Why do Chinese people like to eat cakes and biscuits during festivals?

Text: Wei Shuihua

Header photo: Yoo ah Yoo

"Gao Cai," often appears as an exclusive term for the same type of food. But in Chinese, gao and biscuits are, in fact, two completely different things.

The word "cake" appeared earlier, the Eastern Han Dynasty's "Interpretation of Names" has a special explanation: "餠,幷也, ulcer 麫 to make the merger also." It means to merge wheat flour together.

The word "糕" appeared later, "Er Ya", "Dialect", "Shuowen" do not have this word, until the Song Dynasty, "Jiyun", the interpretation of the cake appeared in the "糜", that is, rice syrup. A little later, in the Kangxi Dictionary, the interpretation of the cake is "餈" - rice squeezed and kneaded into the food.

Only from the literal meaning of the words, the cake and the cake represent a clear-cut distinction between the rice and noodle cultures of north and south China, and they are examples of the regional differences in diet. But in fact, thousands of years of dietary development, and let the cake and cake intertwined, influence, transmutation, and become an important category of Chinese cuisine, and in the spiritual level, by the Chinese people, the auspicious and festive, family reunion symbol.

No:1One

As the most important processed product of wheat, the history of cake is closely related to the spread of wheat.

This grain, native to West Asia, was introduced to the hinterland of the Central Plains via the Hexi Corridor about 2000 BC. This clearly predates the origin of Chinese writing, and so wheat, too, became one of the five grains in the Rites of Zhou.

Wheat grains have a poor taste and are best eaten when ground into flour and further processed. East and West coincidentally thought of this, in the Arabs invented the waterwheel milling, the Greeks invented the windmill milling at the same time, China and India also appeared to pull the mill with animals to make flour.

But the same flour showed very different styles of reprocessing in different regions. The Chinese were skilled at cooking with water and steam, so the word "cake" first meant boiled dough, dough lumps "soup cake" and steamed dough "cooking cake.

Westerners made good use of air and grease for cooking, and frying and baking were used for pasta at an early stage. And because of its easy to carry non-perishable, rich flavor, at the latest in the Han Dynasty, has been introduced to China. In the Book of the Continuing Han Dynasty, it says, "(Han) Lingdi was fond of hu biscuits." Hu cake is baked wheat cake, which is later known as baklava.

For a long time, baked biscuits never became mainstream in China, and were always described by the discriminatory word "hu". As late as the Tang Dynasty, Bai Juyi's poem describing the Anshi Rebellion, in which Yang Guozhong bought cakes to offer to Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, used the line, "The hu ma cake is like the one in Kyoto, with crispy dough and fragrant oil fresh from the oven."

But at the same time, "cake" began to gradually derive another meaning. In Lu Yu's "Tea Classic", the first use of "cake tea" to describe the sun-dried, pressed into a flat round tea. After this, silver cake, cotton cake, orange cake, which has nothing to do with wheat flour "cake" more and more appear. Biscuits became a term for shape and texture rather than material.

After the Song Dynasty, steamed and boiled pasta gradually parted ways with "cake". Meat buns" these epoch-making food terms; and "steam cake", "cooking cake", "soup cake" only survives in the official books, in the folk literature almost The term "steam cake", "cooking cake" and "soup cake" only exist in official books and are almost extinct in folk literature.

It is feared that the description of "Wudalang sells cooking cakes" in "Jin Ping Mei" and "Water Margin" in the Ming and Qing dynasties is just a case of the authors wanting to restore the context of the previous generation, but they have mistaken the year of the ouroboros.

No:2 II

Gao (糕), judging from the font alone, is very different from biscuits. A combination of rice and lamb, the former representing the material and the latter the shape and color.

Clearly, the earliest cakes had and have only rice as a main ingredient.

Rice, which is native to China, is not as adaptable as wheat, but because it is rich in branched-chain starch, it can be cooked directly without milling to achieve a high water content and a soft, sticky texture. This is wheat in any case can not compare.

Beginning in the Song Dynasty, due to the development of land suitable for rice cultivation in the south, rice showed explosive growth. It overturned the pre-Tang Dynasty pattern of "southern rice and northern corn" and became the staple food that dominated the Chinese table.

With this increase in production came a demand for variety. Rice paste, rice vermicelli, sticky rice and soup dumplings all appeared in the notes of the literati from the Ming onwards. And, of course, the soft, sticky rice cakes.

So, in terms of the original purpose of inventing food, the cake is the icing on the cake's makeup, while the cake is the reinvention of the still waters running deep.

