In China ancestral
worship used to be practiced during
the Hanshi Festival, or cold food
festival, which merged with the
Qingming Festival about 300 years
ago.
Today people can enjoy
many kinds of traditional cold
delicacies at this time of
year.
Qingtuan
or
sweet green rice balls, is a
favorite of people living south of
the Yangtze River. People mix rice
flour with wormwood juice, or the
juice of other kinds of green
plants, which they then use to
make rice balls that are filled
with sweet red bean paste and a
small piece of lard.
After
the rice balls are steamed, they
are brushed with vegetable oil to
give them a shiny surface. With
their adorable color, refreshing fragrance
and sweet flavor, green rice balls
have been a must-have offering at
ancestral rituals in the Yangtze River
Delta for more than 2,000
years.
The festival is also
the time to enjoy luosi, or
river snails, as the meat inside
the spiral shells of luosi is
believed to be at its most
succulent at this time of year.
As an old saying goes, "a snail
during Qingming is as fat as a
goose".
As the meat itself
is a bit bland, the snails are
cooked in a variety of ways to
add some flavor. One common way
is to fry the snails inside
their shells with shallots, ginger,
pepper, soy sauce, wine and white
sugar. Sometime the meat is picked
out of the shell with a
toothpick and cooked with different
ingredients.
In some rural
areas, having eaten the meat, people
throw the empty shells on top
of the roof, as the sound is
said to scare away
mice.
Gruel with peach
blossoms is another Qingming specialty.
This looks very nice and it is
believed to have medicinal value. Four
grams of fresh peach blossoms, or
two grams of dry ones, and 100
grams of rice are needed to
make the gruel. The blossoms are
added after the rice has come
to the boil, and then it is
left to cook until the rice has
broken down. It is said that
the gruel is good for reducing
phlegm, and it can ameliorate
constipation.
In some areas of
South China, especially in the eastern
part of Guangdong province, people eat
pancakes during the Qingming
Festival.
The pancakes are
traditionally eaten with two fillings.
People first mix wheat flour with
water to make pancakes that are
as thin as paper. Then eggs,
meat, mushrooms and other vegetables
are combined to make a savory
paste, and white sugar and malt
sugar are used to make a sweet
paste. People spread the pastes in
the pancakes and then roll them
up.
