Qiu Junlin
The Mid-Autumn Festival is approaching, and it is the mooncake season of the year again. "August 15 is round, and the Mid-Autumn Festival mooncakes are fragrant and sweet." A proverb tells the custom of people to admire the moon and eat moon cakes on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival. However, what many people don't know is that the original mooncakes are not called "mooncakes", and even have no connection with the Mid-Autumn Festival. All this must start from the origin and evolution of mooncakes.
The term "mooncake" first appeared in the "Record of Dreams"
Regarding the origin of the mooncake, there is a saying that the mooncake was originally called "Hu Cake", which was transmitted from the Western Regions to the Central Plains. During the Han Dynasty, when Zhang Qian came out of the plug, he brought back a kind of round cake that the locals used walnut kernels to make filling, which was Hu Cake. Later, legend has it that Tang Xuanzong and Yang Guifei enjoyed the moon together, eating pepper cakes while watching the moon. Tang Xuanzong said, "The name Hu Cake is not good. Yang Guifei looked at the big and round moon and said smoothly, "This cake is very similar to the moon in the sky, how about calling it a moon cake?" Tang Xuanzong said, "Good! "Since then, the hu cake has been called moon cake.
The legend is beautiful, but it may not be true. During the Northern Song Dynasty, a popular snack commonly known as "small cake" and "moon ball" was considered to be the prototype of modern moon cake. This cake is made of wheat flour, caramel, lard and other materials, and the taste is crisp and sweet. The pie filling has diced lard, pine nuts, nuts, etc., similar to the current Su-style mooncake and Beijing-style mooncake. At the time, this kind of cake was a daily dessert. Su Shi once wrote in the poem "Farewell and Honesty": "Small cakes are like chewing the moon, and there are crisps and food." But the "moon" here is not related to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but it only shows that this cake is shaped like a full moon, and it cannot be inferred that it is a moon cake eaten by the fifteenth year of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
The Tokyo Dream Record, which is the time of the Two Song Dynasties, records in detail the various "projects" of the Mid-Autumn Festival of the Song Dynasty, in which crabs and seasonal fruits that have just been listed are mentioned in terms of eating. In addition, Zheng Wangzhi's "Records of The Chefs" at the time of the Two Song Dynasties also mentioned that the seasonal food of the Mid-Autumn Festival night was "playing with the moon soup", which was a soup made of cinnamon balls and rock sugar, lotus seeds and lotus flour. However, in many records, there is no figure of "moon cake".
The term "mooncake" officially appeared in the Southern Song Dynasty Wu Zimu's "Mengliang Record", but this kind of mooncake, like hibiscus cake, chrysanthemum cake, crab meat buns and many other famous dim sum, is only a kind of market snack, and "there are four times, let it be called, do not mistake the patron". It can be seen that the mooncakes at that time were not associated with a specific festival.
At the same time, Zhou Mi mentioned in the "Past Events of Wulin" that at that time, there were more than fifty kinds of steamed foods in Lin'an, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, such as spring cocoons, lotus leaf cakes, moon cakes, large buns, mutton steamed buns, etc. "Moon cakes" were just one of many steamed foods.
Combined with the Mid-Autumn Festival, it symbolizes reunion
Mooncakes are associated with the "Mid-Autumn Festival", which roughly began in the Yuan and Ming dynasties. Legend has it that when Zhu Yuanzhang revolted, he once hid a note containing the "August 15th Night Uprising" in the mooncake as a tool to contact various rebel armies, and later after the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang rewarded the "mooncake" as a Mid-Autumn Festival cake to the courtiers. Since then, the custom of eating mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival has spread.
Although this is only a legend, the time when the mooncake combined with the Mid-Autumn Festival was not empty in the Yuan and Ming dynasties. The Ming Dynasty eunuch Liu Ruoyu wrote in the "ZhiZhongzhi" (Discretionary Chronicles): "From the first day of the first month, there were people who sold mooncakes, and by the fifteenth day, every family offered mooncakes, melons and fruits... If there is a leftover moon cake, it is collected in a dry and cool place, and it is used until the twilight of the year, and the reunion cake is also known. It can be seen that after the Mid-Autumn Festival moon festival in the Ming Dynasty, there was a custom of a family sitting around eating mooncakes and moon fruits, and the meaning of "reunion" of mooncakes gradually became deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
In addition, the Ming Dynasty Tian Rucheng's "West Lake Tour Zhiyu" recorded: "August 15 is called the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the folk leave mooncakes to take the meaning of reunion." At that time, mooncakes not only represented "reunion", but also became a good gift for people to give to each other during the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the custom of sending mooncakes to each other has become a common practice.
