We've got loads of information in our Digest on the foods of Asia. What's at the heart of many Asian families is their stomach. A celebration always involves lots of food, and the food we eat always speaks volumes about the occasion that is being celebrated. The Chinese developed an incredible vocabulary of food during the course of centuries of fine dining, and their influence is felt across much of Asia.
Asian dishes are as rich in symbolic meaning as they are in flavor.
Korean families like mine mark the New Year with a serving of duk guk, or Korean rice cake soup. Having the soup is supposed to add one year to your life, according to my mother, who has been eating duk guk for 50-something years now. If you associate Korean cuisine with spicy, pungent foods like kimchi, duk guk is surprisingly mild, lightly flavored by the beef stock used as the soup's base. It is simple, fare, but quite filling, thanks to its slippery slices of chewy, dense Korean rice cake, which is similar to Japanese mochi. In fact, Japanese families share their own version of a new year's rice cake soup, called ozoni, for which there are literally thousands of different recipes.