On this trip to Zhejiang, I found a "strange" snack in the ancient town of Xinshi in Deqing, Huzhou, and its name was tea cake.
The first time I ate tea cake was in a large hotel opposite the ancient town of Xinshi, and their home was famous in the local area.
When we came up with a few "specialties", the waiter recommended it to us. Because, tea cake is "our unique snack here, tourists must order."
Coupled with the hotel's album's display of tea cakes is really very tempting: the white skin faintly reveals the ruddy filling inside, and the heat almost floats to the tip of the nose, and you can feel sweet and delicious through the picture. After all, we have elderly people and children at this table, and it is a good choice to ask for a soft sticky crispy snack. Okay, let's get a copy. But I never thought of it —
After the tea cake is served, it is actually stuffed with meat.
Ah this...
How to say it, you see, this small pastry is square, watery, the skin is the kind of rice cake noodles commonly used in desserts, according to the theory, this coffee-colored filling in the head bag here should be bean paste, right? Then there is the date paste, brown sugar, purple potato is also logical... In short, it is reasonable to "should not" be sauce flavored. This operation... It was a surprise.
Fix your nerves and eat one steadily. You don't have to say that although the preparation of this tea cake is strange, the taste is still strange.
The "glutinous" of rice paste and the "mud" of meat filling are mixed with oral raw jin, eating it is a bit like meat dumplings, but the taste is more elaborate than rice dumplings; a bit like meat buns, but the staying power is more fragrant than buns.
After I ate the meatballs inside the tea cake, I found that the "shell" with the meat stuffing soup on the outside was more delicious to eat alone, and the sweetness of the silk was the sweetness that came with the glutinous rice.
The clerk said: This tea cake out of the new city ancient town will "no longer be eaten", the surrounding same type of Jiangnan ancient town is not.
Indeed, we went from north to south, and the "rice cakes" we ate were almost all sweet, and we rarely saw meat fillings. But I have to say that each of us is also extremely impressed by the exquisite craftsmanship and ritual of Jiangnan small pastries. such as:
The method of orange red cake in Nanxun Ancient Town is based on special honey juice kumquat, the cake is easy to make, and the kumquat is difficult to find;
Pictured: orange red cake, let's talk about the next article in the next Nanxun Ancient Town travelogue
Shaoxing's rice cakes may seem inconspicuous, but they have a long history dating back to the Han Dynasty, and so far more than a dozen practices have been derived;
There is also a kind of pastry that looks like a rose, rose red, quite good-looking, beautiful and dead.
The real thing looks very "fake", but people say that this cake has no artificial additives at all, and it is the color on the rice surface given by the juice of dragon fruit (after seeding) ... You have to lament that the "natural selection" materials of the land of fish and rice give the people of Jiangnan unlimited creativity.
Later, I got used to it, and the first thing I did when I went to a place of travel was to "fix" the food first: what to eat, how to eat, why to eat... The wonderful humanistic interests of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai have made our group of northern tourists have a lot of insight.
But how is the light "insight" enough, we have to understand how this new city tea cake came from, where is the root of "Jiangnan unique", this trip is not in vain.
Tea cake, as the name suggests, is a small food related to tea. After all, from the time the Xiantan Zhi listed it as a "new city property" in 1517 AD, it was already an old specialty of the town.
It is said to have originated in the Southern Song Dynasty, but this claim has no historical facts. Taking 10,000 steps back, even if you start from the Ming Dynasty, it must have a history of about 600 years.
Then let's start with the Ming Dynasty.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal was booming. As I shared in my travelogue a few days ago, as soon as the ancient town of Xinshi arrives at the Qingming Dynasty, there will be a "unique" large market (silkworm flower temple fair) in Jiangnan.
This bazaar is held once a year, and the scene is extremely spectacular, and the crowds are empty - but can you imagine, the new city people told me: What is such a market? The Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty were not new at all, fragrant markets, morning markets, night markets... We all have the unexpected "city" you think of, which can be said to be "the new city every day".
The snack of tea cake came into being with the development and growth of the "Canal Market".
