12 Days of Holiday Food Memories: Francis Lam's Chinese New Year Gelt

We asked a dozen food world luminaries to help us count down the next 12 days with culinary nostalgia, and they gave us their favorite stories of supermarket eggnog, standing rib roasts, discounted candy, and lots of cheer. Enjoy, and happy holidays.

Photo credit: Getty. Lettering: Brian Kaspr.

Editor, classically trained cook, and “Top Chef Masters” judge Francis Lam’s parents were born in Hong Kong, but he was raised in New Jersey. The most prominent winter holiday in the Lam family was Chinese New Year, a chance for little Francis to eat candy for breakfast, make puns on food names, and skip school when the other kids didn’t.

My family isn’t Christian at all, but, you know, [at Christmas] there’s a sense of holiday, a sense of joyousness, a sense of celebration…and especially if you’re a kid, it’s about which Transformers you’re getting that year.

Chinese New Year was the main holiday we celebrated in the winter…we had food traditions we always had to have. My mom would set up the house the night before, and one of the things she did was she put little mandarin oranges by everyone’s bed, and put two of the red envelopes of lucky money, and a couple pieces of candy, and you’d wake up, and the first thing you were supposed to do before you brushed your teeth or anything is have a piece of candy, to make your whole year sweet. I remember thinking it was awesome that you could eat candy before you brush your teeth.

You spent all day visiting other families or they visited you, so you’d be hosting people all day, and you’d serve them tea and you’d serve them snacks, like nuts, or these weird Chinese dried fruits that just looked so gross to me when I was a kid, like dried candied lotus root… now I’m like, “That’s awesome!” and I’m sure that like if you went to Alinea you’d be like, “That’s amazing!” but back then I was like, “No, that’s gross!”

There were a few mealtime traditions… there was a lot of symbolism around the food, and often puns on names of ingredients. For instance, the word for shrimp is ha, but you were supposed to eat a lot of shrimp, you know it’d be like, ha ha ha ha ha, your year would be full of laughter.

[For the candy] we’d have gelt. My parents worked in Chinatown, so they have just went and bought them in the Lower East Side. I’m sure my mom just went and bought all the post-Hannukah special gelt. Which was perfect because it’d go with this idea of fortune and good luck.

I think that when I was a kid, most things that spoke to my Chineseness made me feel weird, but in this case it was great because I was like, “I’m not goin’ to school tomorrow, ha ha.”