The most important feast is on New Year's Eve. Cooking for it begins several days in advance because the feast includes a multitude of dishes. Typical things to buy include hams, dried ducks, and other meats because meat, rather than vegetables, is the focus of this luxury meal. Advance preparations are necessary because using knives or cleavers during the first days of the new year might "cut off" the family's luck, so food must be cut up before the holiday. The meal generally begins with snacks such as honeyed pork, lotus seeds, and other treats offered in a tray fitted with small dishes. This symbolizes the unity of many people in one family. The final dish is a soup, often prepared by an older relative. Again the many ingredients in one dish symbolize the family. Bright orange-colored fruits, such as kumquats and tangerines with the green leaves still attached, are arranged in dishes on the table and in front of the household gods. Their golden color symbolizes joy. Celebrations continue for three days, with festive meals centered on meat dishes every day.
The precise dishes chosen vary from region to region, but foods of symbolic significance are always included.
Northern Chinese
People from northern China make large numbers of jiao zi for the New Year's celebration. These are dumplings filled with chopped pork, cabbage, ginger, and scallions, which are served throughout the holiday season. (Further south similar dumplings are shaped as gold ingots called huan bao to symbolize wealth and good fortune.) The dumplings are served as a side dish with dipping sauces of vinegar and sesame oil or soy sauce, and small dishes of pickles, roasted peanuts, and hard-boiled eggs with crackled shells cooked for several hours in tea. When the eggs are served, shelled and cold, they are beautifully marbled with the tea. For the New Year's meal, northerners frequently cook one very large dish of fried pork rather than the many smaller dishes found further south. Another special dish northerners choose for this season is a Mongolian barbecue. This is a vessel of broth kept heated by a small charcoal or alcohol burner. Guests can pick up thin slices of beef, veal, pork, or mushrooms and dip them first in the boiling liquid, then in soy sauce.
Although beef dishes are sometimes served in northern China, the favorite meat at New Year is pork. One celebratory way of eating it is to mix it with ginger, scallions, chopped bamboo shoots, and seasonings and form it into large meatballs, each weighing 3–4 ounces, which are then steamed between layers of Napa cabbage. These whoppers of the meatball world are called lion's head meatballs.
Taiwanese and southern Chinese
Long, thin foods such as noodles are eaten to symbolize long life. To cut them would shorten life, so they are twirled around chopsticks. Seafood, served as a whole fish and often cooked with ginger and scallions, is popular because the Chinese word for fish can also mean "early" and "coming son," predicting the birth of a boy. Other popular foods also derive from puns: candied kumquats, because part of their Chinese ideogram means "gold"; lotus seeds, because the name also means "many children"; dried oyster, which literally means "something good is about to happen."
The dinner dishes are many and are often served banquet style — one after the other — rather than home style — all at once. Expensive items such as shark's fin soup, bird's nest soup, and pickled jellyfish are served as a sign of status. Eight Precious Rice is a similar status dish. It is made from sweet glutinous rice studded with almonds, lotus seeds, dates, bean paste, and other sweet things. There are also New Year puddings made from sweetened rice flour and millet or from water chestnut paste. Slices of these are fried and served with jasmine tea. Rice is not offered with the meal, but is served at the end. In this polite
tradition, the host implies that the food is poor; therefore the guests need to fill up with rice. However, to accept it would be an insult, indicating there had not been enough good things to eat. Thus, the rice is always declined.
February 12, New Year (Sol). Korean
In the Korean calendar, this is the beginning of the year 4335 of the era of Tan'gun, the progenitor of the Korean people.
Like the Chinese, Koreans set off firecrackers during New Year's celebrations to scare away evil spirits. Also like the Chinese, Koreans celebrate the New Year for three days. Family visits are important, especially visits to grandparents. Roasted chestnuts are often given to children as a treat.
FOOD AND DRINK
Koreans do not have ritual feasts at Sol; rather, each family or community celebrates in its own way. The most popular festival dish is bulgogi, which is strips of lean beef marinated in soy sauce with ginger, garlic, and scallions. Often people cook their own meat on tabletop hotplates, but the dish can also be sautéed on an ordinary kitchen stove. Kimchi, the national dish, is also served, as it is at every meal. This pickle is made from Napa cabbage seasoned with onions, garlic, ginger, and chilies. Small dishes, called collectively na mool, are also served with bulgogi. They include variations on kimchi made with cucumber, beets, vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic, shredded daikon radish mixed with chilies and rice wine vinegar, and spinach or Swiss chard, boiled and tossed with chilies, scallions, sesame oil, and pine nuts or sesame seeds.
