Oil Rice / Sticky Rice (油飯)
Some people called Oil Rice “Sticky Rice”. If your baby is one month old, your relatives and friends will give you presents, gold accessories or red envelops with some money in it. Then you must give back the oil rice with sesame oil chicken soup to appreciate their presents. This custom is a little like the baby shower. You can also hold a party to celebrate, but you still need to serve them the oil rice with sesame oil chicken soup.
Oil rice is a traditional Taiwanese dish. It is a little complex to cook. You need to fry the raw rice first, and put some seasoning in it. Then you should steam it for several hours. We usually put shredded meat, dried mushrooms, dried shrimps or peanuts in it to make it more delicious. If you want to cook it to celebrate your baby’s one month anniversary, you need to cook a sesame oil chicken soup and red eggs too. You can use the cakes instead of the oil rice, and use the fried chicken legs instead of sesame oil chicken soup. This kind of cake we called it “full month cake”. Red eggs are red-dyed hard-boiled eggs that symbolize the happiness. Two red eggs means the newborn is a boy.
In Taiwanese tradition, handing out oil rice means your baby is a boy, and handing out cakes means your baby is a girl. You usually celebrate when a boy was born. If your baby is a girl, you won’t celebrate it. But the younger generation, doesn’t care about their baby’s sex, so they can choose oil rice, cakes or both to share with friends. For convenience, now we can order oil rice and full month cakes from specific stores.
Many foods seem to have its own origin. Why do we like to share the oil rice to celebrate the newborn? This is because there are various ingredients in it, and it can be saved for a long time.
There are some similar foods that are basically made of oil rice — “rice cake/rice pudding (米糕)”, “bamboo tube rice (竹筒飯)”, “sticky rice sausage(糯米腸)” and “rice dumpling(肉粽)”. Rice cake, bamboo tube rice and sticky rice sausage are all popular Taiwanese foods that we can eat anytime. But we usually eat the rice dumplings during The Dragon Boat Festival, which is one of the important holiday in countries with Chinese cultural influences. So, oil rice is a common food in Taiwan.
