Food and family are what Chinese New Year is all about. For two weeks, there are celebrations of feasts, visit family, and receiving pocket money. One of the more important events throughout the two weeks is the big family meal on Chinese New Year’s Eve. Foods with positive connotations will be served, and precious and more expensive delicacies will be shared with the family. Living in a multicultural society, we like to incorporate food inspirations from other cultures into their cooking. Chinese cuisine has often been incorporated into fusion and west coast cuisine.

Chinese New Year Food – The Traditional Ingredients

Traditional ingredients are still commonly used. They are chosen to be the core of Chinese New Year feasts as they bring good luck to the rest of the year. Here are a few ingredients and their symbolism of good luck during Chinese New Year.

Fish

Fish is a main dish in the Chinese New Year Eve dinner. The Chinese word for fish has the same sound as “to remain”, so it is a custom to have fish to symbolize “to have extra (goods) every year”. Fish can be served whole, either steamed or fried. It may also be incorporated into the feast is to stir fry fish (salmon, halibut, cod, etc.) with vegetables, served with corn-starch thickened broth.

Lettuce

Lettuce is often seen accompanying other ingredients in the feast. Lettuce in Chinese sounds the same as “growing wealth”. It is traditionally served with a delicacy like pig’s tongue, Chinese mushrooms and a special type of seaweed. Altogether, it has the meaning of wealth and prosperity.

Tangerines

You may notice many companies or families will have some tangerines on the table for dessert, or even have a tangerine tree. This fruit in Chinese sounds exactly the same as “gold” and “luck”, so families like to keep a few of these tangerines from the previous year as a symbol of bringing wealth and luck into a new year.

Lotus seeds and Sticky Rice Flour Balls

These two ingredients are often used in dessert because of their sweetness and symbolic meaning. Lotus seeds would be added to red bean soup as a symbol of connectedness. Families who are hoping to have children would also eat lotus seeds as the food item sounds similar to “child” in Chinese. Sticky rice flour would be kneaded into small pebbles and served in a sweet ginger soup. The roundness of these rice flour pebbles symbolizes togetherness.

Since we are lucky to have access to food from different seasons, there have been recent additions and creations to lucky and symbolic dishes. So try a few of these ingredients and bring some good luck to your new year!

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