Traditional Dragon Boat Festival cake decorated with five kinds of boxes

The traditional Dragon Boat Festival cake decorated with five patterns is Udon cake.

Udon cake is a special seasonal food in the northern Dragon Boat Festival. Early summer is the time when poisons are active every year, so the ancients would eat Udon cakes to wish to eliminate diseases and keep fit. As early as the Qing Dynasty, it was recorded in the book "Duanyang in Yanjing": "Before each Duanyang, Zhumen and Yamen used zongzi as a gift, accompanied by cherries, mulberries, water chestnuts, peaches, apricots, ruling cakes and rose cakes." There are two kinds of poisonous cakes that can be recorded in words: one is a poisonous cake that is knocked out with a jujube mold and baked in a hanging oven, and then the surface is colored with oil and sugar, and the other is a cake with convex and concave patterns and covered with a bright red "five poisons" image.

The ruling cake is actually a rose cake, but it is covered with images of scorpions, toads, spiders, centipedes and snakes. They are apricot sauce, jujube paste, mung bean sauce, Taiwan Province braised pork and black sesame sauce.