A limerick from Kiangsu Province announced: Sweet glutinuous rice dumplings on the First Moon, cashew cake on the Second Moon, eye-sparkling cake on the Third Moon, immortal's cake on the Fourth Moon, pyramid dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves on the Dragon Boat Festival, red watermelon on the Sixth Moon, lucky cookies on the Seventh Moon, moon cake on the Eighth Moon, chongyang cake on the Double Ninth Festival, new rice cake on the Double Tenth Festival, snow cakes on the Eleventh Moon, sweet shoe-shaped cakes on the Twelfth Moon.
From this lyric we can appreciate that the Chinese people traditionally use various kinds of rice cakes to celebrate any number of occasions.
The Chinese people, especially when traditional festivities occurred, within each family and household, would busy themselves with such work as husking rice, grinding it with mortar and pestle, then kneading the rice flour and preparing the accessory ingredients to make a gallery of cakes, dumplings, and other deserts. The common rice grain was thus suddenly face-lifted to an entirely different form. That is why people say that if the cycle of seasons is a poem, the great variety of rice cakes for the different festivities are its auspicious punctuation marks. People visiting relatives on holidays have a happy period of repose, taking in some more special holiday nutrients before the return journey.
To seek blessings, longevity, and sons in this secular world, the Chinese people traditionally decorate their furniture—tables and chairs, appliances, shoes, clothes, and even rice cakes—with auspicious symbols to please the spiritual world.
The patterns applied on rice cakes can be divided into such categories as flowers, fruit, plants, Chinese "alphabet" characters, animals, household items, paintings, geometric figures, and so on.
Especially included in the first categories are peaches-either long or round, fingered citrons, glossy ganoderma, pomegranates, pineapples, gourds, pine trees, bamboos, and plum blossoms. And since the Chinese characters themselves are endowed with the beauty of art, such auspicious words as fu (blissfulness), lu (emolument), sou (longevity), hsi (happiness), suon hsi (double happiness), tsai (fortune), and such like—mostly in a squared shape—are often used.
Among the most frequently seen animals are turtles, symbolizing longevity; dragons, the phoenix, and the unicorn—animals known as the "four supernatural beings." Cranes, mandarin ducks, and such familiar beasts as deer and rabbits are also frequently seen. In addition, since the bat signifies blissfulness, it is one of the Chinese people's favorite motifs. Local island rice cakes sport motifs from the water—lobsters, red porgy, crucian carp, carp, and silver carp, representing bounteousness every year.
Traditional auspicious items include the shoe-shaped gold or silver ingots, balls made of strips of silk, fans, S-shaped jade, linking coins, longevity locks, etc. Special patterns include the octagon, the symbol of thunder, clouds, lightning, and even the mark of the red cross.
Some cake makers print patterns directly on the chuangyuan cake, for example, depicting the Number-One Scholar riding on a horse—uniquely prepared for the traditional engagement ceremony. Some rice cakes are fashioned after nipples, the rounded shape signifying both heavenly and maternal love, an auspicious symbol; simple homemade cakes were simply imprinted with nipple-like red marks.
Prying into the origins of the Chinese characters for "rice cake," we can roughly understand that in ancient times, while people were husking rice, they would find some broken rice grains left on the bottoms of the stone mortars. To fully capitalize on these remnants, some clever people processed them into rice-cake flour. That is why, in addition to plain rice, the Chinese people enjoy the thousands of rice pastries that enrich their everyday life.
Since the Han Dynasty, the grinding stone has replaced the mortar as a must in almost every household. It is fantastic to see how the crude, pitch-dark stones produce rice powder as soft as snowflakes, and even more amazing, to relish, one after another, rice cakes made from such powder.
In our industrialized society, people no longer use their leisure or experience the pleasure of going through all the trouble to make rice cake flour. But, with the help of a modern food liquifier and a laundry machine, and a little trouble, anyone can now make and dehydrate rice cake dough in 15 minutes.
