Staple Foods and Chinese New Year
Northern Noodles and Southern Rice; Dumplings and New Year Cake. Which Ones are Most Essential to a Chinese New Year’s Eve Dinner?
Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, is the most important holiday in China, and New Year’s Eve dinner is an annual banquet for all Chinese families. Which dishes have the honor of making it onto the table for this occasion can reveal what the people of each region think of fine cuisine.
The Origins of Eating Dumplings for Chinese New Year
During the early 1990’s, when CCTV’s Chinese New Year Gala program was at its peak in popularity, year after year there aired commercials advocating that people eat dumplings for Spring Festival. These commercials featured warm scenes of families making dumplings at home, and dumplings quickly became the symbolic food of Chinese New Year. Today, this “tradition” has become a symbol that people from all over the world use to associate with Chinese New Year.
New Year Cake: A Southern Chinese New Year Tradition
But China is a vast land that is home to an extreme diversity of local resources, history, and culture. So naturally, Chinese people’s taste in food is just as wide-ranging. This can help explain why more than half of all Chinese people have no special feelings toward dumplings. In southern China, New Year cake (or niangao) – not dumplings – occupies the top spot as most symbolic Spring Festival food. In the entire Yangtze River basin and the rest of southern China, it is common to make New Year cake for Chinese New Year. In northwestern Fujian, for example, there is even the saying that “There is no New Year without New Year cake.” Typically, guests are first served food and drink, and then New Year cake prepared with fried egg will be served. In this way, New Year cake acts as both a snack and a symbol of the holidays. Just a few slices of niangao are filling enough. The Chinese word for dumpling, jiaozi, is a homophone for an expression meaning “to hand over the New Year”, and dumplings thus connote good fortune. New Year cake (niangao), meanwhile, also has a phonetic connotation to a phrase meaning “to experience progress each year”, and thus similarly implies auspiciousness, making it an indispensable New Year’s dish.
Sticky Rice Cake and Spring Festival
Sticky rice cake is another essential New Year’s food. The difference between sticky rice cake and New Year cake is that while New Year cake is prepared by steaming, sticky rice cake is kneaded to a finish. Sticky rice cake also does not use glutinous rice milk. Instead, glutinous rice is first steamed hot in a pot before being ground in a stone mortar. Then it’s taken out and kneaded into a ball before finally being partitioned out into individual patty cakes and served. Freshly prepared sticky rice cake can be dipped in sugar or sesame seeds while it’s still hot. Though this method is delicious, most people prefer to let it air-dry and then store it, heating it up when it’s time to eat. Many Southern Chinese people, especially those belonging to ethnic minority groups in the southwest, actually prefer having sticky rice cakes to pass the New Year.
Northern Noodles
Chinese people’s diets change drastically as we venture up into the north. The most obvious difference is in each region’s staple foods. Northerners love the noodles that their wheat produces, and Southerners cherish their rice paddies and the dishes they contribute to. As the years have gone by, Northerners have perfected the art of noodle-making. In Shanxi province, China’s noodle capital, one could eat a different type of noodle every day of the year and never run out of new types: pulled noodles, knife-cut noodles (Dao Xiao Mian), biangbiang noodles, yi gen noodles （longevity noodles）, scissor-cut noodles… Shanxi chefs make the noodles on-site so diners can marvel at their skills. These noodle-making performances have become a delightful pre-meal spectacle.
Southern Rice
Different from northern flour, ground up rice lacks elasticity, and thus it cannot be stretched like flour noodles. Instead, southerners make rice into sticky rice cakes or press them into rice-flour noodles. Southern rice flour dishes are in no ways inferior to their northern counterparts. Just like the noodle stands up north, rice-flour noodle restaurants can be found in abundance in every southern province. Guangxi is China’s rice-flour noodle capital. Aside from its Guilin noodles, it is also home to up to ten varieties of famous noodles of all shapes - round, flat, thin, square - and tastes - savory, sour, sweet, spicy.
New Year’s Eve Dinner
Celebrating the Chinese New Year is the most joyous occasion of the year, so it wouldn’t be proper to serve the same foods people normally eat every day for this celebration. The principle for staple foods served Spring Festival is that they must be ceremonious and special.
Since northern Chinese folks normally eat noodles and mantou (buns) every day, for Chinese New Year, they eat dumplings, which are more luxurious than noodles, more refined than steamed buns, more complex than flat bread cakes, and can be filled with exquisite stuffing. Southern Chinese people are used to eating rice, so for Chinese New Year, they want to change things up by serving rice-based New Year cake and sticky rice cake.
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