World Foodie Guide

Chinese New Year is the most important time of the year for Chinese people. It starts on the first day of the first lunar month and lasts for fifteen days. There are various customs that some families perform during this period, and it’s also a time, and often the only time, when entire extended families will get together.

As my parents live in Costa Rica, and before that in Germany, I’ve not traditionally celebrated Chinese New Year with them much. I remember being in Hong Kong once during Chinese New Year and my grandmother and all my aunts were busy preparing New Year’s Eve dinner. My grandmother had just returned from a visit to her ancestral village in Shunde, across the border in mainland China, and had brought back a live snake to cook for dinner!

Over the last few years, all the London-based relatives have gathered together for Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner, usually at my Aunt 10′s house, but this year we met at Aunt 9′s, because she had just moved into her new house.

We arrived as early as we could, so that I could hang out in the kitchen and watch the food preparation. But my aunt and uncle had already done most of it! There was a mixture of traditional New Year dishes and non-traditional dishes.

Boiled dumplings or jiaozi are a traditional New Year food (because their shape resembles ingots used in China in the olden days), particularly in northern China, but I don’t think I’ve ever eaten dumplings at any of our family gatherings. Hot pot is also eaten during Chinese New Year in some parts of China, but I’ve not had this during Chinese New Year either. I do eat a lot of hot pot during the winter though and it’s one of my favourite meals. Again, it’s an excellent meal to have with lots of friends and family and can last hours. Fish is usually served on New Year’s Eve, as it sounds like ‘surplus’ in Cantonese. My aunt and uncle did look for fish when they went food shopping, but couldn’t find anything that they liked. Anyway, we didn’t have any of these traditional dishes!

In fact, I don’t think we’re a particularly traditional Chinese family (we’ve probably lived in the West too long!). One custom that we do maintain, however, is that of giving out lucky red envelopes containing money. Adults give these to the children. As I’m married, I have to give out envelopes too, although I still receive money from some of my elders…

One New Year dish that we did have was whole dried scallops, whole dried Chinese mushrooms and black sea moss, served on a bed of lettuce. The black sea moss is called ‘fat choi’ in Cantonese (which sounds like Cantonese for ‘to prosper’/'be wealthy’), and lettuce in Cantonese again sounds like ‘choi’, which means wealth. It’s also one of the only times in the year when we get to eat whole dried scallops, as they can be very expensive.

One dish that is connected to Chinese New Year was my uncle’s home-made Dongpo meat. This is a very famous Chinese delicacy from Hangzhou, named after the Song Dynasty poet and governor of Hangzhou, Su Dongpo. The locals were so grateful to him for building a dam (Su Dam) that they would bring him large chunks of pork on Chinese New Year, as they knew of his penchant for braised pork. Instead, he had the meat cut up to give to the workers on the dam, along with the recipe and a postscript to serve it with wine. The recipe was misread and the pork was instead cooked in wine.

Very simply, Dongpo meat is pork belly, tied with string (to firm up the meat) and braised for four hours in soy sauce, Chinese cooking wine and star anise. And it was delicious! The combination of fatty skin and tender meat was exquisite. When I called my mother about this dish, she told me the story behind Dongpo meat.

There was also nian gao (Mandarin pronunciation) or leen go (Cantonese pronunciation), which was home-made by my aunt’s friend. This is a traditional Chinese New Year sweet, made with glutinous rice flour, starch, salt, water and very dark sugar (that you can get in Chinese supermarkets, called peen tong). I’d never had nian gao before. So it was fascinating to watch my aunt heat up the wok, beat an egg and dip each slice into it before frying it a bit. I wasn’t sure about the taste, but my younger cousins assured me that nian gao is best eaten with egg, to achieve the balance of sweet and savoury. More importantly, it stops the nian gao from sticking to the wok.

There were plenty of oranges to symbolise gold (yes, it’s all about wealth at Chinese New Year). Mandarin oranges are called ‘gum’ in Cantonese, which sounds like Cantonese for ‘gold’. We also had traditional sweets – lotus seeds and coconut covered with a light dusting of icing sugar. They weren’t too sugary and absolutely delicious.

So that’s how my family celebrated Chinese New Year this year…

Gong Hei Fat Choi again! Wishing you a prosperous Year of the Rat!

And if you’d like to make a traditional Chinese New Year dish, here’s a delicious one from Bee Zhang, who kindly agreed to share her recipe for Teochiu Braised Goose on World Foodie Guide.

Check out the Useful Info page for more informational posts on Chinese food.

Helen Yuet Ling Pang @ World Foodie Guide

Tags: Chinese, Chinese New Year, cooking, food, food & travel, traveleating