You can make a bowl of glutinous rice cake flour at home. The first trick is to soak the rice in water for a whole night before spinning it in a liquifier on the following day. The total weight must not exceed half a kilogram. Add water to the liquifier to a point two centimeters above the soaked rice. After spinning for ten minutes, the rice and water will turn liquid.
The rice liquid is then to be poured into cotton cloth sacks. For security reasons, it is best to use two sacks. After tightly tying the sacks' openings, dry in the spinstage of the washing machine for five minutes—and a lump of dehydrated rice dough is ready for use. More water must be added before the lump can be fashioned into the different kinds of deserts.
You can make six bowls of rice cakes from half a kilogram of the tsai-lai strain of rice. After liquifying the rice, add a bowl of hot, boiled water and boil again over a low heat for three minutes. Use chopsticks for continuous stirring to keep the rice powder from precipitating.
Pour water inside a covered frying pan and insert a bamboo rack. Then, steam empty bowls till they're hot. After pouring the rice juice inside the three bowls, place the lid tightly on the frying pan. Steam over high heat for ten minutes and over medium heat for five more minutes. It is not strange to then discover that your rice cakes are dented in the center.
For those who prefer a sweeter taste, light brown granulated sugar can be added to the rice juice in advance. For those who love a salty taste, sprinkle in some fried, dried radish shreds, then pour in some of the special sauce made from red onion, dried baby shrimps, soysauce, water, and gourmet powder. Or you may add all the flavoring ingredients you like to the juice before proceeding with the rest of the work.
In this time and age, it is rare to find an old-style grinding stone. It took us a long time to find one at the Hsu family residence in Lungtang, Taoyuan County, about half an hour's driving distance from Taipei. The Hsu residence hides amid tea groves on a mountain slope. Greeting us at the front door was 70-year-old Hsu Tien-yi and an echo of pei kuan classical music.
Mr. Hsu first carried in a wooden tub of rice, washed it clean in mountain water, then carried the tub of rice soaking in the clear water back to where the millstone stands, gasping all the way.
"To produce tender, soft flour, the timing for the rice soaking is most essential. In general, it takes about four hours in winter, two and a half hours in summer. If you can pinch a rice grain in two with your finger tips easily, it means that the rice is ready for use," the old man explained.
To demonstrate to us how to manipulate the grinding stone, Hsu grabbed the handle adjoining the stone. A push forward, and the heavy stone started to run with a sharp whipping sound. With mastered precision, he used a helping hand to add a scoop of rice and water through the small hole in the center of the stone. After about a dozen around-the-rim milling runs, milky white rice juice started to trickle out the mouth of the pitch-dark grindstone into a cotton cloth sack, below.
We again visited the Hsus on the following day, because it takes time for the rice juice to dehydrate into rice dough, hard pressed under a huge rock. Upon our arrival, the Hsus were busy feeding their hogs with a mixture of rice juice and sweet potato leaves. The kitchen was fully packed with Hsus and their friends, who had volunteered to help out.
Mrs. Hsu squatted down at the mouth of a huge old cooking range, made from red bricks, and fanned the fire through a narrow bamboo pipe. Amid the cracking sounds of the dry kindling and bamboos, women were kneading rice dough in a huge basin in order to make mi-tai-mu-macaroni-shaped rice noodles.
A diluted rice juice is boiled till thick, then poured into raw rice dough. After adding lukewarm water and corn starch, then kneading real hard, the now sticky and tenacious rice dough is ready for use.
The implement for making the rice macaroni is simple—a piece of pock marked iron plate punched with round holes. After erecting it on top of a pot of boiling water, a cake maker rubs the rice dough on the surface of the iron plate. And one after another, rice noodles appear, falling down through the eyes of the holes and into the boiling water. The boiled mi-tai-mu floats on the surface of the boiling pan. After being removed from the pan, they must be dipped in cold water several times to keep them from sticking together.
''It is a good summer food, because it is cool by nature," said Hsu.
