The winter solstice is one of several days in the calendar when the vast majority of the Han Chinese on the planet all attempt to eat a certain dish.1 The dish of the day is tangyuan (汤圆), glutinous rice dumplings, often with a sweet filling, served in a sweet broth.
My family makes the simplest sort of tangyuan, which we call ee (meaning round, or spherical). These have no filling – they’re just plain glutinous rice dumplings in a syrup of water, sugar or palm sugar, and sometimes an aromatic (in our case pandan leaves).2 Four ingredients, maybe three.
The simplicity of ee clarifies their real, symbolic purpose. Their roundness symbolizes family unity, eating ee supposedly assures it in the coming year. They’re a four ingredient statement of values.
I don’t know how long it’s been since ee were hard to come by, but they must have been at one point. The ingredients now cost pennies, but it’s taken colossal agricultural and logistical effort to get to this point, where pretty much every household that wants to can participate in this ritual. And while this is true of our food chain as a whole, I’m reminded today that this edifice serves not just our physical hunger, but our emotional hungers as well.
The others that I can think of are the 15th day of the lunar new year (also ee), the Dragon Boat festival (zongzi 粽子), and the Mid-Autumn festival (mooncakes). The reunion dinner on the eve of the lunar new year doesn’t fall in this category because there’s such regional variation that I’m unable to think of a single dish with similar reach.
The more complex kind, in which the dumplings are filled, are never referred to as ee.
How come there is no photo of a bowl of ee to accompany this article?