Family tries new dishes after living in Lanzhou
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CHEN Jie was born in Shanghai, but spent most her childhood in Lanzhou, in northwest China’s Gansu Province. She returned to the city in 2000 to attend university.
She will have Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner with her parents, her husband and 3-year-old son and her in-laws in Shanghai. She shared her experiences of the reunion dinner over the years.
“My parents went to Gansu Province to work, and had home leave every two or four years, when we could come back to Shanghai for the festival. At other times we celebrated in Lanzhou,” Chen said.
So on their Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner table, they had — and still have — both traditional Shanghai and Gansu dishes.
“We cooked the meal ourselves in Lanzhou, and usually had sixikaofu (四喜烤麸), a dish representing good blessings, and babaofan (八宝饭),” Chen recalled.
“And a must-have was stir fried celery with soybean sprouts, as the sprout also has the name ruyicai (如意菜).” Literally meaning “as you wish” in Chinese, ruyicai is considered a sign for good luck.
Because some of the ingredients could not be found in Lanzhou at that time, preparations usually started a month in advance.
“We had to make things like red bean paste (for babaofan) from scratch,” Chen said. “Some ingredients were mailed to us by our relatives.”
When living in Lanzhou, some northern style and local dishes the family made included fried meatballs (usually made with minced pork, sometimes with carrot added) and youguozi (油果子, a sweet treat made with fried flour dough that comes in various shapes).
“I also have a personal favorite, a very local dish called yangyugege (洋芋格格, literally meaning potato princess) but we weren’t good at making it and asked some locals for help,” Chen said.
“You mix mashed potato with minced meat, mashed carrot and seasoning, stuff the filling in leavened dough wrapper, about the size of half a palm, and then fry it.”
Beef and mutton play a very important role in Chinese northwestern cuisine, so Chen’s family also prepare such dishes for their New Year’s Eve dinner, but with a southern twist; they add sugar.
The stewed beef we cook is slightly sweet, said Chen, and they usually make braised or sweet-and-sour flavored mutton.
“There’s also a Shanghai dish we all love, bingtangyangrou (冰糖羊肉, rock candied and braised mutton) — It’s very sweet. You first braise the lamb in soy sauce, then add lots of rock candy, and let it simmer for three or four hours,” she explained.
“There have also been changes over the years. While we were in Lanzhou, we had more red meat dishes, and since returning to Shanghai we have more freshwater fish and seafood dishes,” Chen said.
Fish is an important part of the dinner, and the way the family cook it has also changed.
“Now we steam a good, fresh fish and cook some shrimp and crab, whereas before we usually braised a carp,” she said.
Chen also said that the atmosphere in celebrating the Spring Festival is different in the north and south.
“It’s a very serious thing in the north. Chinese New Year was a very big deal back then, and there were steps you followed. Even the menu was planned and served in order,” she said.
When Chen was a child, because it was hard to make some of the dishes as the ingredients were hard to find, there was great anticipation and high expectations for the Chinese New Year meal.
But now, as it’s not so difficult to get ingredients for special dishes, passion for the festival has cooled down, she said.
“Now in addition to must-have dishes, we’d usually cook what we want to eat for the dinner, whether they’re for the festival or not,” Chen said.
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