Happy New Year~

For the Chinese people, the lunar new year is a holiday that combines their innate love of wordplay, superstition, and food into one massive orgy of auspicious culinary puns. While the food eaten on new year's eve varies from region to region, most Chinese meals on this night are designed to usher in the maximum amount of good fortune for the new year.



According to Chinese mythology, the year is embodied in the form of a beast that goes marauding through the streets on new year's eve. Therefore the lunar new year's eve, like the Jewish Passover, another holiday concerned with averting evil, is a holiday celebrated indoor around an amply laden dinner table. And like the Passover, the food served is imbued with symbolism.



Always present on the table is a leafy vegetable, preferably with leaves, stems and roots intact. The eating of an entire plant symbolizes longevity, giving a whole other meaning to the usual admonition to "eat your vegetables". Usually we eat spinach with the roots intact, carefully washed of dirt. This year we have veggies sauteed in rich yet clear broth of dried shrimps and scallops. The chinese have entirely different words for describing scallops in fresh and dried form, so different are their natures. Fresh scallops are plump, chewy and pale, with a faint bland sweetness. The drying process makes the scallops dry and fibrous, and intensifies the flavor, transforming the flavor into a dense savoriness, perfect for seasoning soups or vegetables.



Our appetizer for the night is a small salad of shredded sea urchins with carrots and cucumber. The sea urchin is seasoned lightly, placing the emphasis on the texture of the dish, the contrast between the chewy, crunchy sea urchins and the crispness of the carrots and cucumber.



Unfortunately, I forgot to take an "after" photo of this dish... This is dried fish roe, one of the most valued (and valuable) Taiwanese foods. The roe is harvested only once a year and carefully dried, with high quality specimen easily costing more than pure gold. The fish eggs have a first impression of slight bitterness, which unfolds into a complex, smokey savoriness that lingers on the palate. Cut into thin slices, this is delicious when eaten with sliced raw garlic or sliced leeks, with the leeks and garlic adding spiky shards of flavor to the richness of the roe.



We also had some chicken, prepared simply in the Taiwanese manner. The free-range chicken is boiled and chopped, then eaten accompanied by delicate shreds of young ginger and a soy paste spicy with chopped garlic. Note the plate is garnished with oranges. Oranges are a common sight around Chinese households during new years. Not only are they in season (in the Northern hemisphere at least), the word for "orange" in Chinese is a near homonym for "good fortune", so it's good luck to keeps lots of them around the house.



Here's another auspicious play on words, the fish. The word for "fish" is an exact homonym for "remainder", so the eating of fish on new year's eve symbolizes the desire that a family always have more than enough to eat for the year. In strict accordance with this pun, the family never eats the entire fish on the eve, always leaving a little bit of fish to finish later. The fish itself, however, should be cooked and presented whole. On important occasions, Chinese people prefer their fish and fowl to be served entire, as though serving a fillet of fish or chicken is some sort of breach of good faith with the powers that be. This year we had our fish steamed, seasoned with salty fermented black beans, chili peppers, and ginger.



We also had some shrimps, lightly floured and deep-fried twice for extra crispiness.

I forgot to take a picture of our soup, another pun-based dish. The soup was a light, hot soup of chopped turnips, shitake mushrooms, bamboo fungus, and plump, crunchy pork meatballs. "Turnip" in Taiwanese is a near homonym for a term for good luck, and is often presented as gifts to new business owners or political candidates. Of course, turnip also flavors our soup quite nicely. Meatballs are a frequent part of banquets and celebrations, its spherical shape representing fullness and completion.

A common dessert for the new year is the sticky rice cake, also called the "year cake". The Chinese words for "sticky" and "year" are (dun dun DUN~) homonyms. Like the Korean rice cake dok, the Chinese rice can take on many forms, appearing in sweet and salty dishes alike. My family aren't big rice cake fans though (I personally prefer mochi...), so we made do with a bit plate of oranges and apples for dessert.