Why do you say that if you don't eat jiaozi on the solstice in winter, your ears will freeze?

There is a folk proverb: "Nobody cares if you freeze your ears when jiaozi bowls run amok from winter till morning", which means that if you don't eat jiaozi from winter till morning, your ears will be gone.

The origin of this proverb is mainly Zhang Zhongjing's Treatise on Exogenous Febrile Diseases, which has been regarded as a classic by doctors in past dynasties. The Eastern Han Dynasty was then the magistrate of Changsha. Later, he resigned for various reasons and went back to his hometown to treat the villagers.

When he got home, it happened to be winter. He saw that the villagers on both sides of the river bank were malnourished, sallow and emaciated, hungry and cold. Many people had a lot of frostbite because of the cold weather, and even their ears were frozen.

As a doctor and mother, he wanted to do something for the villagers, so he asked his disciples to set up a big pot in the greenhouse and cooked a medicine called Quhanjoule Decoction to treat the villagers' chilblains.

The method of Joule soup for dispelling cold is to put mutton and medicines for dispelling cold and treating chilblain in a large pot, then take out these mutton and medicinal materials, chop them up, make them look like ears with bread, then cook them, and serve them out with a big bowl of broth that has just been cooked, thus becoming this Joule soup for dispelling cold.

Later, some people imitated Jiao Er's wrapping method and put on different fillings, which developed into the present jiaozi.

Such a bowl of soup can not only drive away the cold and keep warm, but also has a wonderful taste. More importantly, it can also treat frostbitten ears. If these poor people at that time could not eat such a bowl of "jiaozi soup", they would have frozen their ears.

Therefore, from generation to generation, the winter solstice is not suitable in jiaozi, and no one cares if the bowl is frozen.

The custom of eating jiaozi on the solstice in winter is slowly handed down.