No:3 three

If anything, the origin of the cake and the gao are two unrelated drops of ink. After dripping into the huge dye pot that is the Chinese diet, they began to intermingle one by one, eventually becoming indistinguishable from each other.

In the mid-Qing Dynasty, the name "rice cake" first appeared in Guangdong, and within a short period of time, it spread to the Guiliu area of Wuzhou in northeastern Guangxi and the Putian area of Quanxia in southeastern Fujian.

This kind of rice cake is actually rice hammered into thin and large cake-shaped flakes, and frying, drying and other cooking methods to reduce the water content of rice starch, imitating a similar flavor and crunchy texture with wheat products.

Similarly, in the Jiangnan region in the early-mid Qing Dynasty, pastry dough mixed with wheat flour appeared. The people of the Wu-speaking region, a place where north and south meet, knew how to mix flour and rice flour, with glutinous rice flour setting the tone, japonica rice flour preventing sticking to the teeth, and flour adding a sinewy, chewy texture.

So the traditional Soviet-style pastry dough is not just soft and sticky, but with a subtle proportion, pursuing a balance between softness and crispness. If you want to compare it, it is quite similar to the Japanese wako, which is made of daifuku, a mixture of glutinous rice flour and cornstarch.

Because of the deep integration of cake and cake, the cake industry also centered in the Qing Dynasty. Beijing (Suzhou) Taoxiangcun, Nanjing Lianhu cake dough, Suzhou Huangtianyuan, Hangzhou Wuweihe, Ningbo people ZhaoDaYou, Fuzhou Drunken Immortal House, Guangzhou Lianxianglou ...... these long-established cake stores, are all products of that era.

These pastry stores, clear as day, would make all kinds of cakes and pastries together and put them together for customers to choose from. Moreover, each had its own specialties, such as Huang Tianyuan's double-stuffed dumplings, Wuweihe's pretzels, and Lianxianglou's lotus seed paste gift cakes, which drove the culinary fashions of the era, and ****same as the magnificent map of Chinese mooncakes, and other festive cakes, that would later be created.

No:4肆

Unlike Japanese food, which prizes light, original flavors, the Chinese have an innate preference for flavors brought on by deep processing. The eggplant replica bags china in "Dream of the Red Chamber," the Chinese cabbage in Sichuan cuisine, the one-piece tofu in Lu cuisine, and the three-shrimp noodle in Jiangnan snacks are all vivid illustrations of this preference -- the variety of ingredients and the complexity of the work involved far outweigh the value of the food itself.

Cakes and pastries, made from cheap wheat and rice through complicated processes, are of course among the Chinese people's favorites and admirers. The most direct expression of this adoration is to make the cakes part of the traditional rituals of the festival.

The Spring Festival to eat spring cakes, rice cakes, Lantern Festival to eat the Lantern Festival, February 2 to eat onion cakes, Qingming Festival to eat green 馃, Dragon Boat Festival to eat fried piles, cake, dumplings, Tanabata Festival to eat coquettish fruit, Chrysanthemum Festival to eat Chongyang cake, the winter solstice to eat patties, ring rounds, glutinous cake ......

As for the wedding, funeral, housewarming congratulations on the life of a family event, not less family events, not to mention the attendance of cakes.

And one of the cakes used for the Mid-Autumn Festival, the mooncake, is a masterpiece of Chinese cakes.

Throwing away the complexity of the filling materials, baking technology and other facade of the makeup, in-depth look at the essence of the cake, the traditional Chinese moon cakes, can not escape three categories.

One is the use of shortening and water oil skin complex overlapping rolling, after baking, to get layers and layers of shortening, a touch off the chip, a bite full of crumbs of shortcake. Because it is not easy to be transported over long distances and is prone to deterioration, this kind of pastry is often limited to a certain region. When it meets with local specialty fillings, its name becomes Suzhou-style mooncake, Huizhou-style mooncake, Qin-style mooncake, Ningbo mooncake, Chaoshan mooncake......

As a matter of fact, except for the difference in the choice of fillings and some production details, they are all born from the same mother.

The second type is to make a greasy skin by mixing grease and flour thoroughly, and bake it until it is porous and loose, similar to the texture of western baked cakes and cookies. This is the most traditional and crude way of making cakes and biscuits, and it is only preserved in very few ancient regions where land routes were inconvenient, such as Quzhou and Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, and Minhou in Fujian Province, to name but a few. The most famous of these is the Yunnan leg mooncake.

