While some people celebrate Chinese New Year by filling their house with auspicious flowers and fruits or cramming festive events into their calendars, one of the most common ways to partake in the festivities is by digging into traditional foods. But as much as we love stuffing our faces with puddings, poon choi casseroles, and tangerines during the holidays, have you thought about why we eat them in the first place? While they are all undeniably delicious, each of these auspicious dishes have special meanings behind them. Keep reading if you want to know more about these prosperous plates.
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Whether you like them sweet or savoury, puddings are a staple during Chinese New Year. The Cantonese word for pudding, ‘goh’, sounds like the word height in Cantonese, which can apply to aspects such as luck, success, growth – the list goes on. Nowadays, puddings come in all sorts of creative flavours, but traditionally, they are flavoured with brown sugar and red dates.
This comfort dish has been deeply rooted in Chinese culture for centuries. Typically, families will gather on the night before Chinese New Year and spend time with each other as they wrap and eat dumplings together. Even if you don’t have the time to make them yourself, dumplings are a lucky dish due to their crescent shape, which resembles gold and silver ingots. That means, the more dumplings you eat during the festive period, the more money will come your way!
Most of us eat chicken regularly throughout the year, but did you know that this dish holds an auspicious meaning? In Mandarin, chicken is a homophone for fortune, so it's believed that eating chicken will bring good luck for the year to come. Whether you choose to enjoy it steamed, poached, or braised, the most important thing is that the bird needs to be served intact – head and feet included – to represent unity as well as a good beginning and end to the year.
We’re aware that this dish’s English name doesn’t sound particularly appetising, but its Cantonese name is an entirely different story. For your information, black moss is pronounced as ‘fat choy’, which sounds like ‘be prosperous’, and dried oysters are pronounced as ‘ho see’, which sounds similar to ‘great things’.These ingredients are typically served with lettuce, which is a homophone for ‘growing wealth’. This combination of ingredients provides an abundance of all things auspicious and delicious.
Fish is a staple part of many home-cooked meals in Hong Kong, so it’s no surprise that it’s also eaten during the festive period. Aside from tasting delicious, fish in Cantonese (‘yue’) is a homonym to the word for excess or surplus. By digging into a portion of fish during the holiday, it's believed to bring in an abundance of all things good like money, success, or fortune.
Literally translating to ‘basin dish’, poon choi is a casserole of auspicious ingredients like abalone, shiitake mushroom, prawn, and many others. This dish has a humble beginning that stems back to the Song Dynasty, when the emperor fled to the Guangdong area and Hong Kong. Eager to host the emperor and his army, local residents threw all their best ingredients together to whip up a dish that was served in large washbasins. Nowadays, poon choi is served in a large metal bowl or pot, and is enjoyed communally with family and friends.
In Cantonese, the word for tangerine, ‘gut’, is a homophone for fortune, while their bright gold-orange colour signifies luck. These prosperous meanings also apply to other citrus fruits like mandarins and kumquats. During the Lunar New Year, these fruits can be found everywhere, from flower markets to shopping malls to fai chun and lai sees.
Although these delightful morsels can be enjoyed year-round, they’re especially popular during holidays like CNY. The round shape of each glutinous rice dumpling, or ‘tong yuen’, symbolises completeness. Additionally, tong yuen sounds similar to the word for reunion in Cantonese, which reinforces how these dumplings should be enjoyed together at family gatherings.
If you couldn’t already tell from the name, longevity or e-fu noodles represent good luck and longevity due to their long shape. Many other Asian countries have their own version of auspicious noodle dishes that are enjoyed during the Lunar New Year, like japchae in Korea or misua in Singapore and Malaysia – but the key thing is that the noodle strands must be long and intact to represent a long, continuous life.
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