The Hsus then proceeded to fashion ma chih, a round rice dough about the size of a doughnut. The women first pressed each lump of raw rice dough on their palms, then boiled them in hot water until each of them swelled up to float on top of the water. To make sure it is ready, pierce a lump of hot rice dough to see if there is any white powder inside—if there is, keep boiling.
After gathering the now-cooked glutinous rice lumps in a pot, a long bamboo bar must be used to stir them until they are transformed into a tenacious paste. As the work proceeded, the paste became sparkling white. Mrs. Hsu then dipped her hands in cold water to stop the rice dough from sticking to her, and scooping up a handful of paste, pressed it in her palms to mold a round ma chih.
To get a picture of how a steamed stuffed rice bun is made, we decided to pay a visit to Huang Ri-hsiu and his wife, intimate friends and neighbors of the Hsus. On our arrival, Mr. Huang was busy rubbing leaves underneath a faucet in the courtyard. "These leaves were plucked this morning from shaddock trees. They will be placed underneath rice buns. Like putting banana leaves underneath red turtle cakes, the shaddock adds a special aroma to the buns," stressed Huang.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Huang was busy boiling white radish shreds and preparing a stuffing consisting of fragrant mushroom, fried bean curd, Chinese toon, dried bean curd, gluten, and celery. "I am a vegetarian for religious reasons, therefore I am preparing these buns for vegetarians. Most people add red onion heads and baby shrimps to the filling. As a matter of fact, you may add whatever ingredients you like," Mrs. Huang said,
The ingredients are then fried with such condiments as soysauce, pepper, salt, and gourmet powder. The bun dough consists half of glutinous rice and half of pen lai rice. Mrs. Huang first divided the rice dough into pingpong-size balls, pressed them flat, and dented them in the center. After placing the filling in the holes, she sealed the skin up and pressed them into an elongated shape.
When all the buns were ready, Mrs. Huang cushioned each of them on a shaddock leaf. After being arranged on an aluminum tin, the buns were steamed in a pot over a medium fire for about ten minutes. While we patiently waited, the pot started to puff steam. When they were about ready, Mrs. Huang suddenly opened the lid, then closed it again quickly. She explained: "Too much vapor in the pot will make the buns overly expand. After they are cold, the skin on such buns will crease and shrink up like an old grandma's face."
Among other representative rice cakes which can also be served as a dish with a meal, not just as a seasonal desert, are the year-cake (for the Chinese Lunar New Year), the steamed sponge cake so often destined to be decorated with such greetings as "Happy Birthday," and eight-treasure rice pudding, also for birthday parties.
In ancient China, people celebrated their birthdays with eight-treasure rice pudding-steaming glutinous rice with bean paste, lotus seeds, preserved fruit, dried longan pulp, and others. It was deemed especially auspicious to steam a sponge cake for a birthday gift.
You can also make such a sponge cake at home. First soak the tsai lai rice for a whole night. Scoop it up, dry it, and place it in a liquifier; add a bowl of water, and spin for 15 minutes. Then pour the rice juice into a container, add half a bowl of white wheat flour and brown sugar each, and two thirds of a bowl of white sugar, then beat for 20 minutes. Add half a table spoon of baking powder, and beat until ripples appear and the paste is so thick that it is difficult to whip further. Then let the paste ferment for two hours.
Pour ten bowls of water in a frying pan, insert a bamboo rack and a soup bowl and wait. When the bowl is warmed, pour in the rice paste and steam for seven minutes over high heat, for 40 minutes over medium heat, and then for another 20 minutes over low heat. Insert a chopstick in the cake. If the sponge cake is well done, the chopstick won't be sticky. Decorate the cake with a "Happy Birthday" greeting cut from red paper.
Among one of the most popular New Year holiday cakes is the radish cake. The only ingredients required for radish cake are tsai lai rice powder and radish shreds. In Kwangtung Province on the mainland, cured meat, baby shrimps, and water chestnut powder are added to secure more tenacity and slipperiness.
