Ching Ming Cake and Sage

The Qingming Festival is the 108th day after the winter solstice, so it is not fixed that it will sometimes fall on on April 4, sometimes on April 5, and possibly on April 6, too.

The Qingming Festival was originally just a festival. It takes the meaning of wind and scenery. After the early spring, the weather became better, the rain became more frequent, to the time when plants began to gradually flourish.

Later, it was gradually combined with the Cold Food Festival and the Shangsi Festival. So it gradually became a festival that combines the three main functions of ancestor worship, tomb-sweeping and trekking.

The Qingming Festival is one of the four major festivals in Chinese tradition, and it has as much significance in people's mind as the Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival.

In Wenzhou, one of the customs of Qingming Festival is to eat Qingming cake. Every year, my mom would go and buy something called cotton cabbage, wash it, break it up inside a juicer, and knead it with glutinous rice flour. Then wrapped with shredded meat, dried bamboo shoots or pickled vegetables and other fillings, on the drawer a steam, green and attractive Qingming cake out of the cage.

When I was a kid, people didn't have many snacks to choose from. The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on some of the most popular products in the world, and you'll be able to do that. When I grew up, eating Qingming cakes became a memory, a tradition and an emotion.

Before, I didn't know what a cotton vegetable looked like. Later, I realized that the original cotton grass is the sagebrush, and every time around the Qingming Festival, the sagebrush will bloom with small yellow flowers, all over the mountains and fields.

The sagebrush, also known as the mouse bow grass, Asteraceae, the genus Aspergillus. Qu with "koji" (qu), "Compendium of Materia Medica" recorded: "koji, said its flowers yellow as koji color, and can be eaten with rice flour. Mouse ears, said its leaf shape like a mouse body, and white hair Meng velvet like jade ......"

Because it is the whole plant are densely covered with white thick cotton hair, so in Wenzhou called cotton vegetable is also appropriate. The best way to do this is to pick up the young shoots before they bloom.

The plant can dispel phlegm and suppress coughing, and is effective in treating asthma and bronchitis. Therefore eating Qingming cakes is not only a traditional cultural practice, but also has an effect of keeping people healthy.

In fact, in addition to Wenzhou, there are many other places also have the habit of eating Qingming cake, Anhui, Jiangsu, Fujian and other places have. But the materials used to make Qingming cakes are not the same. Some places use cotton vegetable, and some other places use mugwort.

Mugwort is also a plant of the genus Artemisia in the family of Asteraceae, which has antibacterial and antiviral effects, and also has the effect of suppressing cough, expectorant and asthma, which can enhance people's ability to resist diseases.

As to why different places, with different plants to do Qingming cake? Some people speculate that this may also have something to do with the climate, in Wenzhou, around the Qingming Festival, the rat koji grass has just sent out shoots, while the wormwood has grown too tall to be eaten, while in the Jinhua area, this time the wormwood is just growing shoots. I guess that makes sense.

Qingming Festival, be sure to eat Qingming cake oh, not only because it is a cultural heritage, but also to keep you healthy.