What is the significance of Lantern Festival? What to eat on Lantern Festival? What's the moral of this food?
The custom of Spring Festival in ancient China lasted for one and a half months. The long Spring Festival has to go through three stages: preparing for the New Year, celebrating the New Year and celebrating the New Year. It was the Spring Festival from the 23rd lunar month to the 15th Lantern Festival in the first month. If we compare the trilogy, the Lantern Festival, the end of the Spring Festival, is the climax of the Spring Festival trilogy in China.
Lantern Festival is regarded as the last climax of the Spring Festival, because after this day, people really enter the new year's work, so people all over the country celebrate the Lantern Festival and pray for God to bless the good weather in the coming year. So there is the "Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first month" folk activities.
As a kind of food, Yuanxiao has a long history in China. In the Song Dynasty, a novel Lantern Festival food was popular among the people. This kind of food was originally called "Floating Zi Yuan", later called "Yuanxiao", and merchants also called it "Yuanbao". In ancient times, "Yuanxiao" was more expensive, and a poem said: "Guests look at the Imperial Street with a hook curtain, and the treasures in the city come for a while. There is no way to go before the curtain, and the money can't be returned. "
On the fifteenth day of the first month, Yuanxiao, or "Tangyuan", contains white sugar, roses, sesame seeds, red bean paste, cinnamon bark, walnuts, nuts, jujube paste and so on. And wrapped in glutinous rice flour into a circle, you can be vegetarian and have different flavors. It can be boiled, fried and steamed, which means happy reunion. Jiaozi, Shaanxi is not wrapped, but "rolled" in glutinous rice flour, or boiled or fried, warm and round.
According to the shape of glutinous rice balls, which are round and filled with stuffing or solids, they are called Yuanxiao in the north and glutinous rice balls in the south. Jiaozi can have many tricks on Lantern Festival. Especially the varieties with stuffing are the most.
Sweet fillings generally include bean paste, white sugar sesame, sweet-scented osmanthus assorted, jujube paste, nuts, sesame seeds, almonds, ginkgo, hawthorn and so on; Salty stuffing generally includes diced fresh meat and dried shrimps. There is also a kind of jiaozi, which contains mustard, onion, garlic, leek and ginger. It is called "Five-flavor Yuanxiao", which means hard work and long-term progress.