An Lingrong’s Hometown New Year’s Eve Dinner — Longed for from Start of Winter to New Year’s Eve
I. Drying White, Hanging Gold; Wine Fragrance, Curling Smoke
Families nestling by stream and mountain: sweet potatoes freshly dug from the hillside fields—big and small, still clinging to fresh soil. Carried in large bamboo-woven baskets down to the stream, washed clean, their rough skin and blemishes scraped away, each one pink and homely. Then chopped into chunks, blended with water into a pulp, held in a wooden barrel, and left to rest for half a day or overnight until the starch settles to the bottom. The cloudy water is poured off, the snow-white starch blocks washed out, then spread evenly on bamboo strips to dry—like drying snow that will not melt, downy white as a cold moon. There are also persimmons of molten gold, half cultivated, half wild, along the field edges and village gates, knocked down with bamboo poles, scalded in boiling water, peeled, threaded on string, and hung to dry beneath the eaves—like strings of little suns.
Then there is brewing and distilling wine, smoking cured meats, steaming and pounding glutinous rice cakes and rice-flour cakes. This scene of drying white and hanging gold, of curling wine fragrance and rhythmic hammering, before the New Year in Songyang is found in almost every village, every household.
In Songyang county town, markets are held on days numbered one and six of the lunar calendar. “Braid Granny” from Songzhuang Village in Sandu Township is heading into town to “go to market”. Her old husband, shouldering a burlap sack and a bamboo basket, earnestly sees her off to the edge of the village. The early bus rocks and sways, passing village after village, picking up passenger after passenger—some carrying empty baskets, some shouldering heavy sacks. Going to market means both buying and selling. At Braid Granny’s feet, a plastic sack holds more than half a bundle of dried sweet potato starch; inside her bamboo basket are freshly dug taros.
Sweet potato starch and taro together are the ingredients for Songyang’s “mountain-starch balls”—the seasonal flavour of autumn and winter, and above all the indispensable taste of “reunion” on the New Year’s Eve table. Steamed taro is pounded to a paste, mixed with sweet potato starch at a ratio of roughly two to one, and poured over with rich stock until stirred into a thick paste (some families also add diced shrimp, minced meat, or bamboo shoot granules). It is then kneaded into balls, steamed in a bamboo tray until translucent and gelatinous. At this point it can be eaten as it is—smooth and springy, with a delicate, savoury fragrance. Or it may be further sliced and cubed, stir-fried with vegetables, braised with meat, pan-fried, added to soup, blanched in hot pot, or roasted—however many the ways, the options are flexible. And if mountain starch is used as the outer skin, wrapped around a filling, you get triangular mountain-starch dumplings or half-moon-shaped mountain-starch cakes.
II. “Snowflakes Drift, Grandmother Fries Cakes”
Once the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month has passed, there is a market almost every day. The atmosphere and flavour of the festive season are already arrayed in full display: dried and fresh bounty from sea and land, cakes and sweet rice confections, roasted nuts, yeast-lees and sweet rice wine, cured ham and salted pork, fragrant herbs and medicinal roots… whatever one needs, nothing is lacking. Threading and pressing through the crowd, one runs quietly through the New Year’s Eve menu in one’s head, checking for omissions and gaps, so that the first month’s visits and exchanges are fully prepared in advance.
“Snowflakes drift, grandmother fries cakes; snowflakes fall thick, grandmother fries sweets.” So goes the Songyang nursery rhyme. Cake upon cake, rising higher — how could one greet the New Year without cake? Sister Zhuhua’s cart is already ringed with people. She wears a bright red apron and cradles a pale, moist steamed sponge cake in her hands, her face lit with festive cheer. Bamboo steamer trays are lined with broad bamboo leaves, arranged in a tight circle to form a round frame; the prepared rice batter is poured in, set over the fire and steamed slowly until hot steam billows up. Stir cudweed (Gnaphalium affine) juice into the batter and you have “green cake”; add a syrup boiled from locally made brown sugar and you have “red cake”, also called “sugar cake”.
Sister Zhuhua, from Xiping Town, has been making cakes for nearly thirty years, patiently turning a craft into a livelihood. Her son returned home after graduating from university, took up his mother’s trade, founded a cooperative, and expanded into a workshop that now supplies restaurants and shops throughout Songyang. By the twelfth lunar month, demand for sugar cakes reaches its peak — Songyang families need them for both ancestral rites and welcoming guests — and the workshop may have scores of people working overtime. Yet Sister Zhuhua still loves to take her cart to the market, calling out her wares along the street, unhurried as in days of old.
