Cakes and doughs
Li Tao
I was born in Taiyuan, Shanxi, and grew up there until I was 22 years old before leaving, but I basically never went back. Many things from childhood, even if the environmental space has changed, will re-reveal their imprint at a certain point in time. However, I also found that my "composition" seemed to have become more diverse, reflected in many ways. For example, I like the Cantonese fabric of Xiangyun yarn, I like the Wenzhou embroidery method of Ou embroidery, I like Fuzhou lacquerware better than I like Shanxi Tuiguang lacquerware, and for example, my dietary preferences have changed a lot on the basis of retaining the salty taste in the north and the smoked vinegar in Taiyuan, such as liking Guangdong roast goose, Suzhou boat duck, Jingzhou fish cake, Shanghai roasted bran and other sweet and light foods, as well as liking all kinds of rice snacks - all kinds of cakes.
When exactly the cake balls are produced, I think it is difficult to accurately verify this. Although rice was cultivated in China very early and became popular in stone grinding in the Han Dynasty, these created the necessary conditions for the production and abundance of bait food, but if you look at the historical texts, it should be the cake noodles that have occupied the daily life of the people for a long time. Yes, the classification of food in history is meticulous and clear, and the bait is basically rice and glutinous rice, and the cake noodles are basically wheat and barley food. The Eastern Han Dynasty Cui Yi's "Four People's Moon Order" mentions that the peasant pasta includes water cakes, wine cakes, swallow cakes, boiled cakes, etc.; the Eastern Han Dynasty Liu Xi's "Interpretation of the Name and Diet" mentions hu cakes, steamed cakes, soup cakes, marrow cakes, etc., which are generally considered to be baked sesame roasted cakes, steamed steamed steamed buns, boiled noodles, and animal marrow oil scones. In the Five Dynasties of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, pancakes, biluo, hu cakes, wontons, steamed cakes, etc. are mostly pastry in the records. Although most of the large buns mentioned in the Song Dynasty's "Mengliang Record" are still various large buns, such as bamboo shoot meat buns, goose and duck buns, crab meat buns, shippo buns, etc., there are also various noodles, meat cakes, but the proportion of rice snacks has suddenly increased, such as camel hooves, plum blossom cakes, shou peaches, shou turtles, etc., are pictographic dim sum. By the Ming and Qing dynasties, the records of rice dim sum seemed to be very colorful, and exceeded the proportion of noodle dim sum.
Today, the name of rice dim sum can be collectively called "cake dumplings", whether it is Suzhou, Shanghai, Or Changshu, and Nanjing. Cake dumplings are actually the abbreviation of four words - "reunion cake dumplings", symbolizing reunion and high school, which is the legacy of a long Chinese agricultural society, for the family, the most important thing is the reunion, on this basis, there can be children to high school, out of the official, it is better. In fact, the cake dumplings reflect the cultural background of rice farming, that is to say, the area where rice is grown takes advantage of the simple and easy to eat and particularly digestible characteristics of the cake dumplings to ensure the sustainability of field production during the busy seasons of farming, and then bring it into daily life. Another interesting thing is that in the past, "tuan" generally referred to stuffing, "round" refers to no filling, "cake" refers to making cakes with rice flour, and "dumplings" refers to wrapped in plant leaves, but today, the distinction between "reunion" is no longer obvious, and even most of the understanding is that "circle" is stuffed. This is also a change in the humanities of food.
The snack of cake dumplings, it is said that it is not a small snack, but also because it involves not only the background of agriculture, economy and society, but also the evolution of words. The history of the word "cake" is not long ago, less than half of the history of our Chinese characters. The word "cake" has not yet appeared in the Eastern Han Dynasty's "Commentaries on the Interpretation of Texts", while the Southern Song Dynasty Wang's "Wild Guest Series" says: "If you want to use the word cake, there is no such word in the Six Classics of Thought, so you stop." In other words, he wanted to make a "cake" word, but did not dare to use it. The earliest appearance of the word "cake" may be the Tang poem "cicada singing cockroach call, yellow seed cake cut off". But it is precisely this poem that makes me deduce that the early cakes had little to do with rice and glutinous rice, but were made of "yellow rice", which is what we call sticky yellow rice today. This actually explains from the side why the "sticky" word of the cake dumplings, which generally has a texture of "sticky", is not next to the word "rice" but next to the word "黍".
It is true that most of the cake dumplings are attracted by sticky sticks. The cakes we commonly see today, including strip cakes, osmanthus cakes, green doughs, double filling balls, rose lard cakes, pine blossom cakes, etc., have a sticky taste. Even some reprocessed products, such as red bean dumplings, are also pursuing stickiness. However, I would like to say that the delicious red bean dumplings should actually be boiled with red beans and boiled sand, which naturally shows a viscous feeling, rather than the kind of viscous feeling obtained by using a large amount of lotus powder today. The use of lotus flour is only suitable for sake-stuffed tangyuan, regardless of whether there are red beans in them. Of course, the development of cake dumplings to this day is already a huge lineage, and it also has many varieties that do not show their sticky taste. For example, five-color muffins, red bean muffins, etc., the most well-known should be Dingsheng cake. Today's Dingsheng cake is mostly silver ingot type, taking the meaning that the army will be able to win; in history, it seems to be called "Dingsheng Cake", which often shows a plum blossom shape, taking the meaning of smooth life and rising everything.
A few more words, I want to talk about my personal understanding of the taste of the cake dumplings. This is related to what happened to me in Nanjing in August 2020. For the cake dumplings that I have in mind, I naturally refuse to let go, Ruixue came to see the progress of the work at noon, and specially brought the rose honey cake, wort honey cake, sesame balls, lotus seed red bean dumplings and so on from the Lianhu Cake Dumpling Shop. Although I think the honey cake is a little bigger, similar to a small brick, but still a happy bite, well, why is it so solid? If it is a muffin, then the taste is exquisite and smooth; if it is a honey cake, a pull cake, either Q bullet, or sticky, made into a solid feeling, it is not a good thing. Moreover, it is so solid that the teeth are bitten like chewing wax and the chopsticks are torn by the hand, which is really sad.