Years and years of heavy yang, now heavy yang. On the occasion of the annual Chongyang Festival, Chongyang cake is the seasonal food of chongyang festival, just like eating lantern cake on the same Lantern Festival and mooncake during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Chongyang cakes in many other places are steamed with flour and dates, chestnuts or other dried fruits. In Jiangnan, Chongyang cake is made of rice flour instead of flour, especially in Chongming, a sandbar at the mouth of the Yangtze River, which is exactly the same as the Chongming cake steamed at the end of the Year. It is made of about 10 kilograms of rice flour, plus brown sugar, white sugar, dates, peach kernels and other ingredients. After steaming, the cake must have more than thirty catties. More than thirty pounds of weight, put it on the table, short cylindrical type, the surface of the cake is covered with a round big red shou character or Fu character seal, on which is inserted a triangular colored small flag, it appears to be both thick and solid, but also festive and inviting, adding a lot of atmosphere to the festival. How to say our Chinese snacks must have thousands of kinds of it, if lined up, these more than 30 pounds of Chongming cakes, can be deservedly become the giant in snacks! If all the snacks in China are compared to a fleet, then Chongming Cake must be one of the aircraft carriers!
On the day of Chongyang, there were Chongyang cakes in the tea shops and catering shops on the streets of the town, and when they were sold, they cut a piece of weighing according to the size of the customer. Chongming's "Yingzhou Bamboo Branch Words and Chongyang" during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty wrote: "Looking at the city, the flag fluttered wildly, and the jujube cake was sold in Chongyang at that time." There is no place to find the Dragon Mountain, and there is a golden ao behind Shou'an Temple. Meaning: In the morning, you can see the bunting flag fluttering on the street, which is a small flag planted on the Chongyang cake. Mo said that Longshan has nowhere to find to climb, but there is a tall earthen mountain called Jin'ao behind Shou'an Temple (an ancient temple on Chongming Island).
In addition to such a giant as the steaming of the nine-nine yang, during the Spring Festival, the farmers in the countryside of Chongming are inseparable from the cake. In the Waxing Moon, the Stove King Festival is coming, every household is busy grinding flour, and then set up a steamer on the stove head, kneading glutinous rice flour and japonica rice flour in a certain proportion with boiling water, and when it becomes a hand kneaded into a ball and can be scattered on the ground, it is gradually put into the cage grid and steamed with high fire. The day of steaming cakes in the countryside is the happiest time for children. When the sweet taste of the cake is soaked with the rising water vapor, they will all gather around with spit and wait for the rice cake to come out. Only to see the master of the steamed cake pick up the heavy steaming grid, and put the cake inside upside down on the pad of the table next to it with a shout of "Hi", at this time, the children will eagerly extend their fingers, dig out the rice cake crumbs left on the steaming grid, and stuff them into their mouths. In order to make the steamed cake smell like the New Year, the invited steamed cake master will also cover the cake surface with a large red seal engraved with festive patterns or shou characters or fu characters. In the New Year, when the people worship their ancestors with cakes, they will surround the red seal on the stamped Chongming cake and offer them to the ancestors with cylindrical cakes to show that the days are red and full.
In Chongming, to talk about Chongming Chongyang cake and rice cake, there is also such a story circulating in the folk:
The central part of Chongming Island is a rich land. The land is fertile, drained and irrigated, and is not affected by salty tides. Logically, planting crops on such land should be harvested every year, and every year is a good year. Curiously, the island's farmhouses rarely encounter one or two harvest years in ten years. Crops that grow well on ordinary days are at the critical moment of harvest, or they are inexplicably attacked by hailstones and beaten to pieces; or they are invaded by insect mouths, and large areas of the flower field are swallowed up out of shape. The people there complained one by one.
This year, a woman named Ah Zhen and her husband Shui Gen returned to her mother's house in Jiangnan. When eating, seeing the white rice and turquoise stir-fried vegetables on the table of her mother's house, Ah Zhen sighed deeply. When I saw my father, I felt very strange in my heart. Thought she had something unpleasant to do with her in-laws. Ah Zhen told her father and mother about the crops planted in her area every year and could not get a good harvest. Ah Zhen's mother advised her daughter that it was everyone's business to suffer disasters and famine years, and it was useless for a person to be unhappy. I want her to eat a good meal quickly and go to the sacrificial stove. It turned out that this day was the twenty-third day of the Waxing Moon, according to Jiangnan customs, the next day was the day when the old master of the stove went to heaven to play things, so the night before every household had to worship the old man of the stove, praying that after he went to heaven to see the Jade Emperor, he would say more good words for everyone. The son-in-law felt strange when she heard this, and Ah Zhen told her mother that when she first married to Shui Gen, she also felt incomprehensible. At the end of the year, how can there be no local people to sacrifice stoves. When Ah Zhen's father saw his daughter talking like this, he suddenly understood in his heart and said, "Lord Stove Jun has been in the mortal world all year round, and he has a clear understanding of the affairs of the world. Whoever treats him well and who treats him badly knows clearly. The twenty-fourth day of the waxing moon went to heaven, and when you arrived at the Jade Emperor of the Heavenly Garden, if you had to say something good, next year would definitely be able to smooth the wind and rain. If you say a few unpleasant words, or sue you, the Jade Emperor is angry, and next year you will not want to live in peace. When we come here on the day of the stove festival, we all have to offer delicious things to the lord of the stove. He ate the good things we offered, and naturally he would speak well to us when the apocalypse was played. In the future, on the twenty-third day of the waxing moon, you will remember to sacrifice the stove. Back in Chongming, the two told their neighbors about the customs of sacrificing stoves in the Jiangnan area. The crowd felt a little reasonable, and agreed that in the coming year, they would also make a good sacrifice to the lord of the stove in order to be auspicious.