Traditional Chinese cakes can roughly be divided into two categories—one to serve as a staple food, which we introduced above; the other to serve as pastries. For the ancients, who didn't have refrigerators, dry rice cakes were ideal and easy-to-keep between-meal nibbles. To savor slices of such cake with a cup of aromatic tea is the best treat for friends. People predictably call these cakes "tea snacks."
We visited two leading local cake shops-Laotafang and Kuoyuanyi-specializing, respectively, in tea snacks traditional to the southern bank of the Yang-tze River, and in the ways of the avant garde of the rapidly developing pastry business in Taiwan.
When we arrived at Laotafang, owner Chu Pi-tsai and an old master were busy making pyramid-shaped dumplings at the doorstep. Near his chair were scattered a huge basin of glutinous rice already mixed with soysauce, gourmet powder, and salt; a huge pan of salted meat, baskets of bamboo leaves, and a train of various finished food products. Across the way, several wood racks were holding several pans of mung bean cakes, cooling off in the open air.
The 30-ping kitchen-factory was not too crowded. A pyramid of green mung bean powder was piled high on a working table, which was apparently the gravity center of the plant. Seven workers—four men and three women—were making cakes in a fast-flow dance. With a press, a pinch of stuffing, a knock on wood molds, a quick arrangement in a square plate, and a sprinkle of peanut oil—all in a twinkle—the square array of mung bean cakes, each printed with a different design, was ready for steaming in a huge oven.
In another corner of the plant, a couple—male and female culinary masters—was making "snowflake cakes." The man first weighed a lump of dense sugar paste on a scale, then scooped up and added some rice powder, and weighed it all again. After evenly mixing these ingredients together, then sieving the powder through a screen, the female worker put the result in an oblong aluminum container and pressed it hard with a metal instrumentality. The man then dexterously floated the hard-pressed cakes on boiling water—just like floating boats on a pond. In another ten minutes, the oblong cakes were ready, sparkling white under a fluorescent lamp. They would be sliced into thin pieces before serving.
We moved our stool to the doorstep to chitchat with Mr. Chu, who treated us to types of tea and cakes unique to the Yangtze River basin. The thin, crisp, spiced salt walnut cakes are sweet but not greasy. The combined aroma of soft sesame powder, glutinous rice flour, and the crisp walnut made the cake especially delicious. The sesame fragrance in the lightly sweet eight-treasure cakes especially make the mouth water.
We sipped our tea and surveyed the iron display rack, upon which lay dozens of pastries—jujube paste cake, osmanthus snowflake cakes, walnut sesame cake, and milk cakes, all of them stirring potent memories of childhood.
"Now we have fewer kinds of cakes than before. When we were in Shanghai, where we could get all of the needed ingredients, we could produce more than 300 kinds of pastries. Now we make only 60 types of cakes. I remember, we had more than a hundred kinds at our Shang-hai branch alone. Business was so good that the customers had to squeeze their way out via the back door," Chu recalled.
Emphasis on handicraft training and temperature control in food preparation was a unique feature in China's traditional agricultural society. In the Yangtze River basin, long noted both for its prosperity and the quality of its literary talent, the gourmets were especially fastidious about their food. Especially, the bounteous harvests of rice helped made the great variety of rice cakes inevitable. From the Sung Dynasty down through the Ming and Ching Dynasties, to the time of the early Republic, Soochow was a center for production of sophisticated varieties of rice pastries. The special qualities of rice-aromatic, textured, crisp, easy to melt in the mouth-were all fully exploited.
Such pastries are among the best gifts for friends, a must at weddings, festivals, and all other auspicious occasions. While savoring the tiny cakes, gourmets may also enjoy their exquisite patterns and gorgeous hues. Since cake shops were about the only source for everyday pastries, they played a vital role in ancient society.