III. People Warm Wine, Wine Warms People
In the old village custom, even wine-making called for a solemnly chosen date. Today, so long as the season is right, the specific day matters less; there is more flow and freedom about it. Yet in town and village alike, traditional clay stoves and great cauldrons grow ever scarcer, and home-brewing conditions are limited, so there gradually emerged those mobile distilling vans, carrying their equipment from street to street and village to village, offering door-to-door service. One purpose is to steam rice — the glutinous rice is steamed, left to cool, then further mixed with yeast starter and set to ferment; the other is to distill wine — already-brewed rice wine may be further distilled into a strong spirit. The proportions of rice, yeast starter, and water differ from household to household, each with its own refinement, and thus each with its own flavour. Rice is transplanted in spring, yeast starter made in summer, wine brewed in autumn and winter — a single cup holds the four seasons.
The distilling van has already passed through Maoyuan Village; at Xu Yeyin’s home the new wine is in the vat. This year a full fifty kilos of glutinous rice were steamed. White glutinous rice mixed with red yeast rises fluffy and buoyant, first floating at the mouth of the vat. Bend down and tilt your ear, and you can hear the soft pop-pop of bubbles as fermentation stirs — the microbes at play, full of life. For the first few days, careful tending is needed: each day, a spatula must be used to break up the floating rice and red yeast, pressing them down to the bottom of the vat to help them meld. If the temperature runs high, the wine turns sour; and as the weather grows colder, the vat must be shielded from freezing. You add blankets for yourself, and you add blankets for the wine too — tending it is truly like caring for a loved one.
By the time the New Year’s Eve table is set, a small cupful of the rosy freshly brewed wine is warmed — young or old, all partake, warming the body and kindling the gathering. People warm the wine, and the wine returns the warmth in kind. And the red wine lees strained out after decanting are a fine helper for banishing fishiness and deepening flavour; Songyang folk all put them to clever use, looping them back to the dinner table. On Xu Yeyin’s New Year’s Eve table, there is always a dish of wine-lees braised intestines or wine-lees braised hairtail.
IV. “Why Must We Still Eat ‘Bitterness’ at New Year?”
Xu Yeyin infuses wine with roots of wild fruit trees from the hills. In spring and summer, the bitter greens growing beneath the canopy are especially tender and fresh — one could never grow tired of eating them. He blanches and freezes them, or turns them into dried vegetables, so the household may reach for them whenever the fancy strikes. But when New Year comes, even if there is still a stockpile left, he will not touch them, however much he might long. “How can we still be eating ‘bitterness’ at New Year?” he says. The same holds for dried mustard greens, which Songyang people adore, yet they are taboo on the New Year’s Eve table. But there is one mountain specialty that comes only in winter and is utterly indispensable on the New Year’s Eve spread — one that pairs effortlessly with just about any ingredient. It is, of course, winter bamboo shoots. The first bite of winter bamboo shoots of the year announces, from the very tip of the tongue, the true arrival of winter.
On the New Year’s Eve table, winter bamboo shoots may be enjoyed in any number of ways. Shredded or sliced, they are stir-fried with pickled mustard greens; mountain-starch balls and golden millet cakes, both sliced thin, are tossed with bamboo-shoot strips over a blazing flame, while diced shoots wrapped as filling become triangular mountain-starch dumplings. Eight-Treasure pickles are another household staple — the name promises “treasure from all eight directions,” a lucky blessing — and among all the rich meats and grand dishes of the New Year’s Eve feast, they bring a welcome tang and crunch. Typically a mix of shredded white and red radish, pickled greens, mingfu shreds, kelp, cabbage, and other julienned vegetables, stir-fried or tossed in a cold salad — and one of its eight treasures must always be “winter bamboo-shoot strips.” Set the brazier under the great wok: plump winter shoots, cut into generous chunks, simmer alongside salt-cured pork until the broth turns milky white, then tuck in a few Shicang fried tofu puffs. Fresh, sweet, savoury, and rich — truly a comfort that settles deep into the belly. And when fresh shoots have been eaten to the very last, there are dried shoots and salted shoots to carry one through until the new season’s growth returns.
V. Pleasant on the Tongue, Must Please the Heart Too
When Boss Cai plans the menu, he keeps Songyang’s flavours and Hakka customs at the heart of it, while making small adjustments to suit the palates of travelling guests. The ham, for instance, must always be local Songyang ham — its traditional smoke-cured character sets it apart at once from hams made elsewhere in the province. For drink, the house special is Shicang Hakka’s traditional white rice wine, brewed from glutinous rice using round, ball-shaped yeast starter, quite unlike the broader Songyang tradition of red yeast rice wine. Visitors who come far for a New Year in Songyang naturally want a taste of local food culture, yet one must also mind their preferences; the menu is not confined to one regional style — at this most festive of times, a meal should please both tongue and heart.
