What to eat at Qingming Festival

There is an old saying among Hakka people that "if you eat Ai (bǎn) around the time of Ching Ming, you will not be sick all year round". Ai is a traditional snack for Hakka people during the Qingming Festival. The first step is to wash the fresh and tender mugwort, put it into a pot and cook it, then lift it up and drain it, and keep the water in which the mugwort was boiled as a reserve. Then the boiled mugwort will be chopped into grass mud, grass mud chopped the finer the more rotten the better. Mugwort mud chopped, with the water of cooking mugwort, plus glutinous rice flour and mix together into a ball. Then the prepared sesame seeds, brown beans, peanuts and other fillings into the dough, and then sealed and kneaded into a round, long and other shapes, into the pot of water steaming for 15-20 minutes can be removed from the oven.

Warm Mushroom Buns

Warm Mushroom Buns are a traditional specialty of Taining. The raw material of warm mushrooms is scientifically known as rat's-tress, also called Buddha's-ear grass, locally known as warm mushroom grass. Every year on the eve of the Ching Ming Festival, the fields are full of sagebrush, which is furry and tender, so it is a good time to pick it, and it is also a good season to make warm mushroom buns. In Taining, there are some differences between the northern and southern slices of warm mushroom buns. In the south, freshly picked warm mushroom grass is used to make the buns, which are shaped like a full moon; in the north, warm mushroom powder is used to make the buns, which are shaped like a curved moon and are more like dumplings. The southern piece is usually eaten on the eve of the Ching Ming Festival, which is all about fresh flavors and not too many rules.

Green dumplings

There is a custom of eating green dumplings in the south of the Yangtze River during the Qingming Festival. The green dumplings are made from the juice of a wild plant called "wheatgrass," which is pounded and squeezed out, and then the juice is mixed with dried, water-ground glutinous rice flour to make the dumplings. The filling of the dumplings is made of fine sweetened bean paste, and a small piece of sweetened lard is added to the filling. After the dumplings are made, they are steamed in a cage, and when they are taken out of the cage, the cooked vegetable oil is brushed evenly over the surface of the dumplings, and this is the end of the process.