Belongs To Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Feast Food gathers three dishes from three different traditions, each tied to one specific religious feast rather than to an everyday cuisine.

The mooncake, a round pastry dense with lotus seed or red bean paste and often a salted duck egg yolk standing for the full moon, is the defining food of the Mid-Autumn Festival. Families share it outdoors on the fifteenth night of the eighth lunar month, when the moon is held to be at its roundest and brightest, the shared round cake echoing both the moon and the completeness of a reunited family, and in Chinese folk tradition an offering of mooncakes and fruit is also set out to the moon and to Chang'e, the moon goddess of legend.

Sabzi polo, rice cooked with dill, parsley, coriander and chives and served most often with fish, marks Nowruz, the Iranian new year falling at the spring equinox that was historically the great feast of the Zoroastrian calendar; the green herbs folded through the rice stand for the rebirth the festival celebrates. Nowruz today is kept by Zoroastrians, by Muslims across Iran and Central Asia and by Baha'is among others, and sabzi polo is common to most of their tables, so the atlas records its Zoroastrian religious root without asserting the dish belongs to that community alone.

Simnel cake, a fruit cake topped with a ring of eleven or twelve marzipan balls usually read as the twelve apostles with Judas omitted, though some bakers add a twelfth for Christ, serves two separate points inside the same Christian fast: baked to mark a mid-Lent visiting custom on Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, and kept again for the Easter feast that follows once the fast has ended.