Shicang is a cluster of ancient Hakka villages, situated in the “Shicang Valley” (the Shicang stream valley) roughly 25 kilometres south of Songyang. Besides the white rice spirit, Shicang’s fried tofu puffs — also called Hakka puffed tofu — enjoy a fine reputation that has spread beyond Songyang County itself; even in distant towns, people have heard of them.
The goodness of Shicang tofu comes down to raw materials and craft: the local heirloom soybean varieties, saved and replanted generation after generation, combined with the clear, cold mountain spring water of the Shicang Valley. The old tofu makers are patient and dependable: washing the beans, soaking them, grinding them into milk, boiling the milk, straining it, adding coagulant to set the curd, pressing it into shape, cutting into blocks, deep-frying… every step observed, none skipped. A freshly fried tofu puff, dipped in a pinch of fine salt, is crisp without and silken within, the bean fragrance bursting at every bite. Tofu puffs can be stir-fried with greens, braised with meat, or dropped first into any simmering hot pot so they “drink” their fill of broth until they turn chewy outside and melting inside — one bite and you taste how rich the soup truly is. At festivals, when families make offerings to ancestors and gods, tofu puffs earn their place on the altar.
On the altar, the plain and humble offering is tofu; the grand and commanding one is a whole pig’s head. In harder days, meat on the table was rare, and the pig was slaughtered only at New Year — the pig was killed for the feast, and the feast justified the slaughter. Later, as life grew easier and trade more convenient, fewer families kept pigs of their own; most simply ordered and collected them from the market. Grandpa Li, born in 1947, still remembers that as a child every household had a pig, and by the twelfth lunar month, nearly every day somewhere in the village a pig was being slaughtered. In the mornings, the children were woken by the pigs’ squealing; they found it thrilling and joyful, knowing there would be meat to eat. On slaughter day, the fresh, still-warm offal was parboiled in a great wok of clear water, steam billowing, neighbours gathering to fortify one another against the year’s hardship. The hind legs could be cured into ham; pork belly and spare ribs were prime cuts for air-dried cured meat; the skin went into aspic; the intestines were dressed with wine lees; the trotters were stewed in Xielicha herbal tea…
VI. Granny Song and Grandpa Li
When New Year’s Eve came, he set aside the film gear and shouldered his load to the Earth God temple and the ancestral hall. Pork, together with chicken, or duck, or fish, formed the “three offerings”; joined by cakes, dried goods, tofu, and wine, they were arranged as tribute on the altar. The year had passed, fortune looked brighter — the offerings were laid before the ancestors and the earth god, gratitude for the old year and blessing for the new. And once the ceremony ended, down from the altar and onto the dining table: cold-dressed pig’s head, salt-and-wine chicken, poached duck… The New Year’s Eve dinner in Songyang is shared between the living and the ancestors and gods — past and present all at once, heaven and earth and the human world in perpetual constancy.
Grandpa Li and Granny Song cook together whether on an ordinary day or on New Year’s Eve. Granny washes the vegetables, Grandpa chops them. When Granny is stir-frying, Grandpa has already poured oil into the hot wok. They pick up their chopsticks together; they clear the table together. And the New Year’s Eve dinner in Songzhuang Village — it is eaten at breakfast! Truly a curiosity. Grandpa Li explains that the founding ancestor of Songzhuang had been a hired farmhand; on the last night of the year he would finish his New Year’s Eve dinner early, then go on to work at the landlord’s house, and thus the habit was born. The advantage of an early dinner is that the son and daughter-in-law can come early for the reunion; after the meal, they can head down the mountain to the parents-in-law’s for a second New Year’s feast — a solution that serves both sides.
The old couple wash the dishes, close the door, and keep the New Year’s Eve vigil; the stream before the gate murmurs on. They have watched the Spring Festival Gala together for many years and never once found it tedious. Young lovers, old companions — steadfast side by side; the years steady, the heart simple and quiet, and the days stretch long.
At midnight the new year arrives — open the door and be greeted by the din! Fireworks and firecrackers shake heaven and earth; a proper New Year must have such thunder and grandeur, for the joy of ordinary folk must be known to all between heaven and earth. Rise early and the New Year greets you. On the first day of the New Year, in some parts of Songyang families “eat pottage”: leftover rice-flour cakes and sugar cakes from the New Year’s Eve table, simmered in broth into one sticky, starchy pot. Perhaps these are the “lucky roots” of the old year, and a reminder to cherish food. To cherish food is also to cherish time — and so, another year has truly passed. But there is no time for melancholy; the first lunar month is still full of bustle and noise.
The time for gathering material was short, and my writing shallow and clumsy — an outsider’s view of Songyang, seeing both what is new and what is near. If there are errors or omissions, I welcome friends from Songyang to correct and supplement.
All photographs taken by the author
Editor: Yuyang