Shanghai

There's only one dessert that truly deserves pride of place on the Shanghainese family's Chinese New Year Eve reunion dinner - a pile of tender and sticky rice topped with candied fruit and stuffed with a center of sweetened red bean paste. This is babao fan, or eight treasures rice pudding.

Risotto may easily win awards as the most clichd dish of the decade, but it is this sweet rice pudding that brings comfort during the cold, wet nights of a Shanghai winter.

The rice pudding is steamed and fragrant with its topping of preserved plums, dates and the finishing touch of an osmanthus sauce drizzled over the piping hot pudding.

Eating is not supposed to be a transcendent experience and there is no need to decipher flavors, or to justify its price, according to Shanghainese Miranda Yao, who learnt how to make the rice pudding in the city where she grew up.

For her, some of the most powerful recollections are those infused with the scent of the eight-treasure rice pudding and family.

"We never cut it into equal portions, never. The traditional way of serving it on the big round table with family around is to have a spoon in everybody's hand and you get to pick your favorite part - whether it's the rice itself, candied fruit or red bean paste," she says.

"I don't exactly know the origin of the name, but in the old days when there was not much available, people put leftover nuggets of lotus seeds, gingko nuts, raisins, honeydew, preserved peaches, pear, ginger and plums on the steamed rice - I guess that's the eight treasures," says Yao. "It is a dessert meant to seem decadent, without the embellishment of expensive ingredients."

Bolstered by her childhood memories of this Shanghai dessert, Yao now runs a small cooking studio that offers classes teaching novice cooks how to make the eight-treasure rice pudding before the Lunar New Year every spring.

In the chilly winter of Shanghai, this is the dish to delight the children, heal the soul or feed a family. It is the kind of dessert, like fruit cake at Christmas, that is made to reconnect with memories. That's the real treasure.

China Daily