Qingming Festival has the custom of eating qingtuan. Qingtuan has different names in different places. Qingming Festival has a tradition of eating qingtuan in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Do you know why Qingming Festival eats qingtuan.
Green dumpling is mashed with a kind of wild plant called "wheatgrass" and squeezed out juice. Then take the juice and mix it with the dried water mill pure glutinous rice flour, and then start to make dumpling. The filling heart of the dumpling is made of delicate sugar bean paste. When filling, add a small piece of sugar lard. After the dough is made, they are steamed in the cage, and when they are out of the cage, the cooking oil is evenly brushed on the surface of the dough with a brush, which is a success.
Qingtuanzi is as green as jade, waxy and soft, fragrant, sweet but not greasy, fat but not full. Qingtuanzi is also a necessary food for people in Jiangnan to sacrifice their ancestors. Because of this, qingtuanzi is particularly important in the folk food customs in Jiangnan.
Why did Qingming eat qingtuan? This custom can be traced back to the Zhou Dynasty more than two thousand years ago. According to the Zhou Li, there was a law that "in the middle of the spring, the wood duo was forbidden to follow the fire in the middle of the country", so the people put out their cooking and "ate cold food for three days". During the cold food period, i.e. one or two days before the Weiming Festival, it is also designated as the "cold day festival".
The traditional food of the ancient cold food festival includes glutinous rice cheese, wheat cheese and almond cheese. These foods can be prepared in advance to satisfy the hunger of the cold day. There is no need to raise a fire for cooking. Now, some of the green regiments are made of green wormwood, some of them are made of bromegrass juice and glutinous rice flour and then filled with bean paste. They have been circulating for more than 100 years, and they are still an old face. People use it to sweep tombs and worship ancestors, but more importantly, they should make a try of the new, and the function of the Youth League as a sacrifice is increasingly weakened.
Legend 1 of the Youth League:
It is said that one year during the Qingming Festival, Chen Taiping, a powerful general of Li Xiucheng in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, was hunted by the Qing army. A farmer from the nearby farmland came forward to help him disguise Chen Taiping as a farmer and ploughed with him. Without catching Chen Taiping, the Qing soldiers did not give up, so they added soldiers to the village and set up posts. Every person who went out of the village should be inspected to prevent them from bringing food to Chen Taiping.
After returning home, the farmer was thinking about what to bring to Chen Taiping. When he walked out of the door, he stepped on a bush of wormwood and slipped. When he got up, he saw the green color on his hands and knees. He immediately gathered some wormwood and went home to wash, boil and squeeze juice. He kneaded it into glutinous rice flour to make a rice ball. Then put the green regiment in the grass and mix it with the Sentinels at the entrance of the village.
Chen Taiping ate the green dumpling and thought it was fragrant, waxy and non sticky. After dark, he bypassed the guard post and returned to the base camp safely. Later, Li Xiucheng ordered the Taiping army to learn to be a Youth League to defend itself against the enemy. The custom of eating qingtuan spread.
Legend 2 of the Youth League:
The story volume of Jiaojiang city in Taizhou area of Zhejiang Province records a legend: Once upon a time, there was a young man named Jin Lan. My father died, and I lived on my mother's spinning. Jinlan was arrogant and lazy when she was young, and she wanted to beat and scold her mother. However, the court ordered that the field be put to death, so he had to go to work in his ancestral field.
In the wild, Jinlan accidentally saw the scene of the ewe feeding the lamb. She suddenly woke up and was determined to repay her mother's kindness. When his mother came to deliver the rice with a bamboo basket, he took the initiative to go forward. The mother mistakenly thought that she was too late to deliver the meal, and that she would be beaten and scolded by her son again. For a while, she couldn't think of it and threw herself into the pond. Jin Lan jumped into the pond at once, but only touched a plank. He took the plank home and offered it in front of the hall. It is said that is how the memorial tablet came.
In memory of his mother, he collected the grass growing in the place where his mother put the rice basket and made bitter cakes. The story also says that this day is a day when the young man is clear and reasonable, so we call this day Qingming. And every year on the Qingming Day, they bring bitter pancakes to the roadside near the pond to worship. Later generations call it Shangfen. Slowly, it became a custom to go to the tomb to eat the green troupe in the Qingming Dynasty, which has been handed down to this day.
Precautions for eating green dumplings
1. Be sure to heat before eating. Because the glutinous rice in qingtuan is easy to regenerate after cooling, which is not conducive to digestion, and its nutritional structure will also be destroyed.
2. It's better to eat with bamboo shoots or Malan head. Eating these foods together can speed up the digestion and nutrition absorption of green dough.
3, absolutely do not mix with fat to eat, if glutinous rice such indigestible food is mixed together with fat, it will aggravate the burden of stomach and intestines, cause dyspepsia very easily.
4. It is better to eat some food that is helpful for digestion, such as hawthorn. Because these foods can reduce the digestion burden of glutinous rice food such as digesting green dough in the gastrointestinal tract, which is conducive to the absorption of green dough in the body.