The Lunar New Year has many traditions associated with it, and while many of these are gradually being thrown out the window by a generation too preoccupied to bother, the New Year's Eve family dinner remains entrenched in Taiwanese society. All kinds of dishes, many of them bad for the waistline and blood pressure, are essential to see in the New Year properly, for, as we are told, each dish has important symbolic significance.
The first dish on a New Year's Eve menu is often a cold mixed platter, usually with a choice of five types of food. Regularly to be seen are haizhepi (海哲皮), shrimp, stewed beef, tripe and cold-cuts of chicken. It's the number of choices rather than what's on the plate that is significant in this case. This dish is a reference to the phrase "may you be granted the five blessing" (五福臨門, wufulinmen), a commonly used auspicious saying. There is some debate as to exactly what the five blessings are, but the most commonly accepted version includes longevity, prosperity, official status, joy and numerous offspring.
Fish is an absolute must at the New Year's Eve table, largely because of a homophone. The word fish (魚, yu) sounds the same as "surplus" (餘, yu), so the eating of fish represents the hope that the following year will be one of abundance. The type of fish and the manner in which it is cooked are left to the discretion of the chef.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PRESIDENT CONVENIENCE STORES
A whole chicken is also often thought a necessary part of the meal. This is partly due to a kind of rhyming aphorism in Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), "Eat a chicken, establish a home" (吃雞起家, chiah ke, khi ke), which doesn't make a lot of sense in English when translated directly, but given that the holiday is a time for families to get together, the concept of family unity can be read into almost anything. (Meatballs are another popular way of expressing this in the language of food, simply because they are round.) The use of specially bred black-boned chickens gives the dish additional cachet, as this variety is thought to have medicinal properties that will fortify the body against winter weather.
Fortunately, given the excess of fish and meat that is served up at most Lunar New Year's Eve dinners, a number of vegetables also have auspicious references.
Mustard greens are commonly consumed during the holiday because in Chinese they are called "long years vegetable" (長年菜, changniancai), an auspicious reference to living to a ripe old age.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PRESIDENT CONVENIENCE STORES
Fat choy (髮菜), also known as hair moss (Latin name: Nostoc flagelliforme), a dried fungus harvested in the high deserts of Central Asia, is another common food. It's expensive, adding a certain prestige, but the main reason for its inclusion is that in Cantonese, the name of the vegetable is a homophone for "get rich," which is presumably what everybody is hoping to do as soon as the festivities are over.
It's not only expensive foods that make the cut; the radish is also traditionally part of the meal. In Hoklo, radish (菜頭, chhai-thau) is a homophone for "good fortune" (好彩頭 ho-chhai-thau). To ensure that the radish isn't embarrassed because of its humble origins, it's often served as radish cake, which dresses the vegetable up with shrimp, dried mushrooms and other more costly ingredients.
These are just some of the associations between food and folklore that are brought to the fore over the Lunar New Year, but the ultimate demand is that the food be exotic and varied. For this reason, one of the most popular choices is the dish "Buddha jumps over the wall" (佛跳牆, fotiaoqiang), a Minnan (閩南) stew or soup made of quail eggs, bamboo shoots, scallops, sea cucumbers, abalone, shark fin, chicken, ham, pork tendon, ginseng, mushrooms and taro, all cooked in a wine-based soup. It got its name from a story in which a Buddhist monk forgot his vows (which include not eating meat) and jumped over a garden wall to get a taste of this dish. The concoction comes in many forms and ranges in price from a few hundred NT dollars to many thousands. This show-off stew has no particular traditional relationship with the Lunar New Year other than providing almost limitless opportunities for the addition of pricey and exotic ingredients.
Preparing all of this food entails a good deal of cooking, and few families in urban centers have time to make such elaborate preparations. According to a study commissioned by the President Chain Stores (統一超商), which operates the 7-Eleven convenience store franchise, 75 percent of families in Taiwan now get takeout for New Year's Eve. The company has responded, as has virtually every other convenience store and hypermarket chain, with a huge selection of pre-ordered, pre-cooked and pre-packaged banquets. Restaurants, too, are currently accepting bookings and takeout orders for New Year's Eve foods and if you are looking to celebrate in traditional style without the hassle of cooking yourself, you should probably start getting your orders in now.
When 17-year-old Lin Shih (林石) crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1746 with a group of settlers, he could hardly have known the magnitude of wealth and influence his family would later amass on the island, or that one day tourists would be walking through the home of his descendants in central Taiwan. He might also have been surprised to see the family home located in Wufeng District (霧峰) of Taichung, as Lin initially settled further north in what is now Dali District (大里). However, after the Qing executed him for his alleged participation in the Lin Shuang-Wen Rebellion (林爽文事件), his grandsons were
A jumbo operation is moving 20 elephants across the breadth of India to the mammoth private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest man, adjoining a sprawling oil refinery. The elephants have been “freed from the exploitative logging industry,” according to the Vantara Animal Rescue Centre, run by Anant Ambani, son of the billionaire head of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The sheer scale of the self-declared “world’s biggest wild animal rescue center” has raised eyebrows — including more than 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, according to
They were four years old, 15 or only seven months when they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. Some were born there. Somehow they survived, began their lives again and had children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren themselves. Now in the evening of their lives, some 40 survivors of the Nazi camps tell their story as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps. In 15 countries, from Israel to Poland, Russia to Argentina, Canada to South Africa, they spoke of victory over absolute evil. Some spoke publicly for the first
Due to the Lunar New Year holiday, from Sunday, Jan. 26, through Sunday, Feb. 2, there will be no Features pages. The paper returns to its usual format on Monday, Feb. 3, when Features will also be resumed. Kung Hsi Fa Tsai!
RSS