Moon Cakes

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ThomasCaron

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Posted: Sep 28, 2007 - 04:27 PM
Post subject: Moon Cakes

The New York Times

September 27, 2007

Moon Cakes in Shanghai

By Anne-Marie Slaughter

Tuesday was Moon Festival Day – the 15th moon day of the 8th Chinese Lunar Month. For weeks now, billboards all over Shanghai have been advertising different varieties of moon cakes (yue bing), the traditional holiday food.

One of the many stories surrounding the Moon Festival, which is also known as the Mid-Autumn Festival, is that during the Yuan Dynasty (A.D. 1280-1368) Chinese rebels against the ruling Mongols ordered the making of special cakes for the Moon Festival and baked a message with a call to action and the outline of the planned attack into each cake. The rebellion succeeded and established the Ming Dynasty. Moon cakes continue to have elaborate designs stamped into them.

On the taste side, however, a friend says that moon cakes are the Chinese equivalent of fruit cake at Christmas – tradition demands that you have one, but no one actually eats one. The result is everyone buys them in all sorts of fancy packages, to give them to everyone else. This practice is encouraged by discount coupons for moon cakes from specific bakeries that are given out by employers.

I had a chance to witness the results yesterday afternoon when I walked by the Godly Bakery, which is attached to a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant. The Godly Bakery bears the logo “since 1922” and a plaque on the wall proclaims that it is a “time-honored Chinese brand.”

Yesterday, its time-honored history notwithstanding, it resembled Zabar’s on the day before Thanksgiving. The mob of people spilled out into the street; when I peeked in I saw that what must usually be a storeroom adjoining the bakery itself had been opened and some twenty sales assistants stood in the center behind a hastily constructed L-shaped counter unloading moon cake tins of various shapes and sizes and shoving
them in bags as fast as they could to hand out to the crowd of customers calling out orders and waving coupons. Cardboard boxes were piled almost to the ceiling all around the walls, emptying at a dizzying rate. On the wall was a poster with pictures of the various tins available, with prices ranging from 55 RMB (roughly $7.50) to over 200 RMB ($30).

After making several passes through the room trying to figure out what was going on, I finally managed to get to the counter myself – the Chinese have NO compunction about pushing past you in line, even when you
try to stare them down, so at the first sign of hesitation you are lost – and to buy a gold tin with a Buddha on it containing 8 individually wrapped moon cakes.

When I got them home we had a chance to compare them with a set of moon cakes that a friend had bought for us the previous week. We discovered, thanks in part to an article in the Shanghai Daily News on “do it yourself” moon cake kits, that the traditional mooncakes were “crisp and flaky,” as opposed to the “greasy” version currently being marketed everywhere, including a Starbucks version and a Haagen-Dazs ice cream version). Godly’s apparently favors the traditional version, which is made with an Asian version of phyllo pastry and which has fillings of chopped nuts, red and green bean paste, poppy seed and lotus seed paste, as well as a number of more savory fillings, one of which smells a great deal like truffle. I gather that there are also lots of regional variations, which I welcome hearing about from readers.

The Shanghai Daily News article advertised the virtues of making your own moon cakes as a great way to “de-stress,” another sign of modern Chinese times. We have heard from a number of Chinese friends and acquaintances that urban Chinese are catching “Western disease,” working ever longer hours and chasing an ever more expensive standard of living. An article this morning noted that the Moon Festival was a sad time for seniors, many of whom no longer had the opportunity to eat moon cakes with their families in the traditional celebration because the festival falls on a work day and their working children could not manage to visit them. By contrast, the ever-present billboards portray the perfect modern white-collar Chinese one-child-policy compliant family (and lucky, i.e. male, child) getting mass-marketed mooncakes from grandma. I’m assuming that, like fruitcakes, these tins of mooncakes will be around for a long time to come.

(Anne-Marie Slaughter, a political scientist and the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. She is the author “The Idea that is America,” and she is spending this academic year in Shanghai.)

yu888
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Joined: Jan 25, 2003
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Posted: Sep 29, 2007 - 09:40 AM

Always fun to read about newies and their first experiences in Shanghai. All the pre-conceived notions and misjudgements based on lack of experience. And yet that naivety is almost refreshing coming from a more hardend and jaded perspective. Ah if only I didnt lose those rose coloured glasses. I too, wrote about many of my first experiences, but alas back then the New York Times was more selective in their choices of articles to publish. What is the world coming to eh? Wink