In the blink of an eye, it was the waxing moon of the following year. Every household in The Mizune couple's village is busy, preparing for the sacrificial stove. They remembered the Chongyang cake that was steamed here during the Chongyang season, which contained sugar, dates and red beans, sweet, soft and delicious, and the farmers in the village were steamed with such cakes to offer to the stove king. Strange to say, since then, the central area of Chongming has indeed become a good place for years of maturity. Slowly, the people of The Upper and Lower Eight Sands also began to steam this cake. The sweet and delicious rice cakes gradually spread their reputation, and even the Jiangnan area became famous.
Depending on the steaming method, Chongming cake can be divided into the following three types: muffin cake, glutinous cake and pu shoe sole cake. The so-called muffins, that is, after the rice cake is steamed, when it is half soft and half hard, it is cut into rectangular cakes with a knife (chongming people call it "cake silk"). The rice noodles of this cake have gaps between each other, so they taste crisp and loose. In the early days of Chongming Farmhouse, several large steamed such muffins would often be steamed every New Year's Day, cut into pieces of cake shreds, and placed on the basket to expose them to the sun. When it is dried as hard as a brick, it is stored in the altar. Such cake silk can be put on the hot day of the second year, and it will not become moldy and bad. When you want to eat, put it on a bamboo pad in the pot, and the entrance is still fluffy and soft. Of course, you can also eat dry. I remember when we came home from school to pick up sheep grass, we would put a few pieces of cake in our pockets. Spring is long, hungry, just feel a piece, bite with your teeth, crunch, and eat fried broad beans, more energetic than the current children eat KFC, McDonald's. Of course, now that the living conditions are better, people rarely steam this kind of muffin cake for drying.
Sticky cakes are completely different from muffins. Although its ingredients are exactly the same as the muffins, when steamed and thrown on the pad, they should be covered with gauze and pressed hard with both hands to make the original loose rice noodles stick tightly. This pressed rice cake, cut into pieces of cake shreds, soft and silky, with chopsticks to the middle of a clip, the two ends of the bend will be down. When eaten in the mouth, it feels particularly soft and delicate, and it does not stick to the teeth at all, which is much more delicious than the muffin cake, and is the most popular one among the Chongnian cakes. This Chongming cake is most suitable for eating the waist cake on February 2 with soybean oil, plus green onions and sugar together in a wok.
The most exquisite of Chongming cakes is lard baguette cake. In addition to rice flour and sugar, it is also made with walnut kernels, date paste, red and green silk, lard pieces marinated with cotton white sugar, and osmanthus flowers. Steamed rice cakes made with so many ingredients, they taste sticky and sweet, and can be called the best in Chongming cakes. Since the glutinous cake is pressed, there is no gap between the rice noodles, so it cannot be exposed to the sun like a muffin. Once it is dried, it will become as hard as iron blocks, and no matter how you steam, it will not be soft. Therefore, this kind of rice cake that cannot be exposed to the sun is easy to mildew and cannot be placed for a long time.
As for the shoe sole cake, it is because the poor people can't afford to steam the rice cake in the big cage (usually more than ten pounds of rice noodles are used for each cage of rice cakes), and when they leave the old age and pray for good luck and good luck in the new year, they can't do without the cake, so they mix less rice flour with sorghum and corn flour, and knead them together into thin pieces, cakes the size of the soles of pu shoes, and put them on the steamer basket to steam. This kind of rice cake is not soft and sticky to eat, and it is also stagnant in the mouth and throat, and after 1949, few people have steamed it.
Of course, now, in order to facilitate carrying and eating, the shops that produce Chongming cakes have changed the past thirty pounds of a large cage of cakes to two or three pounds and a small cage, and quite fashionably covered with plastic wrap and packed in boxes. Unfortunately, it also lost its original meaning of being tall and thick.
Source: Chai Tao Bear No River Wind and Sea Rhyme
Editor: Gu Jiali