What to eat during the Winter Solstice? What are the customs in various places during the Winter Solstice?

　　What do people in Ningxia eat during the Winter Solstice?

　　There is a custom in Yinchuan of eating "brain" during the Winter Solstice. On the day of the Winter Solstice, people drink rice noodle soup and eat dumplings made of mutton rice noodle soup. On the day of the winter solstice, the people of Yinchuan gave the mutton noodle soup a strange name - "brain". On the fifth day of the morning, the housekeeper got busy early, washed the purple mushrooms on Songshan Mountain, made soup, and took out the mushrooms after boiling; put the diced mutton in the pot and stir-fried, stir-fried until dry, add ginger, onion, garlic, and chili noodles, stir-fry, add the chopped mushrooms to the diced meat, stir-fry again, and then marinate with vinegar (clear (poisonous smell of wild mushrooms), then add mixed noodles, refined salt, and soy sauce; after the meat is rotten, add fungus and day lily (day lily) and stir-fry briefly, add the clear mushroom soup, boil the soup, add chopped flour cubes, soaked vermicelli, then add leeks, garlic sprouts, and coriander, and you will have a pot of mutton noodle soup. This pot of soup is red with peppers, yellow with day lilies, green with garlic sprouts and coriander, white with vermicelli and vermicelli, and black with mushrooms and fungus. The soup is red, yellow, green, white and black, and the aroma is fragrant, making people salivate. During the winter solstice, the common people call it the Ghost Festival. After the dumplings are made, they serve a bowl first and offer another bowl to their neighbors. I couldn’t eat dumplings in the morning, so I bought Diaolu tri-tip pancakes and fennel pancakes and soaked them in powder soup. Dumplings stuffed with mutton powder soup and yellow radish are a common meal for Yinchuan people, but outsiders rave about it. It is rare to see such spicy and delicious dumplings in other places. This can be regarded as a special snack in Yinchuan.

　　What do Chongqing people eat during the Winter Solstice?

　　Chongqing people have the custom of eating dog meat during the winter solstice. The custom of eating dog meat during the Winter Solstice is said to have started in the Han Dynasty. According to legend, Liu Bang, the emperor of the Han Dynasty, ate dog meat cooked by Fan Kuai on the day of the winter solstice. He thought it tasted particularly delicious and was full of praise. Since then, the folk custom of eating dog meat during the winter solstice has been formed. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that mutton and dog meat have the effect of aphrodisiac and complement. Nowadays, people eat dog meat and mutton on the day of the winter solstice, which is not only nourishing food, but also a good omen for the coming year.

　　What do people in Suzhou eat during the Winter Solstice?

　　Eating wontons reminds me of Xi Shi. Since Suzhou was the capital of the Wu Kingdom 2,500 years ago, Taibo and Zhong Yong, the founders of the Wu Kingdom, were descendants of King Tai of Zhou. They inherited the Zhou Dynasty calendar and regarded the winter solstice as the beginning of the year. Therefore, the ancient city of Suzhou still has the custom of "the winter solstice is as big as the year", and the "menu" on the night of the winter solstice every year is even more exquisite, continuing the distant Wudi customs, forming a unique meaning different from other cities. In the supermarkets in the streets and alleys of the ancient city of Suzhou, winter wine is piled up like a "hill". Winter wine is brewed only once a year. It is fragrant with osmanthus, sweet and refreshing. There is a saying in Suzhou since ancient times that if you don’t drink winter wine during the winter solstice, it will freeze overnight. “When the old Suzhou people returned home, the "Yuan Ye Dinner" placed on the table was not only sumptuous but also "meaningful". Whether it was cold pot, hot stir-fry or fish, meat and poultry, they all changed their elegant names and became "auspicious dishes", "Yuanbao" (egg dumplings), "Tuanbao" "Yuan" (meat balls), "chicken" (fluttering), "golden chain" (vermicelli), "ruyi cai" (soybean sprouts), "eating more than enough" (fish), etc., are similar in shape and color, and are filled with the joy and meaning of Suzhou's traditional festivals.

　　What do Hangzhou people do during the winter solstice?

　　Eating rice cakes From the late Qing Dynasty to the early Republic of China, people in Hangzhou like to eat rice cakes during the winter solstice. During the winter solstice, we make three meals of rice cakes with different flavors. In the morning, we eat rice cakes with sesame powder mixed with white sugar. At noon, we eat fried rice cakes with fried vegetables, winter bamboo shoots and shredded pork. For dinner, we eat rice cakes in soup with mustard mustard, shredded pork and bamboo shoots. Eating rice cakes during the winter solstice will make you grow taller every year, which is auspicious. There are many places in the north where it is customary to eat dog meat and mutton on the day of the Winter Solstice, because the weather enters the coldest period after the Winter Solstice. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that mutton and dog meat have the effect of aphrodisiac and tonic, and there is still a folk custom of having tonic during the Winter Solstice.

　　What do Taiwanese eat during the Winter Solstice?

　　In Taiwan, we still preserve the tradition of using nine-layer cakes to worship ancestors during the Winter Solstice. The glutinous rice flour is used to shape chickens, ducks, turtles, pigs, cows, sheep and other animals that symbolize good luck, happiness, wealth and longevity, and then steamed in layers in a steamer to worship ancestors to show that they do not forget their ancestors. People with the same surname and the same clan gather in the ancestral temple in order of age and worship their ancestors one by one at the winter solstice or an early date agreed before or after. This is commonly known as "ancestral worship". After the ceremony, a grand banquet will be held to entertain the clan members who come to worship their ancestors. Everyone drank happily and kept in touch with each other's long-lost feelings, which was called "eating ancestors". ”The ancestors of the Winter Solstice Festival have been passed down from generation to generation in Taiwan to show that they do not forget their "roots".

　　What do Chaoshan people eat during the Winter Solstice?

　　Eating sweet pills: This custom is almost universal in the entire Chaoshan area, but this custom also contains an interesting custom: after people worship their ancestors on this day, they take out some sweet pills and stick them on the top of their doors, roof beams, rice jars, etc. Why do we do this? According to legend, there are two reasons: First, the sweet pills are sweet and round, which means good things. It indicates another bumper harvest next year and family reunion. If family members accidentally encounter it on this day, it is a good sign, just like the "Water Splashing Festival" of ethnic minorities. If outsiders happen to visit on this day and let outsiders encounter it, these outsiders will also have good luck. Therefore, people do not want outsiders to visit their homes on this day. One is for rats to eat. It is said that the seeds of grains were brought to farmers from far away by rats. In order to repay the rats for their contribution, the farmers agreed that during the annual harvest, a small portion should be left unharvested so that rats could eat it. Later, because a greedy man harvested all the grains in the field, the mouse angrily complained to the Goddess of Mercy. After hearing this, the Goddess of Mercy felt pity for the mouse, so she gave it a set of hard teeth and told it to move into other people's houses in order to find food. From then on, the mice caused harm everywhere. It has become one of the "four evils" today. However, this bad custom of "sticking sweet pills everywhere" has not been around for a long time. It is not only unhygienic, but also detrimental to appearance and very wasteful, so it will naturally die out. And this custom of "eating sweet nine" has been passed down to this day.

　　In addition, pumpkin cake, radish, red bean and glutinous rice, nine-layer cake, rolled balls, etc. are also delicacies on the Winter Solstice table for people from all over the world.