Old cooking ways offer taste of New Year spirit

Fan Chenhai, 69, stood under the eaves of a courtyard spinning the handle of a stone mill as light yellow rice milk trickled into a big wooden barrel beneath.

It was a typical day in the 12th month of the lunar calendar. Fan, a villager in Shuangxikou, a small mountain village in Zhejiang province, rose quite early.

He and his neighbors planned to make a typical local delicacy-rice cake-a normal preparation for the upcoming Spring Festival.

A special plant growing on the mountain was picked to offer a unique scent to the rice cake. Fan burned the plant using lit soybean stalks and poured the ashes into the water, boiling and filtering the mixture before combining it with the rice milk.

"Grinding requires skill," Fan said. "You must grind steadily in a fixed direction so that the rice milk will not flow backward."