Happy Lantern Festival 🏮!
Yummy sesame paste and red bean tāngyuán to celebrate the end of lunar year festivities.
In China, we kick off the new year with a 15-day celebration called the Spring Festival. This period of celebration starts on Lunar New Year’s Day and ends with the Lantern Festival (元宵节 - Yuán Xiāo Jié), on February 5th this year.
The Lantern Festival (元宵节 - Yuán Xiāo Jié) is the first day of the full moon in the lunar new year, and because the full moon represents a happy, tight-knit family, communities all over China come together in hopes that the first full moon will bring a year of happy, familial bonds. Splendid, outdoor lanterns best enjoyed at night with the full moon are put on in celebration.
In the right picture, you can see examples of lantern riddles (灯谜 dēng mí) for people to guess together. For example, the riddle, “a flock of white geese jump into the lake,” refers to boiling dumplings 🥟.
Tāng Yuán - Sweet Rice Balls
Another important family activity on Yuán Xiāo Jié is to make 元宵 yuán xiāo, also called 汤圆 tāng yuán. These sweet rice balls filled with black sesame or red bean paste carry each family’s wishes to be joyously together in the new year (团团圆圆 tuán tuán yuán yuán).
In northern regions, these sweet rice balls are made by putting the solidified, round fillings into dry sweet rice flour and rolling them until the flour fully covers the fillings; when made this way, they are called 元宵 yuán xiāo. In southern regions, we make a sweet rice dough, and then wrap the filling in the dough; when made this way, we call them 汤圆 tāng yuán.
Food Lore
Eating tāng yuán for the Lantern Festival can be traced back to the Song Dynasty (宋朝 Sòng Cháo) during A.D. 960-1127. But eating yuán xiáo for the Lantern Festival started much earlier, during the Spring-Autumn period (春秋时期 Chūn Qiū Shí Qī) during B.C. 770-476 😮.
Lore from this period tells us that while the king of the Chu State (楚国 Chǔ Guó) and his advisor Confucius were visiting different towns, they passed by the Yangtze river on the 15th day of the lunar year. The king saw white balls floating in the river, and asked Confucius what they were. Confucius shared that they were sweet rice balls, a sign of revival, and people put them in the river to welcome him. The king was delighted and decided that families should make and eat sweet rice balls each year on that day, which later became the day of the Lantern Festival.
We like to imagine an alternate version where a child sneakily shared their sweet rice balls with fish in the river, and thus a small misconception turned into a national past-time 😂.
Notes
If you’re feeling brave, you can use thinner rice flour skins to wrap the filling. But if you want extra security that your tāng yuán won’t break apart as they boil, there’s no shame in making a little extra dough and thickening the outer layer!
Also, note that the recipe calls for you to add the boiling, hot water first, and then slowly add in cold water - this is important in helping to make the dough soft and stretchy.
Jiǔ Niàng - Fermented Sweet Rice Porridge
There are several ways to boil yuán xiāo and tāng yuán. One way is to boil them with 酒酿 (jiǔ niàng), a type of fermented sweet rice. Fermentation gives jiǔ niàng its iconic sweet tang, similar to that of rice wines like soju.
In China, jiǔ niàng is especially popular in the autumn and winter and is kind of like our version of hot apple cider in the fall. Back in the day, sweet rice was hard to come by, so jiǔ niàng was an expensive food saved for special occasions. And during good harvest years, families would often make a big barrel of fermented sweet rice to save for celebrating Chinese New Year.
Food Lore
According to the book《史记》Shǐ Jì - Records of the Historian, Chinese people started to make fermented sweet rice about five thousand years ago, as early as the first Chinese dynasty: the Xia Dynasty (夏朝 Xià Cháo) in B.C. 2070-1600. Because of its long history, the technique for making it is often passed down through generations in families, and it’s a favorite treat for many.
Notes
This recipe requires Chinese yeast (which you can find on Amazon). It can be substituted by other Asian yeast balls (like rice wine koji), but there, unfortunately, aren’t other great substitutes for it.