In the beginning, tea cakes were only sold in tea houses in the ancient town of Xinshi, but at that time it was (probably) not meat filling, or ordinary rice cake, sweet, or no filling at all. Legend has it that the earliest practice of wrapping meat stuffing into rice cakes was accidental:
The people of Xinshi attach great importance to the Qingming Festival, which stems from the development of the local mulberry industry , when almost every household in the new town raised silkworms and planted mulberries, and the spring silkworm breeding almost determined the harvest of the year.
Therefore, every time they arrived in the Qingming Dynasty, the people of Xinshi (and the surrounding areas) spontaneously burned incense to the "Silkworm Flower Lady" and prayed that everything would go smoothly for the whole family.
One year, the Qingming Festival, which came later than usual, stopped at... A cooker from a family on the shore of the new style invented the snack of tea cake with an inadvertent little act by some coincidence.
When this cooked woman was offering to the "silkworm god", she suddenly thought: Why not make this sacrifice into the appearance of "not willing to eat at home", the "immortal" must be happy to eat, and our family's harvest this year must be good. OK, do it when you say:
She "spent a lot of money" to prepare a large number of ingredients that the family was willing to eat once every New Year's Festival. First, the fine glutinous rice is stone-ground into flour, and then the large meat filling with bamboo shoots and jelly is wrapped in rice noodles and steamed.
Jiangnan rice cake has been improved by the xinshi people, and since then it has had a "high-grade taste": the housewife found that the steam in the hot pot flushed the skin of the meat cake into a small opening, and the soup of tender lard flowed down the cake body, and the aroma was particularly attractive.
Immediately, this method of rice cake was learned by the neighbors who opened the tea house, and soon became popular throughout the new city and ancient town.
As an important transportation hub on the Jiangnan Canal, Xinshi Ancient Town is naturally not a minority of tea houses.
I found that the habits of the people of Xinshi to drink tea are somewhat similar to the habits of Cantonese people eating morning tea, and the old people in the new town also like to put together a table in pairs in the morning, while chatting and eating a small snack - throughout the country, the living customs on the docks always have the characteristics of the north and the south, so this new "new city folk customs" is gradually formed with this small tea cake, and then, along with the Qingming Xiang City of the Ming Dynasty, the prosperity of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal in the Qing Dynasty, and the "tea house culture" in the early years of the Republic of China, which has been passed down to this day.
Just like shaoxing people drink small wine with a plate of fennel beans, Xinshi people now drink tea with a piece of tea cake, and this day's life can be regarded as a complete and complete.
It is worth mentioning that since the birth of the tea cake in Xinshi Ancient Town since the first day of its birth, it has been called such a name, which is this shape, and the difference in bread is such a meat filling, which has never been renamed, never changed, and never changed.
There have been attempts to improve it, but without success.
From this point, it can be seen that the word "tea cake" is not only a food, but also a recognition in the minds of the people of Xinshi. Perhaps we can understand it more like this: tea cake is a firm determination and persistence of the people of Xinshi to their hometown culture.
In the eyes of my northern tourists, xinshi ancient town tea cake is the best "souvenir" on the road of Deqing travel in Huzhou.
Nowadays, Xinshi tea cake is no longer exclusive to the tea house.
As a must-have in the daily life of the people of The New City and at the dinner table, tea cakes entered the small restaurants and also boarded the halls. Perhaps in the future, Xinshi tea cakes, as a unique specialty of Jiangnan Ancient Town, will also be protected like many "intangible cultural heritage".
In the long history, in the brilliant chinese food culture directory, although the figure of tea cake is not eye-catching, "name" is indispensable.
A small piece of tea cake is a canal "evolutionary history of water towns" in the ancient town of Xinshi.
The zhejiang trip continues, and the next travelogue of other cuisines in Xinshi Ancient Town continues. Remember to follow me, remember to come and see.
I am a big red sister, an anchor of the audio radio travel channel, a professional travel player, focusing on niche gameplay and sharing unpopular destinations. Travel is not an attitude, but life itself.