Festival FeatuRe
by
In northern part of China, people eating dumplings when celebrating the spring festival. The Chinese dumplings are wheat slices filled with different materials. In northern China, most common food ingredients seeing in the dumplings are cabbage, celery, lamb, beef and pork. In ancient China, meat was very expensive, so dumplings were considered to be luxury foods. Therefore, only on spring festival, elders in every family would kill the cattle they have and made delicious dumplings. There is also a tale about eating dumplings: children must drink the entire dumpling soup after eating dumplings; it will bring bad lucks if they do not. Although this tale seems funny, it actually has some scientific evidence to support it. Since dumplings are very hard to digest, drinking dumpling soup will help small children to digest the food and stay away from stomachache.
Food has always been closely related to the festivals. On different festivals, people will hold various events to celebrate. Food is an important ingredient of festivals and we would like to take a closer look at it. In the following sections, we will introduce Spring Festival in China and Korea, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Thanksgiving, Easter and Epiphany Festival.
Asian Section
In China, a country with a long history, there are many traditional festivals and many food are typical for some certain festivals. For instance, on mid autumn festival, people would have mooncake at night; on Spring Festival, dumplings and rice cakes are a must ;on Double Ninth Festival, people would have Double Ninth Gao; on Tomb-sweeping Day, people would have sweet green rice ball, a typical dessert that is green and sticky etc.
Spring Festival
In Korea, “Year cake” and “Year drink” are the necessary foods people must have during spring festival. “Year cake” is a type of rice cake. In Korean tradition, having the year cake representing that the person is getting one year older. “Year drink” is a kind of alcohol that Korean people drink on spring festival. Although it is in winter, people still prefer to drink the cold year drink.
In the southern part of China, people have rice balls instead of dumplings and rice cakes. Rice balls are usually filled with sesame sauce or peanut sauce. It is very soft and sweet. When cooking the rice ball, the elder people in each family will put one coin in one random rice ball. The person who gets the coin will have the best wishes from the entire family and be lucky the next year. This tradition is very similar to the trinket tradition of French people when celebrating the Epiphany festival.
By Lianyan Gu, Henry Dai, Junyi Chen