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Five recipes for a Chinese new year feast
Celebrate China’s lunar new year with classic and updated dishes, including dongpo pork, stir-fried okra and braised fish with chillies
The diversity of Chinese cuisines is extraordinary but one food ritual unites Han Chinese communities all over the country and the world: the lunar New Year’s Eve dinner. (This year’s Chinese new year is on 25 January.) It’s the time when families traditionally gather for a lavish feast, prefaced by ritual offerings to gods and ancestors, and followed at midnight by a storm of firecrackers.
There are few rules for this “family reunion” (tuannian) meal except that there should be extraordinary amounts of food, particularly fish, meat and poultry (dayu darou: “great fish and great meat”). In the countryside, many households still fatten a pig as the holiday approaches, eating the prime cuts over the festivities, then making bacon, sausages or confit pork to eke out over the months ahead. The other essential is a fish, served whole and never quite finished, because the phrase “a fish every year” (niannian youyu) sounds the same in Chinese as “every year a surplus”.