Several hundred-year-old cake shops can be found in Taiwan-each with its own specialties. For instance, Yuchen Cakemakers in Lukang is noted for snow white cakes patterned after the eyes of the phoenix, while Wanchuan Cakemakers in Tainan is reputed for its "salt cake" (a mixture of sugar and salt and the fragrance of fried onions and sesame makes the aftertaste unforgettable). The Litchi Cake Shop in Taichung is famous for its "chuangyuan engagement cake," which is always imprinted with a pink Number-One Scholar astride a horse. The Yipinghsiang Cakemakers in Lotung, Han County, is noted for its great variety of candy cakes-in the shapes of jumping carp, cranes, litchis, red-crosses-all fully displaying the joy still bubbling in the human world.
Though fine traditional cakes are praised everywhere on the island, their major consumers are nostalgic senior citizens. The Kuoyuanyi Cake Shop in Taipei, with moderate touches of modernization, is a special pastry shop that has enjoyed special success.
In all its history to V-J Day, Taiwan absorbed the essences of the cake-making skills of Fukien and Kwangtung Provinces (across the Taiwan Straits) and of Japan; the cake making practices of Kiangsu and Chekiang Provinces and of Europe and America followed. Synthesizing from such a background, Kuoyuanyi was able to "cosmopolitanize" its cakes, while preserving the quintessence of the traditional Chinese cuisine.
Kuoyuanyi was founded in 1867 at Shihlin, in the suburbs of Taipei. In the beginning, the ancestors of the Kuos had to peddle their cakes along the streets, living from hand to mouth. Down to third generation Kuo Ching-ting, the Kuos had to work very hard to keep improving their cake manufacturing techniques and earn their way. Today, the four sons of the Kuos operate a chain of eight stores in Taipei. Their secret: about ten years ago, they discovered that butter and milk could add a different and highly attractive flavor to rice cakes. Since then, their seasonal cakes have won high acclaim, both at home and abroad.
The more than 20 kinds of seasonal cakes-such as milk cake, orange cake, plum cake, and candied fruit cake-are made from a mixture of glutinous rice and pen lai rice flour. When savoring the different kinds of seasonal cakes, the gourmet always indulges in the delicate aroma of oranges, strawberries, or butter, and of course, rice. Mung bean cakes especially enjoy a wide reputation. The tea-color cakes, six thin pieces in a row, go well with water-ices in the scorching heat of summer.
Today the Kuos' cake manufactory still stands at the site of the old kitchen, but the facility is doubly expanded and equipped with modern facilities. Kuo Jung-shou, the fourth son of the Kuo family, explained the departure from traditional ways: "It wastes time to make cakes from wooden molds. Stainless steel molds are easy to clean, and with the press of a button, ten cakes emerge. Our production volume is increased by a factor of two to three."
In a corner of the plant, hand-carved wooden molds still stand in a disorderly pile. Though still clean and glistening, they see little use. As devotees of modern food industry methods, the Kuos have installed an electronic oven, mixer, sieving machine, and cutting machine.
In a different world is Chen Heng, a true loner in the local cake making industry. He supplies square or crystal cake to many local coffee and tea shops and leading cake shops-even to supermarkets. The steamed cakes, stuffed with love pea paste, are each imprinted with an auspicious Chinese character- blissfulness, fortune, longevity, happiness, and others. The red love pea stuffing, vaguely visible through the thin white cake skin, is a worthy appetizer.
Chen's cake shop is located on the ground floor of an apartment building in Chingmei, a suburb of Taipei. The Chens are earlybirds who start work at 5 a.m. We arrived at 7 a.m. when the Chens were about to finish their morning effort.
A square cake requires a mixture, half of dry glutinous rice powder and half of wet tsai lai rice flour, plus a tenth of that volume of refined granulated sugar. The mixture is placed in a freezer over-night to allow the sugar to completely merge into the dough. This process is colorfully called "sobering up."
Chen Heng first placed a pock-marked square aluminum pan on his working table, covered it with a handkerchief-size cloth, framed off part of the pan with four wood bars, then sieved powder down into the quartered area. When the powder filled the frame, he bulldozed it. Then he picked up a ruler-sized piece of iron with five "teeth," to hoe from left to right. And as, his arms moved, one after another, files of five small holes appeared, little wells ready to take in spoonfuls of sweetened osmanthus bean paste. He used the toothed iron piece to pile powder over the pock marked holes, then bulldozed it all again.
