At Spring Festival, good food is an essential ingredient when families get together for dinner to celebrate the arrival of a new year.

There are many new kinds of food on the market now. However, in Jiading people’s minds, traditional food cooked at home, such as stir-fried peanuts, fermented glutinous rice and broad beans are especially treasured.

At New Year’s Eve dinners, even the most ordinary food becomes a precious delicacy when it’s shared with family.

Broad beans a winter treat that goes well with the movies

Broad beans, also known locally as cold beans, can be a delicious food in winter if properly stored since harvesting in spring.

Years ago, watching movies was the most popular entertainment and any street with a cinema would be crowded and lined with snack vendors.

Cinemagoers would buy deep-fried shelled broad beans from the vendors and took them into the cinema to kill time when waiting for the main feature.

Such beans were also sold at Daoxiang Food Store, just opposite the old stadium on Chengzhong Road. The shop assistant would spoon the bright-yellow beans from a glass bottle and pack them in a piece of newspaper. Sometimes the oil would exude from the paper, leaving the special flavor on customers’ fingers.

Hard broad beans, another variety, are also a popular snack. The beans are dried in the sun and then stir fried with a little salt in a large iron pot until they turn deep brown.

You can take the shell off and eat them, but some locals with strong stomachs like to eat them with the shell.

The north area of Jiading is rich in broad beans, and they are usually on the market in April and May. A popular restaurant dish at that time is thick chicken soup with shelled broad beans.

The soup is cooked with the beans and minced chicken and ham. The beans will be extremely soft when it’s served. However, the simplest way is to fry the fresh beans with scallion when they are just picked.

It would be hard to imagine a taste so delicious. 

A time for reunions and good wishes

The Chinese New Year’s Eve Dinner, also known as the Family Reunion Dinner, originated in the Jin Dynasty (265-420 AD).

An article at the time described New Year’s Eve: “All the family members gather together at the dinner table and present wishes, and they stay overnight and worship the gods and ancestors.”

Zhou Zongtai, a Jiading scholar in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) described the dinner in a poem like this: “Wife and children are gathering in the room, fish, meat, melon and eggplant are on the table, all the chopsticks are busy with the food, and all the families are enjoying their happy time.”

By New Year’s Eve, local people would have prepare enough food for the entire Spring Festival holiday. Relatives and friends will give fruit and candies to each other, and people will put oranges and lychees beside pillows, symbolizing good fortune.

A good New Year’s Eve Dinner should have meat, chicken, duck, fish as well as green vegetables, bean sprouts and eggplant. Each of the dishes will have a name related to good fortune. For instance, egg dumplings are called yuanbao, meaning gold ingot, and meatballs are called tuanyuan, meanisng reunions, since it has a round shape.

Another Qing Dynasty scholar named Chen Weisong vividly described in his poems how happy the New Year’s Eve Dinner in his childhood was, when his brothers and sisters had drunk countless cups of wine and beat drums madly. After dinner they played various games and watched the fireworks bursting in the sky.

When the dinner is over, there are various customs to follow, such as receiving the kitchen god, sealing the well and staying overnight to welcome the new year.

Every family will set off fireworks and put sugar-canes in front of the door, hoping to have a good luck over the next 12 months.

The Yangs get busy frying peanuts

Grandma Yang’s family in Xuhang Village gets busier as Spring Festival approaches. After housework in the morning, Yang and her daughter-in-law start to make fried peanuts, also known as longevity nuts in Chinese.

Yang planted the peanuts herself and harvested them in October. She dried the peanuts and packed them in three bags, about 30 kilograms.

Stir frying the peanuts is a particular skill. Yang does it in the traditional way. She pours a big bowl of unprocessed salt into an iron pot. When the salt is hot enough, she pours in the peanuts in their shells. Then she takes care of the fire while her daughter-in-law would be busy stir frying the peanuts. Some people add sand when frying peanuts to make sure they are evenly heated, but Yang uses a medium heat and spends about an hour frying the peanuts continuously until she hears the slight sound of the shells bursting. When the peanuts are done, the yellowish color of the shell and the aroma coming from the kernel is guaranteed to whet your appetite.

Festival soup fit for a high-ranking official

It has been a custom since ancient times for rural families in Jiading to cook Spring Festival Soup on the 15th day of the first lunar month. It originated from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) when there was a famous Jiading scholar called Tang Shisheng who had great academic achievements but came from a poor family.

It was on the 15th day of the first lunar month that one of his students, who had become a high-ranking official, returned to the hometown to visit Tang.

When Tang met the student, he was happy for his success but felt embarrassed that he had nothing special to offer his guest.

Tang asked his wife to prepare dinner, but she didn’t have much food to cook.

But she took some red dates, water chestnuts, dried bean curd and fried bread sticks which were used for worship and put them into a big pot together with some noodles, dumplings, rice and vegetables which were leftovers from previous days. She made a pot of thick soup and hoped the student would understand.

However, the student found the soup delicious and asked Tang what it was called.

Tang hesitated for a moment and said: “It is called Spring Festival Soup.” Because in Chinese tradition, the 15th day of the lunar New Year is still in the Spring Festival holiday.

Since that time, preparing and eating Spring Festival Soup has been a local custom.

Fermented rice a popular snack

Jiuniang (fermented glutinous rice) is also called jiuban by Jiading residents.

It’s a popular snack in rural areas, especially in autumn and winter, because in summer it’s hard to keep and doesn’t taste that good.

As the weather gets colder, more and more jiuniang vendors will show up on streets and in markets, especially from late December to Spring Festival.

Usually the vendors will hawk jiuban using a very special long tone. The first character jiu is melodious and stretching like the rivers of the ancient towns of Jiading, while the tone of the next character niang will suddenly go up and ends clearly and rapidly, just like the first taste of jiuniang.

These vendors usually sell home-made jiuniang. In early times, they put jiuniang into brown pottery pots and carried them on a shoulder pole. Later, they started to use bicycles equipped with iron baskets.

The first step in making jiuniang is to wash the glutinous rice with well water and then soak it for a day and night until the rice puffs up like pearls.

Then, it is steamed in an uncapped steamer. Usually firewood rather than coal is used for the fire.

When the rice is completely cooked, water is poured on to make the rice cold on the outside but still hot inside. If the rice is too hot, the jiuniang will probably be a little bit sour; if the rice is too cold, the taste of jiuniang will not be sweet enough.

Then the rice is mixed with powdered Chinese yeast and put in a big bowl with a bamboo tube in the middle. The rice is pressed around the bamboo and when the bamboo is removed a little warm water is poured in.

After that, the bowl is covered with a quilt to ferment. After one or two days, the rice becomes the sweet jiuniang, with a fragrance that fills the room.