About ten days before the festival, people began to buy 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 a custom in the south of the Yangtze River to prepare the New Year's dinner in advance, put it in a bamboo basket, put fruits such as red orange, Wuling, water chestnut and gold ingot cake on it, and insert pine and cypress branches, which is called "New Year's dinner".
Northerners' New Year's Eve dinner is made of gold, silver and rice (yellow rice and white rice). The dinner was decorated with dates, chestnuts, longan and fragrant branches, with pine and cypress branches inserted. Northerners eat jiaozi in the Spring Festival. Some jiaozi stuffing with sugar, intended to eat the sweetness of the New Year; Some stuffing put peanuts (called longevity fruit), the intention is that people who eat can live longer; There is a coin in a dumpling stuffing, which means that whoever eats it will get rich. jiaozi is shaped like an ingot. During the Chinese New Year, jiaozi is cooked in the inner strip, which is called "Gold thread wears gold ingots".
Auspicious language should be used in New Year's diet. Jiangnan people make tea for their guests in the New Year, and put two olives on the tea tray or bowl cover, which is called "treasure-free tea". When eating in the New Year, there must be cooking, saying that eating "kissing hot"; Be sure to eat bean sprouts, because the shape of bean sprouts is like "Ruyi"; You must eat fish heads for every meal, but you can't eat them all. This is the so-called "leftover fish".
You must eat rice cakes during the Spring Festival, and the wind is the same in the north and south. Eat rice cakes and wish your life a "high year after year". Suzhou's sweet-scented osmanthus rice cakes, Ningbo's Shuimo rice cakes, Beijing's red jujube rice cakes and Baiguo rice cakes are all good New Year's cakes. Many areas in China pay attention to eating rice cakes during the Spring Festival. The rice cake, also known as "rice cake", is homophonic with "high year by year", which means that people's work and life are improving year by year.
As a kind of food, rice cakes have a long history in China. 1974, archaeologists discovered rice seeds at Hemudu matriarchal clan social site in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, indicating that our ancestors began to grow rice as early as 7000 years ago. People in Han Dynasty called rice cakes "rice cakes", "fish bait" and "glutinous rice cakes". The ancients also had a development process from rice cakes to flour cakes. In the 6th century A.D., the cookbook Historical Records contained the method of making "white cocoon candy" for rice cakes, which said: "If the rice is cooked thoroughly and hotter than that in Chu Jiu, 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 kernels.
The method of grinding rice into cakes is also very early. The Book of Qi Yaomin written by Jia Sixie in the Northern Wei Dynasty can prove this point. The production method is to screen glutinous rice flour with silk, add water and honey to knead it into hard dough, attach dates and chestnuts to the dough, wrap it with bamboo leaves and steam it. This glutinous rice cake has the characteristics of the Central Plains.
Rice cakes are mostly made of glutinous rice flour, which is a specialty of Jiangnan. There are sticky grains such as glutinous rice in the north, and sticky millet (commonly known as millet) was first introduced in ancient times. This shelled millet powder is yellow, sticky and sweet after being steamed with water. 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 Jingshi" published during the Chongzhen period of the Ming Dynasty recorded that Beijingers at that time would "eat millet cakes and have New Year cakes on the first day of the first month". It is not difficult to see that "rice cake" is a homonym of "sticky cake" in the north.
There are many kinds of rice cakes, such as the white rice cakes in the north, the yellow rice cakes of farmers in Saibei, the Shuimo rice cakes in the south of the Yangtze River, and the red turtle rice cakes in Taiwan Province Province. Rice cakes have different flavors from north to south.
There are steamed rice cakes and fried rice cakes in the north, both of which are sweet; In addition to steaming and frying, southern rice cakes are also sliced and cooked in soup, which is both sweet and salty.
It is said that the earliest rice cakes were used to worship gods and ancestors on New Year's Eve, and later became food for the Spring Festival.
The rice cake is not only a kind of holiday food, but also brings people new hope with the passing of a year. As a poem in the late Qing Dynasty said, "People's hearts are high, and food is harmonious, so that the year is better than the year to pray for the year."