An Lingrong’s Hometown Reunion Dinner: A Feast Awaited from the Start of Winter to New Year’s Eve
I. Drying White, Hanging Gold; Brewing Spirits and Curling Smoke
In the streamside and hillside villages, set against rivers and mountains, sweet potatoes are freshly dug from the terraced fields. Large and small, they still carry the fresh scent of earth. Carried to the stream in large woven bamboo baskets, they are scrubbed clean in the running water. Rough blemishes are scraped from their skins to reveal each tuber’s soft, starchy flesh. Chopped into pieces and pulped with water, the mixture is poured into wooden buckets and left to settle for half a day or a night, allowing the starch to sink to the bottom. Once the cloudy water is poured away, blocks of snow-white starch are washed clean and spread evenly across bamboo mats to dry. Bathed in sunlight, they look like snow that refuses to melt, soft and pale as a winter moon. Alongside them are the golden-red persimmons, growing half-tamed along field edges and village entrances. Knocked down with long bamboo poles, briefly scalded, and peeled, they are threaded onto string and hung beneath the eaves to dry—a garland of miniature suns.
The preparations continue with brewing and distilling spirits, smoking cured meats, and steaming and pounding glutinous rice cakes… Across Songyang in the weeks before the New Year, this familiar tableau—starch drying white, persimmons hanging gold, the rich aroma of spirits weaving through curling smoke, and the steady thud of pounding mallets—is a sight found in virtually every village and home.
Markets in Songyang County are held on days ending in one and six. The “braided granny” from Songzhuang Village in Sandu Township heads down to the county town to “have a browse”. Her husband, shouldering a sack and a bamboo basket, sees her off with warm wishes to the edge of the village. On the early bus, rocking and swaying along the route, it passes through numerous villages, picking up locals—some carrying empty baskets, others heaving heavy sacks—keen to both buy and sell at the market. By the granny’s feet rests a woven sack filled to the brim with sun-dried sweet potato starch, while her bamboo basket holds freshly dug taro roots.
Combined, sweet potato starch and taro form the base of Songyang’s *shanfen yuan* (mountain starch balls), a seasonal autumn and winter speciality that brings an essential taste of “reunion” to the New Year’s Eve feast. Steamed taro is pounded into a smooth paste, mixed with sweet potato starch at roughly a two-to-one ratio, and enriched with hot stock until it forms a thick batter (some households also fold in diced prawns, minced pork, or bamboo shoots). Kneaded into a round lump and placed in a steamer, it transforms into a semi-translucent, gelatinous disc. Ready to eat as it comes off the heat, it boasts a silky, springy bite and a delicate fragrance; it can also be sliced or cubed and prepared in countless ways—lightly stir-fried with vegetables, braised with meat, pan-fried, simmered in soup, tossed into hotpot, or even baked. When the starch dough is used as a wrapper for fillings, it takes the form of triangular *shanfen jiao* (starch dumplings) or half-moon-shaped *shanfen guo* (starch cakes).
II. “Snowflakes Drift, Grandma’s Pan-Fried Cakes”
By the time the twenty-fourth of the twelfth lunar month has passed, the market is held almost daily. The sights, scents, and spirit of the coming festival are already on display: fresh and dried produce from land and sea, steamed cakes and sweet pastries, roasted nuts, fermented rice wines, cured hams, and fragrant medicinal herbs. Whatever you require, you will find it here. Weaving through the stalls, one quietly runs through the New Year’s Eve menu in their head, ticking off ingredients and filling in any gaps to ensure everything is prepared in advance for the First Month’s visits and celebrations.
“When the snowflakes drift lightly, Grandma pan-fries the cakes; when the snow falls thickly, Grandma melts the sugar,” runs a traditional Songyang nursery rhyme. The New Year calls for ever-rising fortunes—a play on words with *gāo* (cake), which sounds like height or elevation. Who could possibly celebrate the festival without tasting them? Sister Zhuba’s stall is already surrounded by a crowd. Clad in a bright red apron, she cradles the plump, snow-white steamed rice cakes, her face glowing with festive cheer. Rattan leaves line the base of bamboo steamers, pressed into tight rounds. The prepared rice batter is poured in, then slowly steamed until fragrant vapour begins to rise. Stir the green juice of mullen leaves into the batter to make the “Green Cake”; simmer local brown sugar into a syrup for the “Red Cake”, also called “Sugar Cake”.
Hailing from Xiping Town, Sister Zhuba has been making cakes for nearly thirty years, patiently building a humble craft into a thriving trade. Upon graduating from university, her son returned home to carry on the family trade. He established a cooperative, expanded operations beyond the original workshop, and now supplies numerous restaurants and local shops across Songyang. As the twelfth lunar month arrives, demand for the sugar cakes peaks. Indispensable for ancestral offerings and festive entertaining in Songyang, the workshop temporarily takes on dozens of extra hands to keep pace. Yet Sister Zhuba still prefers to take her stall to the market herself, navigating the streets with the same unhurried rhythm as in years gone by.
