Lovely Spring Festival Food

Spring Festival 2012 is a major public holiday in China which starts on January 22 to 28 with January 23 as the first day of the Chinese lunar calendar. And January 1, New Year’s Day is also celebrated in China as a public holiday.

It has also been a long week for the members of the media as we joined the various spring festival celebrations held in different hotels in Metro Cebu. We try our very best to participate in these events but we cannot be present in all since festivities occur simultaneously. Your favourite food columnist tried his best but five events were all I could attend and my column last week reported the first of these five celebrations.

Round two was the invitation from Marco Polo Plaza Cebu to welcome the Year of the Dragon with Culinary China at Café Marco and it is customary to create a menu with dishes and delicacies that are viewed as symbols of prosperity. Even the name of the dish is given importance and it must be a homonym in the Chinese language with a phrase about abundance, success, power and wealth.

Appetizers were Century Egg & Capsicum, Deep Fried Fish and Prawn Taro Rolls, Deep Fried Chicken Rolls, Sesame Squid and Jelly Fish with Chicken. The latter two dishes were placed in a bed of lettuce and it is symbolic because the Cantonese word for lettuce, shengcai, sounds like “rising fortune”.

A refreshing piping hot soup was available, Chinese Medicinal Herb Soup and that triggered memories to a dinner in Jhengzhou, Henan Province. We had a chicken dish with Chinese herbs and one of the herbs was dong chong xia cao which means “winter worm, summer grass”. It is said to be the larvae of a moth and is infected by a fungus which kills it and the fungi grows out of the head of the larvae giving it the appearance of a blade of grass.

Main dishes were as follows: Braised Sea Cucumber and Fish Lips with Chinese Green, Steamed Fish Fillet with Black Beans & Tofu, Noodles with Assorted Meats, Boiled Spring Chicken in Soy, Beef Steak Chinese Style, Kung Pao Prawns, Stir-fry Pork Belly with Sweet Pepper and the Pièce de résistance, the Steamed Whole Fish with Ham and Mushrooms.

In China, during the Spring Festival in China, fish is served because it sounds like “abundance” and when the steamed fish is served whole, it means “consecutive bonus”. My friend, fellow food critic Jigs Arquiza in his column (“eats’ my life”) described the dish as “really tasty”. Cebu follows tradition with an elaborate fish ceremony called the Yee Shang Tossing Ceremony (Yusheng, Yee Sang) signals the start of the Lunar New Year. And in Marco Polo Plaza, the tossing ceremony, excuse me, is literally a gigantic event with a three-meter giant iron wok (mixing bowl) and five-meter chopsticks.

Desserts were very traditional: White Fungus with Melon, Mango Tapioca, Butchi, Almond Lychee and Glutinous Rice Dumplings (tikoy). I took a small bite of the dumpling to bring good fortune and family cohesion then went for some ice cream. It has been months since I had some and such item is always available at Café Marco. Your favourite food columnist also received a gift of red packet (hun- pao or lay shee) personally distributed by the top honcho of Marco Polo Cebu, GM Hans Hauri.

There is a new greeting for the Spring Festival and “The Ear” of this newspaper reported this Cebuano salutation... Malipayong Chinese New Year!” made by a local resident of Chinese lineage. Do you think “Malipayong Chinese Bagoong Tuig” would sound better?