February 12, New Year (Tet Nguyen Dan). Vietnamese
Like the Chinese, the Vietnamese welcome New Year by wearing new clothes, settling old accounts, watching fireworks and parades, and feasting. Villages often celebrate with some special event, such as a puppet show or a display of dancing or martial arts.
FOOD AND DRINK
The most famous Tet dish is called seven styles of beef. The beef is cut, sliced, cubed, made into meatballs, barbecued, and so on; then all the different preparations are arranged on a large platter and served with salads, rice, noodles, and French-style bread rolls. Goi are also often served at Tet. These are rice wrappers presented on a big plate and surrounded by vegetables, herbs, and bean sprouts. Guests take a wrapper and add a lettuce leaf and whichever of the other items they like, roll it up, and dip it into a sauce made from peanuts and hoisin sauce.
February 12, Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras. Christian
Shrove Tuesday—Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday in French—marks the final midwinter fling before Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten fast. Traditionally, believers confessed and were absolved (shrived) of their sins before the fast, then they consumed the last of luxuries such as dairy foods and meat. In England and France people now use milk and eggs to make the traditional pancakes. In Finland, the Shrove Tuesday specialty is a bun filled with almond paste and whipped cream. In many Roman Catholic countries Shrove Tuesday is the culminating day of Carnival—a word deriving from the Latin words carne vale, "farewell to meat." Carnival parades and balls with masked dancers and costumed figures from popular myth are the annual highlight in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Venice, Italy, and New Orleans in the United States as well as many other Mediterranean, South American and Caribbean cities.
February 13, New Year (Losar). Tibetan
On New Year's Eve Tibetans decorate an altar with as many candies and fruits as possible. They also include khabsa, a homemade deep-fried dough twist that comes in many shapes and sizes. Mo-mo, steamed dumplings of ground meat and onions, take a long time to cook so they are reserved for New Year, which is the major celebration of the Tibetan calendar. Luxury foods such as rock candy, dried fruits, and nuts are eaten. Buttered tea thick enough to float a coin is the traditional drink. At the celebratory meal everyone, including a child in a mother's womb, receives equal portions.
February 13, Ash Wednesday. Christian
FOOD AND DRINK
From the Middle Ages salt cod was a winter staple, especially for Lent and fast days, when meat, eggs, and milk products were both hard to get and forbidden by the Church. But cooks in the Catholic countries of Europe turned hardship to blessing by inventing literally hundreds of ways to cook it. In France there are more recipes for salt cod than for any other single fish. Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and the countries of South America and the Caribbean also have a myriad of salt cod dishes, now often served throughout the year.
Classics include:
- Brandade de morue—salt cod pureed with milk and olive oil (France)
- Bacalao a la Vizcaina—salt cod with dried peppers, tomatoes and cayenne (Basque region of Spain)
- Bacalao al Pil—garlic and pepper-flavored salt cod (Spain)
- Salt Fish in Chemise—salt cod cooked with tomatoes and onions and topped with eggs (Caribbean)
- Baccala alla Livornese—salt cod stewed in tomato sauce (Italy)
- Taramasalata—salted cod roe pureed with lemon juice and olive oil (Greece)
- Cod a Bràs—salt cod with fried potatoes, onions and eggs. (Portugal)
(See recipe for Italian Salted Cod Croquettes.)
February 22, Eid al-Adha (The Feast
of Sacrifice). Islamic
This Islamic festival celebrates
the time when Abraham showed his obedience to God by agreeing to sacrifice
his son, Ishmael. In contrast to the story in Genesis, in the Qur'an, Abraham
blindfolded himself so he wouldn't see his son die. He struck the blow
to kill his son. However, God substituted a ram for Ishmael. In memory
of this, Muslims now slaughter rams at Eid al-Adha, but they do not make
the meat the center of a family meal rather, it is distributed as gifts
to neighbors and the poor.
FOOD AND DRINK
Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha
with rounds of visits at which sweet desserts are the typical foods offered.
Baklava, a nut and honey filo
pastry, and kadaife, made from a pastry like shredded wheat and walnuts,
are typical of the sweet pastries served.
February 26, Purim. Jewish
This festival commemorates the rescue of the Jews, living in what is now Iran, from a plot to kill them by Haman, an advisor to the king. The queen, Esther, who was Jewish, pleaded with her husband to save the Jews. When this story is read in the synagogue, children rattle noisemakers every time Haman's name is mentioned.
FOOD AND DRINK
The Purim treat best known in America is homentashen—three-cornered pastries, shaped like Haman's hat, with fillings such as poppyseeds, raisins, prunes, dates, figs, and apricot preserves. The Sephardic Jewish tradition has a different pastry—Hojuelos de Haman, Haman's ears, made from thin pastry, cut in crescents and twisted so the ends stick up like ears.