What lucky foods to eat for Chinese and Japanese New Year?
Every country and region has it's own celebrating foods to eat in New Year and Festivals, most of them contain the meaning about bring along good lucks, especially in Asia.
For Chinese culture, every family member needs back home, no matter how far away they live and work daily, in order to have a round table dinner together during Chinese New Year. ROUND is the symbol of reunion and complete. Therefore, families in southern regions will have “Tangyuan” (round shape rich dumpling dessert, texture like Japanese mochi) with sweet ginger soup on the 1st and 15th of CNY, and the latter is Chinese Valentine’s Day as well. For families in northern regions, they will have half moon shape meat dumpling instead. Back to the CNY main course, FISH is a must have item, since it not only sounds like ample and contains blessing about getting richer year after year, but also sounds like wish, thus they love to create some fortune names with similar sounds for all dishes, for example, “as you fish (as you wish)”.
So how about Japanese Festivals foods? Soba, zoni, osechi must in the list for New Year. Meanwhile, they are still keeping an interesting Sushi culture about having some lucky fishes to make a good fortune wishes when festivals. In Japanese traditional, snapper means longevity and good luck, from the myth of idol Ebisuke. Yellowtail (Hamachi), another name is “fish of promotion and success”, their names will keep changing when in different growing stages, quite alike human job promotion, therefore it became the symbol of promotion, success and good luck. Scallop, also named fan shell, just because their shape and swim post looks like a sailboat, and contains the meaning of getting winds from sails.
Will it make you mouth-watering when reading this article? And what will you eat during New Year and other Festivals?