Celebrating Lunar New Year—and My Heritage—By Making Dumplings

16.02.2024 - 19:25 / cntraveler.com

I’ve always been obsessed with the food around festivities. I adore breaking ‘rules’ set around cooking, but there is something so lovely about the simplicity of celebrating with a certain dish to link you to a culture. Food around Scottish festivities is not a widely known tradition; the most habitual celebratory food we would eat would be a steamy tower of haggis, neeps, and tatties on Burns Night, surrounded by poetry and whisky. But I can’t really think of many others off the top of my head.

When I think of celebrations from around the globe, there are a plethora of foods linked to festivals and traditions: Mushakhan sumac roasted chicken with onions on flatbread to celebrate the freshly pressed olive oil during pressing season in Palestine. Krafitskiva, Sweden’s annual crayfish party. Biryani for Eid in India. The list goes on.

Annually, a few days or weeks after some hearty haggis was consumed depending on what day Lunar New Year would fall on, the food traditions would begin. The Chinese zodiac is based on a mythological race, whereby the order of the animals finishing determines their place in the zodiac, influencing people’s personalities and fortunes based on their birth year. There was always such excitement as a child to hastily ask what zodiac year it was. There are 12 different animals in the race: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Mine is the goat—the eighth to finish the race. There are also five elemental signs to further determine your zodiac (wood, fire, earth, metal, water). With 1991 being my year of birth, I am the humble metal goat.

My heritage is Malaysian and Scottish: My mother is from the beautiful Melaka and is of Nyonya background; my dad was born and bred in Scotland, only about 20 minutes from where I grew up. Despite being miles away in a place far separated from the heat and traditions of Malaysia, the Lunar New Year in Scotland has been a somewhat soul-nourishing experience. January and February are usually the coldest and most unforgiving months for weather on the west coast of Scotland. But my mother would instill a sense of celebration every year nonetheless.

She would invite our family friends around to the house and spend two days preparing all of the different foods for Lunar New Year. From delectably steamed sea bass with matchsticks of ginger and sweetly cooked spring onion sitting in a bath of soy sauce, to perfectly grilled char siu roast pork with the inside still juicy and tender and the top adequately blackened. Cucumbers would be dressed in a simple marinade of sesame oil, sugar, and fish sauce with crumbled crystalized ginger for a sweet, spicy freshness. The list goes on, and there would usually be around