Tujia Shefan Festival Rice 土家社饭

How it is made

In Xiushan, where the name is also written with a homophone character (赦饭), tender fragrant wormwood (香蒿) and plantain (车前草) are picked in fields, on stream banks and on hillsides. They are washed, chopped, rubbed until the bitter juice is gone and dried over gentle heat, then mixed into rice with wild onion (野葱), shepherd's purse (地米菜), cured dried tofu and diced cured pork, and the pot is steamed or braised. The county lists the steps as gathering, washing and stir-frying the greens, blanching the rice, mixing, steaming or braising, and preparing side dishes.

Youyang's version starts with Huatian tribute rice (花田贡米), soaked, washed, boiled until half done, then drained and steamed. The cured pork and dried tofu are diced, and the chopped greens are rubbed with a little salt and squeezed dry. The pork is fried until fragrant, the tofu goes in, then pieces of sweet-potato cake (苕粑) and the rice are stirred through before the greens, and everything is fried through or steamed.

Ingredients

The greens depend on the county. Youyang households go out at the end of the first lunar month and the start of the second to dig shepherd's purse (荠菜), plantain, wild onion, water celery (水芹菜) and duck-foot greens (鸭脚板), and cook them with cured pork and dried tofu smoked at home. Xiushan names fragrant wormwood and wild onion as the key ingredients, abundant on the hills when spring returns. Xiushan describes the result as savoury, strongly fragrant and soft, suited to old and young alike.

Where it comes from

In Xiushan the dish is eaten mainly on the She Day, the fifth wu (戊) day after the Start of Spring (立春), locally called guoshe (过社). Wu days belong to the earth element, so it is the day for offerings to the earth god and for prayers for a good harvest. Tujia, Miao and Han families all make it, and Xiushan's government lists the making and sharing custom among the municipal-level intangible heritage items of the Wuling Mountains (south-east Chongqing) Tujia and Miao cultural ecology protection area.

Sharing follows a set order. A first bowl goes on the household shrine for the ancestors, the elders eat next, portions go to relatives and friends and then to the neighbours, and only then does the family sit down to what is left, with side dishes and wine. A local saying runs 'you give all of yours away and still cannot finish everyone else's'.

An older, richer shefan appears in the classic Dongjing Meng Hua Lu (东京梦华录), quoted by Youyang county: there, noble households laid sliced pork and mutton offal, duck cakes, melon and ginger over rice and called it shefan.