and seafood. New Year's cake is a very important thing in the eyes of Japanese people. In ancient times, they were also used as lucky money. If you don't reward, you will reward the rice cake.