Spring Festival is a traditional festival in China. People celebrate the Spring Festival by posting Spring Festival couplets and setting off firecrackers. What other customs do you know? Introduce one

Spring Festival is a traditional festival in China. People celebrate the Spring Festival by posting Spring Festival couplets and setting off firecrackers. What other customs do you know? Introduce one in detail (not less than 200 words). In southern China, there is another custom for local people to make rice cakes.

During the Spring Festival, many areas in China pay attention to eating rice cakes. The rice cake, also known as "rice cake", is homophonic with "high year by year", which means that people's work and life are improving year by year.

As a kind of food, rice cakes have a long history in China. 1974, archaeologists discovered rice seeds at Hemudu matriarchal clan social site in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, indicating that our ancestors began to grow rice as early as 7000 years ago. People in Han Dynasty called rice cakes "rice cakes", "fish bait" and "glutinous rice cakes". The ancients also had a development process from rice cakes to rice cakes. In the 6th century A.D., the cookbook Historical Records contained the method of making "white cocoon candy" for rice cakes, which said: "If the rice is cooked thoroughly and hotter than that in Chu Jiu, it must be cooked extremely well so as not to have rice grains ..." That is, after the glutinous rice is steamed, it is boiled into rice and then cut into peach kernels. The method of grinding rice into cakes is also very early. The Book of Qi Yaomin written by Jia Sixie in the Northern Wei Dynasty can prove this point. The production method is to screen glutinous rice flour with silk, add water and honey to knead it into hard dough, attach dates and chestnuts to the dough, wrap it with bamboo leaves and steam it. This glutinous rice cake has the characteristics of the Central Plains.

Rice cakes are mostly made of glutinous rice flour, which is a specialty of Jiangnan. There are sticky grains such as glutinous rice in the north, and sticky millet (commonly known as millet) was first introduced in ancient times. This shelled millet powder is yellow, sticky and sweet after being steamed with water. It is a delicious food for people in the Yellow River valley to celebrate the harvest. The article "A Brief Introduction to the Scenery of Jingshi" published during the Chongzhen period of the Ming Dynasty recorded that Beijingers at that time would "eat millet cakes and have New Year cakes on the first day of the first month". It is not difficult to see that "rice cake" is a homonym of "sticky cake" in the north.

There are many kinds of rice cakes, such as the white rice cakes in the north, the yellow rice cakes of farmers in Saibei, the Shuimo rice cakes in the south of the Yangtze River, and the red turtle rice cakes in Taiwan Province Province. Rice cakes have different flavors from north to south.

There are steamed rice cakes and fried rice cakes in the north, both of which are sweet; In addition to steaming and frying, southern rice cakes are also sliced and cooked in soup, which is both sweet and salty. It is said that the earliest rice cakes were used to worship gods and ancestors on New Year's Eve, and later became food for the Spring Festival. The rice cake is not only a kind of holiday food, but also brings people new hope with the passing of a year. As a poem in the late Qing Dynasty said, "People's hearts are high, and food is harmonious, so that the year is better than the year to pray for the year."

The origin of making rice cakes during the Spring Festival;

There is a legend about the origin of Dongbutou Rice Cake: According to legend, at the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, Wu Zixu, a famous official of the State of Wu, guarded Suzhou. Before he died, he said to his men, "If the country is in trouble and the people are short of food, you can dig three feet under the city wall to get food." After Wu Zixu's death, Suzhou City was surrounded by the troops of Yue State, and many people starved to death. At this moment, some soldiers remembered Wu Zixu's words and went to dig the city wall, digging more than three feet. Sure enough, they found edible "city bricks" to avoid hunger. Hungry people in Suzhou also dug up the city wall, and everyone dug up edible "city bricks". Among the hungry people, a businessman named Nian, a native of Dongbutou, Cixi, also dug up two city bricks. He ate one, hid the other as a treasure and used it as a pillow at night. Soon Suzhou was captured by the Vietnamese army, and the merchants returned to Dongbutou with the city wall. It turns out that when Wu Zixu saw the dissolute corruption of Fu Cha, the prince of Wu, and anticipated that he was doomed to national subjugation, he was ready for famine when he built the city wall. The city bricks he stored under the city wall were all pressed with steamed glutinous rice flour, which was very hard and did not deteriorate for many years. To commemorate Wu Zixu's saving his life, Yan also learned to make rice cakes by grinding and steaming. Because there was not much glutinous rice, he changed it to late rice. I didn't expect the quality of rice cakes made with late rice to be better than glutinous rice flour, so he made rice cakes in the market, which was very popular among local people. I had three sons in. His eldest son and second son soon separated from Cicheng, singing cranes and left, leaving only the youngest son beside them, but they never forgot the teachings of their ancestors. At the end of each year, they grind and steam rice cakes. This spread slowly, and both Dongbutou and Cicheng in He Ming will produce rice cakes. Later, after continuous technological innovation, the late rice for making rice cakes was soaked for a few days, and the dry grinding was changed to water grinding, and the manual work was changed to machinery. The quality of rice cakes was getting better and better, and the speed was getting faster and faster.

The rice cake means "getting higher every year", so people have to eat it or sacrifice it at the end of the year or at the beginning of the year in order to win the lottery next year on the basis of this year.