Having Porridge in Cold Days

Porridge, also known as congee, is the mushy food boiled from rice, millet, or corn. Porridge has a long history in China. According to the legend, it was created by the Yellow Emperor. Since then, the production method has been innovated constantly with a large variety.

The cooking of porridge usually adopts two methods - boiling and braising. The boiled porridge has mushy stock while the braised porridge has strong flavor. Porridge is usually divided into two categories - ordinary porridge and colored porridge. The former is boiled only by rice while the latter adds different ingredients in the ordinary porridge, thus having rich tastes. The most famous colored porridge is laba porridge (porridge eaten on the 8th day of the 12th lunar month), and the porridge with sliced pork and preserved egg as well as fish slices porridge, etc, is also very popular.

Porridge has an important position in traditional health preserving, among which the medicated gruel with therapeutic effect is unique in China. Medicated gruel is made of various health therapeutic foods and Chinese medicine. It is simple to make and easy to absorb, having a significant health and therapeutic effect and suitable for long-term consumption. Therefore, it is known as "the first healthy food under Heaven". The ancients respected much to keep health by eating porridge. The famous poet Lu You extolled the effectiveness of porridge in his Poem of Porridge. In the Qing Dynasty, there was a work especially for the study of porridge - Book of Porridge.

Until now, porridge is still favored by people. As porridge is prevalent in life, the Chinese people use much analogy about porridge in daily expressions, such as "such a mass as porridge" to describe scenes of chaos, and "little porridge for many monks" to describe that things are not enough to be distributed to all members.

This article comes from kaleidoscope.cultural-china.com