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A couple of days before the Chinese New Year of 2004, my friend Fan Qun, her husband and I travelled by bus, minibus, boat and, finally, foot, to her family’s remote village in the hills of Hunan province; her two brothers, migrant workers in Guangzhou, had also returned for the festival. On New Year’s Eve, we rounded up a rooster from the paddy fields outside and her father dispatched it quickly with a cleaver, while the meat of a fattened pig that had already been slaughtered was smoked above the kitchen fire. Fan Qun’s father made offerings to his ancestors at a domestic altar laid with the pig’s head, a whole smoked fish and a block of tofu, as well as enamelled mugs of rice wine and homegrown tea.
All day, Fan Qun’s mother and sister-in-law laboured in the kitchen. A chicken stew hung in a blackened cauldron over the fire; another pot filled with dried radishes sat in the embers. Steam billowed from the woks as the two women sizzled meats and vegetables on an old-fashioned, wood-fired range. Mid-afternoon, they brought out the feast: sweet, golden fritters of glutinous rice, home-cured bacon and carp, Cantonese roast duck brought home by the brothers, a magnificent rooster soup with medicinal herbs, dried squid with jujubes, smoked pork intestines, dishes of tofu and homegrown vegetables and a potful of rice with sweet potatoes. The young nieces, dressed in festive scarlet and pink, sang a song. Then we drank toasts of grain liquor and Coca-Cola and ate. At midnight, we all went outside to light firecrackers that snapped, sputtered and echoed up and down the valley.
The New Year’s Eve reunion dinner (tuan nian fan) is at the heart of Lunar New Year celebrations all over the world. Traditionally, family members return to their ancestral homes for a sumptuous banquet of home-cooked dishes, followed by a week or two of idling and visiting relatives and friends. In rural areas of China, home-reared pork is often served, along with chicken and a whole fish, the latter because the phrase “a fish every year” (nian nian you yu) sounds the same as “a surplus every year”. But as the Chinese world is on a scale to rival Christendom, local festive food customs vary as much as global Christmas dinners. In the wheat-eating north of China, people traditionally prepare jiaozi dumplings, while the Sichuanese steam fat slices of pork belly in clay bowls packed with salted vegetables. In many parts of the country, families gather around bubbling hotpots packed with meatballs, quail eggs, chunks of pork belly and other delicacies.
While the symbolic whole fish is almost ubiquitous on the Chinese festive table, the Cantonese are particularly playful with the auspicious meanings of their New Year dishes (the Chinese language is replete with homonyms and therefore ripe for punning). Slabs of New Year Cake, a sweet pudding made from glutinous rice, are eaten over the holidays because their name, nian gao, plays on another word with the same sound (gao): “higher” — in wealth, school grades, status or stature. In advance of the festivities, people gift each other coupons that can be redeemed at specific restaurants or shops for this and other seasonal cakes, also known as gao, made from radish and taro (“radish cake futures,” my Cantonese friend Roberta quips). Kumquats and mandarins are served because their golden colour invites prosperity, along with ruddy deep-fried chickens — red being the traditional colour of Chinese celebrations.
In Hong Kong and other centres of Cantonese society, restaurants create menus of lucky-number eight dishes, each one with a name that signifies luck, wealth or one of the other bonuses of life. “So many people dine out around the New Year that we have to offer set menus because the kitchen cannot cope with à la carte,” says Lau Kin-wai, veteran food columnist and proprietor of Kin’s Kitchen in the Wanchai district. His restaurant is offering two set menus this year, priced per table at figures in Hong Kong dollars involving lots of auspicious “8”s: the pricier “Four Seasons of Prosperity” menu, for example, costs HK$9,888 ($1,270/£1,030) for a table of 12. Every dish has a poetic name imbued with optimistic meanings, seasonal symbolism or punning words, from “Make a Fortune, Increase Wealth and Honour” (a dish made with hair moss — facai, which sounds the same as “make a fortune” — and “golden coin” dried scallops) to “Golden Dragon Welcomes the New Year” (tiger shrimps in cheese sauce with egg noodles) and “Dancing Phoenix Augments the Joyful Occasion” (deep-fried chicken).
“When I was small,” says Lau, “people didn’t have much money and cooked more themselves, so the New Year’s Eve dinner normally took place at home. We would stock up on seasonal foods like cured pork and dried oysters [their name a pun on ‘good business’], as well as lucky sweets and seeds to offer visitors. On the first day of the New Year, we would eat a vegetarian meal because the markets were closed.
“These days,” he adds, “more and more Hongkongers have their celebratory meal in restaurants. And in the past few years, they’ve been increasingly popping over to Shenzhen on the mainland, where they can eat lavishly for half the price, or seizing the chance to fly off on a foreign holiday.”
Cantonese food customs have spilled over into diaspora communities. Chinese restaurants all over the world offer New Year cakes and symbolic menus. In recent years, an auspicious Singaporean dish has become wildly popular in Chinese circles all over the world: yu sheng, or “prosperity toss”. A colourful assembly of shredded ingredients, including raw fish, are bathed in a sweet dressing, then everyone around the table tosses the food together with their chopsticks while voicing good wishes for the year ahead — and the higher the ingredients fly above the table, the “higher” the luck. This year, far from China, that New Year with Fan Qun’s family a distant memory, I’ll be celebrating over a home-cooked Shanghainese feast in London — and I’m looking forward to tossing the prosperity salad while welcoming the Year of the Snake.
Fuchsia Dunlop is the author of “Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food”, Fortnum & Mason Food Book of 2024
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