Welcome the Lunar New Year with sticky fingers and fortunes

The sugar rush of nian gao (rice cake) and tang yuan (glutinous rice balls) can charge your Lunar New Year in meaningful ways.

Nian gao is a sweet Lunar New Year staple. Source: Getty Images

Having the good fortune of my extended family living within a 20-minute radius means that Lunar New Year feasts are a lively cacophony. It starts with the electrifying brightness of yee sang (prosperity toss), a loud spectacle featuring a tangle of chopsticks tossing salmon and crispy slivers of fried wonton skin into the air, and ends with the satisfaction of successfully avoiding my aunt’s interrogation about my non-existent romantic life by crunching on a mountain of glistening roast pork at the end of the table.

Humble glutinous rice flour wove these feasts together. It was steamed in nian gao (rice cake) and boiled as tang yuan (glutinous rice balls) and provided a sugary high to get us between each feast.

Eating nian gao is said to welcome prosperity and luck in the upcoming year. Its bouncy texture was the perfect welcome gift for visiting friends. We’d buy nian gao from the store, a plain toffee brown circle around the size of a small cheese wheel, sealed with a red sticker bearing the character for “fortune” on top.

I definitely considered myself lucky if I woke up to mum steaming Spam-shaped bricks of nian gao. The steam transformed them into soft, tacky bars of sugar that I’d pry from the plate with sticky fingers. If we were really lucky, mum would fry them, their sugary outsides blistering and caramelising into a crunchy coating with a molten inside that would mould itself onto the roof of my mouth. The pain didn’t stop me from smiling – it was the rare time I was allowed to have a sugary treat for breakfast.

Between lunch feasts and reunion dinners, popo (my grandmother) would dust her hands with glutinous rice flour, and corral my sister and I into making tang yuan. Aside from the Winter Solstice, it was the rare time she would make tang yuan from scratch. The ones we made were nothing compared to the fabulous ones we’d get at restaurants – stuffed with a deliciously nutty crushed peanut paste, a moreish red bean paste, or other sweet fillings. My favourite filling was black sesame, which would leak out through the chewy tang yuan skin and coat my teeth with sesame, leaving me with a toothy black-freckled smile at the end of a meal.

Tang yuan, stuffed with black sesame, is a favourite. Source: Adam Liaw

Our tang yuan were simply pearls of pink, white and green, boiled in a rock-sugar and ginger broth. I’d watch as my sister’s hands mirrored popo’s: mixing flour and water, kneading the sticky mass into a smooth opaque log, dividing the dough into equal portions, strands clinging against popo’s hands. Its simplicity was worth the entertainment – someone would start humming the ‘tang yuan song’ (like a lot of our childhood songs, the origins of the song were murky, but likely traced to an old karaoke VHS), popo would bemoan the unevenness of the tang yuan and something would inevitably fall off the plate.

I was unashamed of my lack of contribution to the tang-yuan-making endeavour (my strengths, after all, lay in consuming tang yuan) until years later, standing in the frozen food aisle on Lunar New Year’s eve. My failed attempt to make tang yuan in my student apartment was seared into my mind, together with a gnawing dread that the resulting soggy coagulated mass was spawning its own ecosystem in my bin.

The pain didn’t stop me from smiling – it was the rare time I was allowed to have a sugary treat for breakfast.

My phone was uncharacteristically silent, free from family WhatsApp dinner reminders as I was eight hours away. The kaleidoscope of frozen tang yuan promised an echo of home, with violently purple packaging telling me I could achieve “authentic” and “quick” tang yuan with “only a pot of boiling water!” I removed the perfect globes from the plastic tray, smooth and uniform in a way only a machine can achieve. I watched them bop and float in the pot, the result, a tad soggy as I was distracted by a dancing dog on Instagram.

While not as perfect as advertised, it was certainly an adequate substitute – sweet enough to balance my half-hazard sugar syrup, without the mess of flour across the kitchen. I was instantly grateful for the 15-minute wonders of frozen food, almost as good as home – not that I’d ever admit that to popo.

 

Celebrate Lunar New Year with SBS.