Traditional recipes 食谱 食譜
Food is half of Chinese culture — every festival has its dish and every region its pride. Cook your way through the calendar and the map, and the vocabulary comes with dinner.
Chinese New Year 春节春節
Lantern Festival 元宵节元宵節
- 汤圆湯圓On the fifteenth night of the new year, the first full moon, families eat round rice balls in sweet soup — 圓 means round, and roundness means reunion.
- 炸元宵In the north the Lantern Festival dumpling is called 元宵 and it is rolled, not wrapped: hard balls of filling are tumbled through dry glutinous flour until they grow a coat.
- 酒酿圆子酒釀圓子On the fifteenth night of the first lunar month, families in the Jiangnan region warm up with a bowl of tiny unfilled rice balls floating in fragrant sweet rice wine — round little dots that echo the festival's wish for reunion and wholeness under the year's first full moon.
Qingming Festival 清明节清明節
- 青团青團For Tomb-Sweeping Day, Jiangnan families dye sticky rice dough jade-green with mugwort juice and fill it with sweet bean paste.
- 馓子饊子Crisp golden coils of fried dough, sanzi are the survivor of the old Cold Food Festival, when lighting a fire was forbidden for days — so everything had to be fried crunchy in advance.
- 润饼潤餅In Fujian, Taiwan and the Chaoshan coast, Qingming means rolling runbing — a paper-thin wheat wrapper piled with cold, pre-cooked vegetables.
Dragon Boat Festival 端午节端午節
- 粽子When the poet Qu Yuan drowned himself in 278 BC, villagers threw rice bundles into the river so the fish would spare his body.
- 咸鸭蛋鹹鴨蛋Cut open a good salted duck egg and the yolk is sunset-orange and beaded with oil.
- 绿豆糕綠豆糕Pale-green, melt-in-the-mouth mung-bean cakes appear on Dragon Boat tables across the lower Yangtze, where their "cooling" mung bean is meant to balance the heat of high summer as the festival arrives.
Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋节中秋節
- 月饼月餅Round like the harvest moon, mooncakes are cut and shared so everyone holds a piece of the same circle — separation and reunion in one pastry.
- 桂花糕Osmanthus blooms exactly at Mid-Autumn, scenting whole cities for two short weeks — and the legend says a giant osmanthus tree grows on the moon itself.
- 炒田螺In Guangdong, no Mid-Autumn night is complete without a wok of spicy river snails: families gather under the full moon to suck the meat from each shell, a noisy, hands-on snack that tastes of late summer and home.
Laba Festival 腊八节臘八節
- 腊八粥臘八粥On the eighth day of the last lunar month, temples once ladled out free porridge of eight treasures to mark the Buddha’s enlightenment.
- 腊八蒜臘八蒜Drop garlic into vinegar on Laba day and by New Year’s Eve it has turned an impossible jade green — no dye, just chemistry and cold.
- 腊八面臘八麵Across the wheat country of Shaanxi and Shanxi, where eight-treasure porridge never took root, Laba is marked instead with a steaming bowl of noodles in a vegetable-rich gravy.