If you’re going to stay awake on Thursday night to see in the Year of the Dog, you might as well do it eating your way through the hours — the way the Chinese do. Chinese New Year is the celebration of a fresh start. It’s welcoming a dawn of new hope for prosperity, peace and plenty and it comes with rituals and customs tied intimately to food. Food is a binder after all, a connection to the familiar, to roots and also to pleasure. At Chinese New Year it’s exquisitely so. The Chinese New Year’s Eve feast should mean the dinner table groans with food as an invitation to share and feast together. All family members should have returned home on this night of reunion. Even deceased ancestors are remembered and symbolically invited to the feast with a tray of food placed before an altar in the home and as joss sticks are lit and spiralling coils of smoke dissipate like invisible missives to the dead. It’s this duty to return home that drives the annual mass movement of people across Chin...
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