People’s tastes in food change over the years. In today’s health-conscious society, many of the fat-and-sugar-rich confec tions of a bygone age still retain their nostalgic appeal, while others have been consigned to the history books. What makes a cake a winner?
Swiss chocolate, Kona coffee, good French wine...some jaunts abroad are all too easy to commemorate with edible--or imbibable--mementos. But what would you expect your friends to bring back from Taiwan? If their tour encompassed Taichung, the answer might very well be: a box of flaky, sugar-rich “sun” cakes. It is hard to escape from the city without succumbing to the temptation to indulge in this mouthwatering pastry product, because hordes of vendors have set up shop along Chungkang Road, which connects downtown Taichung with the main north-south highway, and lots of tourists stop to acquire some of the goodies that have helped make their visit to central Taiwan so pleasurable. With its crumbly exterior and succulent malted -sugar filling, the sun cake has long been synonymous with Taichung, and nowadays its popularity has reached such heights that it is sold on all the island’s mainline trains.
Another cake with strong local connotations is tsai tao (turnip) cake, which fortifies visitors to the historic little town of Lukang in Changhua County adjacent Taichung. Despite its name, this is really a fried patty of shredded turnip. Sweet variations with mashed taro or red bean are now common, but people continue to call it tsai tao cake, since in Taiwanese that sounds similar to “good luck.”
Other cakes lack strong local links but have interesting names, such as “wife cake” and the (less popular) “husband cake.” Both are flat and filled with glutinous rice. The former is sweet, whereas the latter is both sweet and spicy on account of the garlic that is an essential ingredient of its filling.
But perhaps the most popular all-year-round confection is pineapple cake. According to Her Cheng-hsiung, 29, a baker who worked in the mainland Chinese city of Nanjing for two years, this is one of the few traditional cakes that can truly be described as native to Taiwan. “Most pastries have their origin on the mainland, especially the ones distinguished by their flaky outsides,” he says. “But pineapple cake, which has a smooth crust, can be found only in Taiwan. It was unknown to mainlanders until we Taiwanese went there to sell it and taught them how to make it.” This origin seems perfectly natural, given that the southern part of the island is rich in tropical fruits, until Her adds that mashed wax gourd (a pumpkin-like fruit) has largely replaced pineapple as the filling, being both less coarse and less expensive. Once again, however, superstition intervened to ensure that the old name stuck: in Taiwanese, “pineapple” is another homophone of “good luck.”
According to Her, who combines his bakery business with a job at Chinese Culture University, where he teaches over seas Chinese students the finer points of patisserie, the most popular cakes on the island today are sun cake, wife cake, pineapple cake, and egg-yolk cake. The latter, a small cake that comes in the shape of a flattened ball, is also native to Taiwan and is stuffed with pureed dates or red beans and a whole salty egg yolk. But sales of these delicious pastries pale into insignificance when set alongside the extraordinarily lucrative business of engagement cakes.
Chinese societies have always been serious about engagements and their associated customs, such as the fiance provid ing lavish cakes for his future wife’s friends and relatives. “In the days when information technology was far from advanced, people used to announce their engagements by giving food to their families and friends,” notes Chen Mei-hui, who teaches at Chinese Culture University’s Department of Applied Living Science. Despite the arrival of the Internet and e-mail, the tradition is still observed, not only in rural areas but also in major conurbations.
Engagement cakes come in different shapes and sizes, depending on where they are produced. Generally, the ones from southern Taiwan tend to be large and rectangular in shape, whereas those from the northern part of the island are small and round. Fillings are likewise manifold and various: they can be sweet, as when made from mashed dates and red beans, or salty, with a mix of shredded pork and wax gourd inside. According to Her Cheng-hsiung, northern Taiwanese bakers prefer to puree the pork and the gourd very finely, while southern patissiers adhere to the tradition of keeping them coarse. More and more young consumers are turning their backs on the latter, however, because they say it leaves the taste of fatty pork in the mouth.
Another big money-maker is the moon cake, which traditionally accompanies special occasions. “Moon cakes can bring in an amazing amount of money,” Chen Mei-hui says. Around the time of the Moon Festival, which falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, bakeries vie with one another to promote their special recipes. “If a shop does well with its moon cakes, that means it’s going to have a great year,” she adds.
Here again, variety abounds. The smooth-crusted “guang-style” cakes originated in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces, while their flaky-crusted “su-style” cousins hail from Jiangsu and Zhejiang. There are also distinctively Taiwanese editions of the moon cake, such as the “green-bean” cake, mainly produced in central Taiwan. Called “Fengyuan” moon cake for one of the towns where it is made, this is filled with a mix of pureed green beans and pork, or sometimes pureed green beans alone. Despite its name, it is available all year round.
Moon cakes never seem to lose their glamour, despite the growing Westernization of Taiwan and most things Taiwanese. For the older generation, however, some once popular cakes are little more than a fading memory. “Red turtle” cakes and “flour turtle” cakes, for example, are available nowadays only on special occasions, and even then mostly in the countryside. The former is made from glutinous rice, whereas the latter is flour-based. Both can be found, although nowadays rarely, at ceremonies honoring ancestors or deities, birthday or wedding banquets, and various other special occasions.
Kuo Ching-yuan is general manager of Kuo Yuan Ye Foods Co., which has been selling traditional Chinese and Taiwan ese cakes since as long ago as 1867. (According to family legend, the company invented the egg-yolk cake.) From his unique viewpoint, the result of his family’s accumulated experience, he can see how certain cakes have fallen from favor while others go on regardless.