III. Warming the Wine, Warming the Heart
Old village custom once dictated that brewing should begin on a carefully chosen, auspicious day. These days, as long as the season is right, the exact date is less important, giving the practice a more fluid and free rhythm. As traditional earthen stoves and large cauldrons fade from towns and villages, leaving households with limited space for home brewing, mobile distilling carts have gradually taken their place. Carrying their equipment from door to door, they provide two services: steaming the rice, where glutinous rice is cooked, cooled, and then mixed with yeast to ferment; and distilling the wine, where already fermented rice wine is refined into clear spirit. The ratio of rice, yeast and water is a closely guarded recipe in every household, which is why each family’s batch carries its own distinct character. Seedlings go into the paddies in spring, yeast is cultured in summer, and wine is brewed in autumn and winter. In a single cup, the four seasons turn.
The wine-steaming cart has passed through Maoyuan Village, and at Xu Yeyin’s home, the fresh batch has already been settled into the fermentation vats. This year, a full hundred jin of glutinous rice was steamed. The white rice, blended with red yeast, sits light and airy just below the rim. Lean in close, and you’ll hear the soft bubbling of fermentation—a lively chatter of microbes at work, brimming with energy. During the first few days, the vats demand attentive care. Each day, the floating rice and red yeast must be broken up with a shovel and pressed down to the base to encourage proper blending. Should the temperature run too high, the brew risks turning sour; as the weather turns colder, the vats must be shielded from frost. Just as people add blankets in winter, so too must the wine be wrapped for warmth. The care given is as devoted as that for family.
When the New Year’s Eve dinner table is set, heat up a few taels of the fresh brew with its lovely pink hue. Served to young and old alike, it warms the body and enlivens the room. People warm the wine, and the wine in turn warms the people. The red wine lees left after straining prove invaluable for masking gamey odours and enhancing flavour. In Songyang, locals make clever use of this by cycling it back to the dinner table. At Xu Yeyin’s New Year’s Eve dinner, you can always count on a serving of intestines or hairtail fish braised with wine lees.
IV. “Why eat ‘bitter’ food during the New Year?”
Xu infuses wine with wild fruit tree roots from the mountains. During spring and summer, the bitter herbs growing beneath the forest canopy are exceptionally tender; he never tires of them. He frequently blanches and freezes them, or dries them for winter, ensuring a steady supply for everyday meals. Yet when the New Year approaches, even if stores remain and cravings run high, he abstains. “How could we eat ‘bitter’ things during the New Year?” Xu remarks. By the same token, although locals in Songyang relish dried salted greens, they are carefully kept off the New Year’s Eve feast. However, there is one mountain specialty, available only in winter, that would never be absent from the celebratory table and pairs effortlessly with virtually any ingredient. Naturally, it is the winter bamboo shoot. The first bite of winter bamboo shoot of the year announces the true arrival of winter right on the tip of the tongue.
The New Year’s Eve feast showcases the myriad ways to prepare winter bamboo shoots. Shredded or sliced, they can be lightly stir-fried with pickled mustard greens. Sweet potato starch balls and glutinous millet cakes are both sliced and wok-tossed with shredded shoots, while diced shoots serve as the filling for starch dumplings. The Eight Treasures dish is also a household staple, chosen for its auspicious promise of “treasures arriving from all directions”. It adds a refreshing, tart and crisp contrast to a table otherwise heavy with fish and meat. Typically, it is made by stir-frying or serving cold a medley of shredded red and white radish, pickled greens, shredded bean curd, kelp and cabbage. Naturally, one of the eight “treasures” must be shredded winter shoots. For a rustic brazier-and-pot stew, large chunks of fresh shoots simmer with cured meat until the broth turns milky white. A handful of Shicang-style fried puff tofu is added at the end, yielding a sweet, savoury and fragrant dish that settles warmly in the stomach. Since fresh shoots are never quite enough to last, they are dried and salted to be savoured until the next season’s crop emerges.
V. Pleasant to the palate, and peace of mind
When planning the menu, Manager Cai preserves Hakka customs and Songyang flavours while making subtle adjustments to suit his guests. For instance, he insists on using local Songyang ham, whose traditional smoked flavour clearly distinguishes it from hams produced elsewhere in the province. For drinks, the homestay primarily serves the Shicang Hakka aged white rice wine. Made with a white, pellet-shaped fermentation starter, it differs markedly from the more common red yeast rice wine found across Songyang. Visitors travelling far to spend the New Year in Songyang naturally wish to experience local culinary traditions, but their palates must also be accommodated. There is no rigid adherence to a single regional style; after all, during the festive season, a meal should be both pleasant to the palate and comforting to the spirit.