Chen then employed engraved wood blocks to print Chinese characters on the cakes. A hard press on each of the cakes plus several knocks with a small hammer, and the kitchen was suddenly filled with the blessings of fortune and happiness. After cutting each cake into 25 pieces, Chen moved them to a position over a stove, to steam over high heat for about 10 minutes.
In general, before 8 a.m., Chen will have made more than a thousand pieces of square cakes to be distributed to local shops and supermarkets. Though the square cakes do not contain any preservatives, they can be kept in a freezer for half a year without deteriorating.
At their workshop, the Chens also demonstrated to us how to make sponge cakes with bean paste stuffing, and to decorate them with preserved fruits on top. We noticed a love pea year cake and two boxes of tiao tou cakes, with red-gram paste stuffing, looking somewhat like the hot dogs of the West.
He even made chongyang cakes for the Double Ninth Festival, when families climb in the mountains together. Since the Tang Dynasty, it has been customary for mountain climbers to carry chongyang cakes along with them. Chen's cakes were decorated with triangles of bunting and cut with auspicious characters and patterns.
To make his dough, Chen first soaks ten catties of tsai lai rice and 20 catties of glutinous rice in water for seven hours. After the rice is dehydrated and ground into powder, Chen slowly adds two liters of warm water and ten catties of white granulated sugar to the powder.
"The trick is to keep the powder as loose as possible to avoid making a 'rat's nest,' which is a sticky, hard lump in the cake. In our hometown, there are many taboos in steaming a cake. For instance, strangers are not allowed to peep in. Nor are children to engage in wild talk. If you violate the taboos, a rat's nest will be your punishment, and you will have to make the cake from the beginning again," Chen observed.
Noting that his bamboo food steamer was puffing vapor, Chen scooped up some mixed flour and piled it inside the steamer to one fourth of its height, then paved over it with a layer of colorful preserved fruit. This action is repeated three times, until the cake reaches a height of 15 centimeters. After half an hour, Chen's beautiful rainbow-colored cake was ready to serve.
What bread is to the West, rice has been to China in multiple force, in ancient times in particular, as demonstrated by tradition.
Three days after a baby is born, an "oil-glutinous rice" dish, including such ingredients as mushroom, pork, and baby shrimps, is to be served. When the baby is one year old, red rice round dumplings are prepared, though some prefer red peach or turtle cakes instead. When a child is about 16 years old, almost an adult, a symbolic taro-oil-rice dish must be made because it is said that the taro proliferates rapidly.
For engagements, a round popped-rice cake is a must. A Chinese proverb says: "Eating popped-rice cake assures you will marry a good husband." And on the wedding day, the newlyweds must eat red glutinous rice dumplings to invoke a happy family life.
By local custom, people over 50 must have a grand birthday party every ten years to celebrate their longevity. In addition to fruits and sacrificial dishes, rice cakes' patterning after the Chinese character "longevity"—or after peaches and turtles which symbolize longevity—must be served. The number of red turtle cakes must be equal to the age of the god of longevity, with an additional 12.
Rice is even indispensible at a man's death bed—a bowl of uncooked rice in which two bamboo chopsticks have been planted along with a boiled duck's egg. And after 49 days, a grand ceremony is staged, also demanding rice dishes. While the mainland people serve images of the eight immortals made from rice, local people pay their respects with cakes patterned after wheels, pens, or hills—or just plain white cakes.
Prying into this world of rice, we discover that each pastry originated as a brainchild of our ancestors. And each is worthy of recording and recreating.
Like Western birthday cakes, we hope someday, our delicate Chinese rice cakes will be loved by the whole world and that the global reputation of the "Kingdom of Rice Food" will be fully established.
—By Huang Yu-mei, based on reporting by the Chinese-language "Echo" magazine, which will soon publish rice-food cook books in English and German.