Take bito and moho, for example. These flour-based cakes feature only at ceremonies held on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month to mark the middle of the Ghost Month, when according to legend the spirits of the departed are allowed a four-week furlough in the land of the living. The dead have to be fed, of course, and they are deemed to have a special fondness for a wide variety of foodstuffs, including chicken, fish--and cake. Today the mid-month festival is still widely observed in Taiwan, but bito and moho cakes are rarely seen except at a public ceremony held to honor and placate the dead, which is held annually in Keelung, a few miles northeast of Taipei.
Cake towers are another tradition that has largely faded into history. These cylindrical, glutinous-rice confections used to be a major feature of funerals, heaped up to make a pile higher than a human being. Today, however, the “towers” consist of cans containing food that does not go bad as quickly as cake, and they take much less time to assemble.
It is not just the comestibles themselves that stand in danger of being lost. Wooden cake molds are also becoming a thing of the past in this automated age, and now they mostly grace the shelves of antique collectors. Kuo Yuan Ye Foods Co. even has a little museum housing old molds and other odds and ends involved in the making of traditional cakes. Kuo Ching-yuan points out that the molds were mostly made from durable hardwoods, since they had to stand up to the harsh treatment meted out in a busy kitchen. The interiors of many are engraved with Chinese characters or intricate patterns that would show up on the surface of the finished cake. “Double Happiness” symbols appear frequently, as do the dragon-and-phoenix patterns popular with makers of engagement cakes.
Cakes, like many other food items, have fallen prey to shifts in popular taste, coupled with health concerns. “Changes in the social environment definitely have an impact on people’s eating habits,” says Chinese Culture University’s Chen Mei -hui. As people become less serious about traditions, cakes related to rites and ceremonies are giving way to machine-made cookies and other substitutes. Meanwhile, a richer and more pluralistic society means a wider selection of foods, including hamburgers, breads, creamy desserts, and other Western imports. In today’s Taiwan, only a handful of stores restrict them selves to sales of traditional cakes, and even Kuo Yuan Ye Foods, which has more than forty retail outlets around the island, carries a wide range of Western goodies.
Typical of current trends is Chiang Min-tzu, the owner of a bakery in Taichung that first opened its doors some eighty years ago. This shop originally sold only traditional items like green-bean cakes, but later it branched out into Western-style foods such as breads and biscuits. There are exceptions, however: when somebody is getting engaged, or when the Moon Festival is imminent, everything gives way to the baking of Chinese-style cakes.
“Traditional cakes tend to be greasy and very sweet,” says Chiang, noting that foods rich in sugar used to be popular because they stayed fresh for a long time. Nowadays, of course, that doesn’t do for everyone, so less sugar goes into the cakes on the shelves. And in some cases, sun cakes for example, butter is increasingly replacing the formerly ubiquitous lard, even though it is three times as expensive. In Western eyes there may not appear much difference between the two, but lard tends to hold its ground in “traditional” southern Taiwan rather than in more health-conscious northern towns and cities such as Taipei.
Obesity and other health concerns are becoming issues in Taiwan just as they are in the West, generating an upsurge in demand for low-calorie foods and organic products. To have a slim, well-toned body is the ideal nowadays, as people seek healthier lifestyles. The number of vegetarians is on the rise, which is perhaps a good thing; less good, however, is the sharp rise in the number of diabetics.
Last year, Her Cheng-hsiung, alert to this increasingly hot topic, began to substitute a protein-based product for the sugar he would normally use to make moon cakes. This contains much less sucrose than the ordinary refined product, but unfortu nately it costs eight times as much. At the beginning, the new but expensive product attracted few takers, which caused Her considerable concern on account of the short shelf life of foods with a low sugar content. But word of mouth turned out to be favorable, and Her eventually managed to sell all his “healthy” moon cakes.
Her also decided to market a moon cake containing pureed red beans with herbal juices. Some bakers now add ginseng to the filling, trading on popular affection for this all-purpose health supplement, while others use green tea, which is widely believed to prevent cancer. People also worry about the cholesterol in egg yolks, which feature in some kinds of moon cakes, so a few bakeries have begun to substitute kumquats, which resemble yolks in size and color.
Another change came about as the result of the simple fact that people are eating less. Moon cakes are shrinking! “This reflects Taiwan’s social transformation,” Chen Mei-hui says. “Families are smaller nowadays, so people no longer need big moon cakes.”
Companies are willing to spend a lot of money on developing new moon and engagement cakes, because they account for such a big share of the market. Some of the more recent experiments with moon cakes seem to be pushing the envelope, however, involving as they do imports such as red wine, coffee, chocolate, maple sugar, and even the popular but evil -smelling durian fruit. Presentation is changing, too--some people still send big, round traditional cakes to announce their engagement, but many prefer a gift box containing beautifully wrapped Western-style cookies and snacks, although for some reason this is still called an engagement “cake.” Some people, torn between East and West, combine the two in a tasteful, tasty arrangement.
“We have to adapt,” says Her Cheng-hsiung. “It isn’t easy to keep a product going forever and a day, you know.” Even Kuo Yuan Ye Foods has adopted a motto of “30 percent traditional, 70 percent modern.” And that seems to be a move in the right direction, because many of its best-selling lines are variations on old themes: “pineapple cakes” filled with pureed fruits and vegetables, for example. “Change is inevitable, and today’s variants become the traditions of tomorrow,” Chen Mei-hui says with a shrug. Moho and bito have already been forgotten by most people, but for the sun cake, moon cake, and pineapple cake there is hope--as long as the island’s pastry cooks can go on devising new ways of pleasing Taiwan’s ever more choosy palates.