Shicang is an ancient cluster of Hakka villages, situated about 25 kilometres south of Songyang in the “Shicangyuan” (the Shicang river valley). Aside from the aged white rice wine, Shicang tofu puffs—also known as Hakka braised tofu—have gained considerable renown, with people outside Songyang County well aware of them.
What makes Shicang tofu so exceptional lies simply in its ingredients and craftsmanship. It relies on local heirloom soybeans, carefully preserved through generations, paired with crystal-clear mountain spring water from the Shicang watershed. The master tofu-makers are patient and dependable: washing, soaking, grinding, boiling, filtering, coagulating, pressing, slicing, and deep-frying… not a single step is ever omitted. Freshly fried tofu puffs, lightly dusted with fine salt, boast a crisp exterior and a silky interior, releasing an intoxicating bean aroma. They can be stir-fried with greens, braised alongside meats, or added to stew pots first, allowing them to “drink” their fill of broth. Simmered until tender within yet resilient on the outside, each bite only enhances the soup’s depth of flavour. They are even deemed worthy of a place on the offering table for New Year rites to ancestors and deities.
On that same table, tofu brings a quiet, humble grace, but nothing commands quite as much ceremonial attention as a whole pig’s head. In leaner times, meat was a daily rarity; pigs were slaughtered only for the New Year, and the New Year, in turn, was the very reason for the slaughter. As living standards gradually rose and trade became more convenient, fewer households kept pigs, preferring to buy meat from the market instead. Grandpa Li, born in 1947, recalls a time when every family kept pigs. By the twelfth lunar month, slaughter was almost a daily occurrence in the village. Children would wake to the cries of the pig, thrilled by the bustling atmosphere, knowing meat was on the way. On the day of slaughter, the fresh offal was blanched in a large pot of clear water. Steam would billow as neighbours gathered, sharing a communal meal to reward a year’s toil. Meanwhile, the hind legs were smoked into ham, the pork belly and ribs cured into preserved meat, the skin boiled down into aspic, the large intestines preserved in rice wine lees, and the trotters stewed with Xieli tea…
VI. Grandma Song and Grandpa Li
As the year drew to a close and New Year’s Eve arrived, he would put away the film equipment and shoulder a carrying pole instead, heading to the village temple and ancestral hall. Pork, alongside chicken, duck, or fish, formed the traditional “three sacrificial offerings,” accompanied by steamed rice cakes, dried provisions, tofu, and wine, all arranged as offerings. With the passing year bringing improving fortunes, these were presented to the ancestors and the local earth god—both a thanks for the past year and a prayer for the one to come. Once the rites concluded, the offerings moved from the altar to the dining table: cold-tossed pork head, salt-wine chicken, poached duck… In Songyang, the New Year’s Eve dinner is a shared feast between the living and the ancestors and spirits, where past and present coexist, and the heavens and the human realm remain in eternal harmony.
Whether on ordinary days or New Year’s Eve, Grandpa Li and Grandma Song cooked together. She would wash the vegetables while he chopped them. When she was ready to stir-fry, he would have already poured oil into the hot wok. They sat down with their chopsticks at the same time, and cleared the table together. Yet in Songzhuang Village, the New Year’s Eve dinner is actually eaten in the morning! It is quite unusual. Grandpa Li explained that the village’s founding ancestors were farm labourers; on New Year’s Eve, they would rush to finish the reunion meal early so they could still go to work at the landlord’s estate, and the custom stuck. The advantage of an early dinner is that sons and daughters-in-law can make it down the mountain in time for the family gathering. After eating, they can head back down to their parents-in-law’s home for another meal, making it a win-win arrangement.
Having washed the bowls and cups, they would close the door to see the year out, while the stream trickled steadily in front of their gate. They have watched the Spring Festival Gala together for many years and never once found it tedious. A young couple grown old, still clinging to one another, living through tranquil years with quiet minds and a sense that the days stretch on, peacefully.
As the clock strikes midnight, the new year arrives, and the door bursts open to sound! Fireworks and firecrackers shake the earth and roar across the sky. Celebrating the great festival demands precisely this kind of stirring grandeur, so that the joy of ordinary folk may be known to the heavens and all living things. By early morning, the atmosphere is entirely new. On the first day of the Lunar New Year, some places in Songyang observe the custom of “eating a thick soup,” taking the leftover rice cakes and sweet pastries from the previous night’s dinner, adding broth, and simmering them into a sticky, comforting pot. This may be the old year’s “root of fortune,” but it also serves as a reminder to “cherish food.” To cherish food is to cherish time, and the year has, after all, passed. Yet there is no time for melancholy; the first lunar month is still full of lively celebrations.
My time in the field was short, and my pen is clumsy. As an outsider to Songyang, I came to see both the novel and the familiar. Should there be any omissions or inaccuracies, I kindly ask my friends in Songyang to point them out and add their corrections.
All photographs in this article are by the author
Editor: Yu Yang