VANCOUVER -- Last year, when Vancouver chef Regina Lee was forced to close her artisan pie business, Gaia Kitchen, because of COVID-19, her hectic lifestyle came to a screeching halt.
It was a tough decision but it meant she could spend more time with her husband and two teenage daughters, something she’d been missing out on while operating her business.
One year into the pandemic, that’s still as big as her in-person circle gets — a very unusual circumstance for her and other families at Lunar New Year.
“Even though I have my immediate family with me, I do miss the big family gatherings,” Chef Lee said. “That’s very important in the Chinese New Year, to see your grandma, uncles and aunties, people you don’t see for a whole year, that’s the time you meet them.”
“There’s nothing like that social interaction and the fact that this year we cannot travel back to be with them, it’s a very difficult time for me.”
Growing up in Singapore, Chef Lee was steeped in the traditions of the Lunar New Year, arguably the most important celebration in Chinese culture. Her love of food and cooking followed her as she travelled all over the world — 10 countries in the last 20 years.
“The first thing was always the food,” she remembers. “Learn the ingredients and how to cook, and then actually share my culture, so the further away from home I was the more I longed for all the things that everyone in Singapore just took for granted.”
That includes the wildly popular Yuseng, or Prosperity Toss Salad, an elaborate raw concoction with 28 different ingredients — each one packed with flavour, and meaning.
“I’ve always introduced the Prosperity Salad to all my friends, and when I tell them salad they all go, oh it’s just a salad, and I go, no no!” Lee said. ““This is no normal salad.”
Served only once a year, each step in its creation follows a strict protocol.
“As we put the ingredient in we actually have a good wishing in Mandarin,” she explained. “So it’s almost like a prayer that we say over the salad as we place each ingredient in.”
Vancouver chef Regina Lee lovingly prepares one of the 28 ingredients in Prosperity Toss Salad, a dish she only makes once per year to celebrate Lunar New Year.
The fish in Chef Lee’s B.C. version of the dish is local wild sockeye.
“Using the salmon as a sashimi for the salad,” Chef Lee said. “Using the skin, frying it up and into a salted egg yolk fish skin for the horns of the ox, for the Year of the Ox, so presenting it like horns.”
“I’m also using ikura, which is salmon eggs that I’ve cured myself with organic soy sauce.”
Some of the other ingredients include white radish, ginger (candied, sour and fresh), Chinese celery, a variety of Lee’s candied citrus, red chilli, lime leaves, and pomelo (for the prosperity part). All are carefully placed to create the face and horns of 2021’s Chinese zodiac sign, the ox. It is accompanied by a smorgasbord of condiments and toppings.
To say this salad is labour-intensive is a bit of an understatement, but it’s a labour of love as she slices, dices, shreds, chops, minces and hand-cranks a spiral machine to create long carrot and sweet potato corkscrews.
“Making a salad is even more meaningful to me this year because it allows me to remember the family that I’m missing right now, the social interactions that we don’t have,” Chef Lee said. She and her family had planned to fly home to Singapore this year, but like so many people, their plans were scuttled by the pandemic. It’s just the four of them for now.
Once assembled, the salad is prepared to meet its destiny — as a harbinger of good luck, abundance, and optimism. Plum sauce, peanuts (gold ingots for wealth), sesame seeds (for a flourishing business), and a fragrant mix of soy sauce, oil, and Chinese spice powder are added at the table. That’s when the real fun begins.
“We do a final wish for everyone, and then we get everyone to stand around the table with their long chopsticks,” Chef Lee explained. “We’re going to get everybody to shout out their wishes for the year — you have to say it out loud, loud, and you have to shout over each other.”
And that’s when the "toss" in the Prosperity Toss Salad erupts. The food begins to fly, as they each grab mounds of salad and lift them high in the air. The higher you toss, the better your luck.
After the salad is eaten, that’s it, there will be no more Yuseng for another year. But Chef Lee is hoping the spirit of optimism it represents will linger — especially in these uncertain times.
“I think in this pandemic and COVID, unity, hope, faith, positivity, and resilience is really something we have to keep on going because it’s going to be a while and we need to keep the faith.”
