Eight-treasure porridge is a traditional food in China. Do you know its origin?

Laba Festival in China is on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, and people have the habit of eating Laba porridge. Laba porridge is also called Babao porridge. It is said that Laba Festival is the day when the Tathagata "becomes a monk". The Buddhist temple should imitate a short story of a herder offering minced meat, and take eight kinds of fragrant grains and fruits to cook porridge for the Buddha, so it is called eight-treasure porridge. Laba porridge is simple to make, rich in nutrition and sweet in taste. In the Song Dynasty, people competed to imitate it, which was widely known and became a special food loved by the public.

The eighth day of the twelfth lunar month is regarded by the Buddhist community as the day when the Buddha realizes. Monks and nuns in the temple often cook "eight-treasure porridge" with eight kinds of ingredients, such as glutinous rice, white sesame, coix seed, longan, jujube, oyster mushroom and lotus seed, and invite the surrounding villagers to join hands in holy communion and give it to the people, young and old, to show their sacrifice to the Buddha. Later, it gradually became a folk self-cooked eight-treasure porridge (called Laba porridge). There is that custom of eate Laba porridge.

On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, in ancient times, temples cooked porridge with fragrant grains and fruits to worship Buddha. People also cooked porridge as on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month to avoid disasters and diseases. In the Song Dynasty, the folk Laba porridge in Hangzhou was made of "golden pomelo, pine nuts, milk mushrooms, persimmons and chestnuts" and rice. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Laba porridge was popular all over the country.

Laba porridge is nominally added with eight kinds of raw materials, but it is also hard, ranging from four or five kinds to more than a dozen. Laba porridge in some areas is made of glutinous rice, old brown sugar, 18 kinds of nuts and soybeans, which is very solemn. Laba porridge is cooked with lotus seeds, ginkgo trees, peanut kernels, Chinese dates, pine nuts, ginger, cinnamon and rice, which has the functions of warming hands and feet, nourishing and preserving health. It is also effective for laba porridge cooked with beans, gold needles, black fungus, tofu and mushrooms. This kind is "refined Laba".

Laba porridge eaten by ordinary families is cooked by adding vegetables, soybeans, cowpeas, tofu, carrots and water chestnuts to rice, which means "coarse Laba". In some areas in northern China where there is little or no rice production, people do not eat Laba porridge, but only Laba noodles. The next day, make minced meat with all kinds of fruits and vegetables, roll out fresh noodles, and eat Laba noodles in the morning of the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month.

Some mountainous areas produce corn. Speaking of Laba, it is to use corn instead of rice to make Laba Festival. The custom of farmhouse music is to cook Laba porridge every Laba Festival. Laba porridge is made at home, but any delicious and edible food can be cooked in a pot in a proper place, such as soybeans, black beans, beans, lentils, hard eggs, taro, carrots and flour, corn flour, sorghum flour, barley flour and so on. People often say that if you eat all of them, you will look all of them.

The twelfth lunar month is a year. You must eat whole grains and vegetables all year round in order to have all-round nutrition. This is also a prayer for the health and prosperity of the whole family! The second is to eat everything and harvest everything. After the twelfth lunar month, we will arrive at the New Year. When eating Laba porridge, we will eat up all the grains that grew in the field at the beginning, and we will not abandon anything. This shows that the farmhouse loves everything it feels in the field and expects all the crops to grow well and get a bumper harvest in the new year.