SPRING FESTIVAL foods

With only six or seven days left before the eve of Spring Festival and every family busy buying food for the holidays,  the market would be very crowded.  Because it was winter in the northern provinces, all the vegetables are wrapped in plastic bags and the vegetable bins are covered by thick cotton blankets. Because it was so cold, the vegetables would often freeze on the way home after we bought them.

Since I was a little girl, my favorite thing was to go with my dad to buy Spring Festival foods because I would always get a treat of hawkthorn syrup on a stick. We would buy a lot of food, including a whole pig's head, a ham, pig's feet, pig skin, pork, beef, chicken, ribs, vegetables, sausage, fruits, and so on. We couldn't carry everything at one time, so it would take many trips to finish all the food errands.

My parents would prepare all the food on the eve of Spring Festival. There was a lot of to do to prepare all the food.  My dad would burn the hair off the pig head and then clean it.  He would boil the pig skin to make it very thick, and then put it outside on the balcony to freeze.  When we ate it, we would cut it into cubes and serve it with different sauces and flavors such as garlic, sesame oil, and vinegar.   I remember that our kitchen windows were constantly steamed from the heat and moisture from all the pots or pans.

My parents would make around 15 dishes, including: fried stewed fish with yummy flavor; fried pork with fresh celery; fried egg with leek; stewed pig feet; cold pig head meat; cold pig skin jello; bok choy and wood ear with fried pork; pork stewed with thin rice noodles; sausage; fried green beans; a salad of sliced cucumber, bean sprouts and pork tenderloin; and pork stewed with rice noodles and "suan cai," or sauerkraut.

My mom would also make all kinds of steamed breads stuffed with sweet red-bean or brown sugar or cubed fat.  It would be too much for four of us to eat at a single meal, but Spring Festival is the most important meal of the year and we always liked to eat leftovers in the coming days. My mom and dad would usually drink some wine or beer with the meal. 

My favorite memories of growing up are of our family gathered together around the table with a lot of yummy food. We would make a lot wishes for the coming year.  My mom and dad always had high hopes that my brother and I would do well in school in preparation for the future.

After the dinner, we would be busy again making dumplings. Dumplings are the most important meal in the northern part of China, north of the Yellow River. There are several hundreds different types of stuffing for dumplings throughout the country, but my parents usually made them with ground pork and mashed celery.  Usually my mom would make the stuffing while my dad made the dough; then the family would gather to assemble the dumplings

Making the dumplings together was a fun family tradition and we would share our stories and happiness.  Then we would boil the dumplings until they floated to the top of the pot and the dough was transparent, and we would eat them around the midnight on the Eve of the Chinese New Year, which meant we would have good fortune and the next year would progress smoothly.

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About the Author

Ying Stumpf (whose Chinese name is Zhang Ying) was born in LianoNing Province in China.  She graduated from the prestigious People's Police Officer University in Beijing, China, with a bachelor's degree in Chinese Language and Literature.  Currently, she lives with her husband in the U.S. and works as a English-to-Mandarin interpreter for Language Line, and also as a private Chinese Mandarin teacher.  Click here for information on learning Chinese Mandarin.