The third type is based on the previous oil crust cake, adding syrup and alkali. The syrup colors the crust, gives the baked product a nice brownish-red hue, and extends the shelf life. The lye modifies the proteins (gluten) in the flour, enhancing the gluten while gaining a fluffy texture, making the crust thinner and carrying more filling.

Because the Guangdong region is the most famous producer of traditional lye-skinned mooncakes, most people refer to them as Cantonese-style mooncakes. But in fact, it is produced in Guangxi and Shanxi, and because of its value, ease of transportation, and natural preservation, by the middle of the Republic of China at the latest, the Cantonese mooncake had become the standard likeness of the Chinese mooncake.

The cakes made this way can often have a skin-to-filling ratio of 1 to 5, or even higher. This is something that no other type of mooncake can match. It's worth emphasizing that because of the filling, thickness, and fluffy texture, it's not really a "cake" in the popular sense of a flat, round cake with a crunchy texture, but rather a "cake".

No:5 WU

After the 1990s, due to the maturity of cold-chain technology, the preservation of freshness after long-distance transportation is no longer an obstacle. Mimicking the shape and texture of the Cantonese lye-skinned mooncake, the Chinese have come up with many new ideas.

The Taiwanese, for example, took the "peach skin" from Japanese wakame and put it into a traditional Taiwanese custard filling, inventing the Taiwanese peach skin custard mooncake. Peach skin is a white bean paste mixed with milk and cream to create a delicate, soft crust that replaces the flour crust.

While the drawbacks of peach crust are obvious: it's not resistant to collisions and spoils easily, it's not a problem that can be solved for the sake of getting a softer texture at an extra cost.

Then there are the ice cream moon cakes that have become popular in the last few years, which often use konjac starch as a crust to wrap brightly colored fillings in order to show off a crystal clear effect. Low-temperature freezing cures the otherwise soft-couch taro starch crust, giving it an almost lye-like wrapping effect as well.

Similarly, there's a frozen black-and-white chocolate crust.

These "derivative subspecies" of the Cantonese-style mooncake with lye crust are actually cakes, not biscuits, in terms of cake categorization.

No:6 Lu

Looking at the millennial map of the evolution of Chinese cakes and pastries, the trend can be traced in two beautiful arcs.

The flat, low water content, crisp and hard texture of the cake, from the beginning of the absolute advantage, and gradually with the fat, high water content, soft and glutinous taste of the cake, and then after the modern era, gradually by the cake to overtake. This is attributed to both technological advances, as well as the evolution of Chinese tastes, and changes in China's geographic landscape.

The upgrading of storage and transportation technologies was a decisive factor in the overtaking of cakes by pastries. In ancient times, water content was the enemy of food preservation; mold, modification, corruption and all other problems originated from the water in the food. And the lack of transportation, lack of transportation, the lower water content of the cake, naturally became the first choice of the general public.

Meanwhile, the Central Plains, as the birthplace of Chinese civilization, grew food crops that y influenced the evolution of cakes and pastries. From the earliest corn, to later wheat, to the introduction of corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes from the New World after the Ming Dynasty, wheat flour in the Central Plains experienced the impact of various staple foods, and its status was repeatedly reduced.

But south of the Yangtze River, because of its unique climate and soil environment, rice has always been firmly in the mainstream of food crops. Beginning in the late Qing Dynasty, Korean and Japanese immigrants entered the Northeast and also began to cultivate rice, which allowed confectionery to develop in a sustained and stable manner. At the same time, the southward shift of economic and political centers after the Song Dynasty also allowed rice products to spread more widely in the upper echelons of society.

In addition, the biggest disadvantage of rice confectionery: its high water content and difficulty in transportation and storage was complemented by the increasingly developed road infrastructure and the emergence of various preservation techniques.

Most importantly, Chinese tastes have also evolved over the millennium. Having satisfied the demand for food and clothing, the taste buds are more inclined to more subtle flavor variations.

The diversified fillings and textures of pastries meet the escalating demands of the tongue. Moreover, compared with cakes, pastries are more inclusive of fat and sugar, which is also in line with the human instinct to feel pleasure when consuming calories.

-END-

The old man Zhitang said that the cakes in the north were "official tea food", while the ones in the south were "jiahu dots". This was said by a man born in Zhejiang, living in Beiping and Nanjing, of course, there is nothing wrong. However, from a broader geographical perspective, it fails to summarize the important schools of pastry, such as the Soviet, Cantonese and Yunnanese styles.

But from the other side of the understanding, "official ceremony tea" "Jiahu fine point" eight words, summarizes the Chinese cake on the up to the temple feast, down into the people's life of the ultimate interest.