In the Qing Dynasty, a man named Pan Rongxi once entered the imperial palace during the Yongzheng period, retired to idle at home, according to his many years of experience in the palace, month by month recorded the relevant customs and affairs of the four seasons of the Beijing division at that time, compiled into a "Jisheng in the Imperial Capital", which also mentioned in the Mid-Autumn Festival: "Mid-Autumn Festival, fifteen days of moon sacrifice, incense lamp offerings, then reunion moon cakes." At that time, the mooncake could no longer be separated from the "Mid-Autumn Festival" and "reunion".
Oversized mooncakes with a diameter of two feet appear
Mooncakes in ancient times had a variety of tricks, endless. It is recorded in the Ming Dynasty Shen Bang's "Miscellaneous Records of Wanjue": "August Moon Cake: Shi Shu's furniture is left behind by moon-made noodle cakes, and the size varies, which is called moon cake." The market is filled with fruit, with a strange name, and there is a cake worth hundreds of dollars. It can be seen that the mooncakes at that time not only had different sizes, but also had different shapes, and even appeared a luxury version of the mooncakes with hundreds of dollars.
Not only that, but in the Ming Dynasty, there was also a kind of oversized mooncake with a diameter of two feet. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Liu Tong and Yu Yizheng recorded in the "Imperial JingJing Scenery Strategy": "The moon cake and the moon fruit, the relatives give reciprocal retribution, and the cake has a diameter of two feet." "Two feet in diameter" indicates that the diameter of the mooncake has reached sixty or seventy centimeters. In addition, it is also mentioned in the "Wanli Jiaxing Fu Zhi": "In August, I hope to use the hundred fruits as a large cake to name the moon cake, and the name of the hundred fruits and sugars is the sugar, and the moon is admired." "It shows that there were already fruit-filled mooncakes at that time."
In the Qing Dynasty, the production skills of mooncakes continued to improve. The well-known foodie Yuan Ming recorded a kind of "Liu Fangbo MoonCake" in the "Suiyuan Food List". The method of this mooncake is: "use Shandong flying noodles, make puff pastry as the skin, use pine nuts, walnut kernels, melon seeds as fine powder, and add rock sugar and lard as filling, the food is not very sweet, and the fragrant pine is soft and greasy, which is very unusual." "This kind of puff pastry mooncake filled with nuts is similar to the current five-kernel mooncake.
In Yuan Ming's eyes, "Liu Fangbo Mooncake" tasted very good and was also the benchmark in the mooncakes of that era. In addition, he also mentioned a kind of "lace mooncake", which Yuan Ming commented on as "not under Liu Fangbo in Shandong". This mooncake is stuffed with date meat and then slowly crafted into delicate contours and patterns, where the fragrance of the dough and the sweet aroma of date paste blend perfectly after being grilled. This was a mooncake made by a large family with the surname Ming at that time, and Yuan Ming could not resist the delicious taste of this mooncake, so he often used a palanquin to pick up the ming family's cook to make mooncakes in his garden.
During the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, Yang Guangfu's "Songnan Lefu" has clouds: "Songnan is good, the time is recommended for autumn fragrance, the moon cake is full of peach meat filling, the ice cream is sweet and cane frosting, and the new valley gradually appears." "While tasting the peach meat pie mooncake, I feel the joy of the grain harvest, how comfortable and satisfied.
Cantonese-style mooncakes were famous in the late Qing Dynasty
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were already many types of mooncakes, and mooncakes in different regions also had different flavors and textures, and the traditional types of mooncakes such as Cantonese, Su-style, Beijing-style, and Chao-style were dizzying. From the end of the Qing Dynasty to the beginning of the Republic of China, the Nanjing historian Chen Zuolin wrote a "Jinling Property Customs and Soil History", which was originally a historical record of Nanjing's history and culture in detail, but it mentioned that "the Mid-Autumn Festival mooncake is better made by Cantoneses". It seems that Cantonese-style mooncakes have been famous as early as the end of the Qing Dynasty!
Cantonese mooncakes have a wide range of qualities, the main features are heavy oil, thin skin, more filling, traditional Cantonese mooncakes can be divided into nut type, meat and poultry type, coconut type, rongsha type and so on according to its filling. Among them, the most famous is the lotus mooncake. However, the lotus mooncake appeared very late, and was only born at the end of the nineteenth century.
At that time, there was a cake and puff pastry restaurant in the west of Guangzhou, and they used lotus seeds to boil lotus paste as the filling of shortbread, which was fragrant and delicious, and was very popular with customers. During the Guangxu period, the cake restaurant was renamed "Lian Xiang Lou", and the cake point of the lotus paste filling had been fixed as the current moon cake. In the second year of Xuan reunification, Chen Taiji, a Hanlin scholar, praised the store after tasting the mooncakes of the store, but felt that the word "Lianxiang" was indecent, suggested changing it to "Lotus Incense", and hand-wrote the "Lotus Xiang Lou" signboard, which is still in use today. According to The Yangcheng Evening News
Source: West China Metropolis Daily