Glossary A
Ai Wo Wo refers to the Mandarin name of a typical Beijing snack made of sticky Rice with sweet fillings. Ai Wo Wo
was once a court snack in Yuan Dynasty, and became popular since then. Ai Wo Wo is available from the Chinese Spring Festival until the late summer. It is made in a complicated process, first, the sticky rice is steamed, pounded into pulp, shaped into a ball and then filled with sesame and white sugar, pea flour, jujube paste or some other fillings such as walnut-meat, melon seeds, greengage etc. And then it is spread over with rice flour. Ai Wo Wo tastes smooth and soft while its fillings are loose and sweet.
Ashura refers to Albanian special pudding made of cracked wheat, sugar, dried fruit, crushed nuts, and cinnamon prepared and eaten by the members of the Islamic Bektashi sect to mark the end of the ten-day fasting period of Matem.
Matem falls on the first ten days of the month of Muharrem and commemorates the battle of Kerbela in the present-day Iraq in 680 A.D. in which Imam Husein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, was killed. It is a period of fasting or at least of abstinences from drink in memory of Husein and his troops who were encircled by the enemy and left without water before their death.