Celebrating with cake, pa
Drawing hearth paintings, making steamed cake Jiading has its own customs during the Spring F Li Xinran to see the special events in Jiading.
IN Anting Town, people draw hearth paintings or eat steamed cakes as part of the Spring Festival celebrations.
Every farmhouse used to have a hearth for cooking, and every one painted with auspicious patterns and characters. It was once an essential custom for every family to repaint the hearth before the Spring Festival.
Hearth paintings were popular in Jiangnan, regions south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Simply outlined in bright colors, they are very decorative.
Painters depict various auspicious patterns through the festive colors, such as bright red, goose yellow and green. For example, the meaning of rooster is to urge people to get up early, to be hardworking and to be rich.
Carp are drawn as the Chinese word for fish is a homophone for the word surplus, lending thoughts and hopes for surplus for the new year.
There is a Chinese proverb that goes “carp leaps over the dragon’s gate” suggesting “a person working hard and diligently will one day achieve the success.”
With the urbanization of rural areas and the renovation of old houses, gas stoves replace hearths, and the hearth painting rooted in rural areas, as an important part of folk art, is gradually fading away, so protection and inheritance of the art is important.
Wang Yuanchang, an 87-year-old hearth painter in Anting, drew for a family in Qian’s Village recently.
Before drawing, he first used lime water to paint the hearth. After it dried, he drew a frame along the edge of the hearth in black ink, and then began to paint.
The picture of a carp leaping over the dragon’s gate is lifelike. A smaller hand-painted lotus to the next implies family harmony as “lotus” and “harmony” sound the same in Chinese.
The paintings by Wang attracted neighbors. “What a good painting!” said one of them, “This shrimp looks like a real one.
“I’m so glad to see hearth paintings again, after decades, as they were previously part of my childhood memory.”
Eating steamed cake is a must for people in Anting during the Spring Festival holiday. “Cake” and “going upward” sound the same in Chinese.
However, there are fewer and fewer people making steamed cakes. Xu Qinglong is one of a small number who adhere to this traditional skill. Xu and his wife have been making steamed cakes in the traditional way for 20 years.
Wood in the hearth is blazing. A steam stove in the kitchen is connected with the hearth through pipes. Xu’s wife Shi Qinzhen puts sifted rice flour into a mould, compacts it gently, and steams it.
Every half minute or so, another layer of rice flour will be flattened in the steamer, three layers in a row. More than two minutes later, a steamed cake with fragrance is the result. Take a bite while still hot and you can feel it’s soft and waxy but not sticky, sweet but not greasy.
The making of steamed cake seems simple, but from weighing the rice, soaking, drying, powdering, sugar mixing, screening, steaming to packaging, there are eight steps.
The rice needs to be mixed with a certain proportion of glutinous rice, soaked for half an hour, dried, and then sent to the rice mill to be rolled into flour before being mixed with sugar and steamed. Controlling the heat is very important in the steaming process.
“We make our own bean paste, sugar and rice flour, without saccharin or food additives. What we eat is the original taste, which is also reassuring,” said Xu, 56, who learned to cook from his grandfather.
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