Guo Yemin
Every Mid-Autumn Festival, a debate will come as promised. On the one hand, there are concerns about whether the "high oil and high sugar" food such as mooncakes is conducive to health, on the other hand, discussions such as "five-kernel mooncakes" and "fresh meat mooncakes" will also occupy a place in social networks. In any case, everyone seems to have tacitly agreed that the Mid-Autumn Festival should have been to eat mooncakes. Where did this habit begin?
Let's start with the "pie"
Moon cakes are not only similar in shape to the moon, but also closely related to the full moon complex of the Chinese.
If the ancients wanted to eat "moon cakes", they first had to be able to make "cakes". The raw material of the cake is wheat flour, and from this point of view alone, people in the pre-Qin period were probably not blessed to enjoy mooncakes. This is because an important feature of the Chinese civilization in the diet is "granular food" (the whole grain is steamed in a cooker and eaten). For example, millet (millet) is very suitable for grain food, and "the children of millet (excellent quality millet) have become synonymous with the children of rich families. Because the seed coat is hard and not suitable for grain food, wheat has been regarded as a "bad food" for inferior people for a long time, and the number of people who ask for it is widowed.
Around the time of the Qin and Han Dynasties, the advent of the tool dedicated to grinding, the turning mill, could finally process grain into a finer powder state ("dust flying snow white"). This marks the maturity of flour processing technology. The advent of flour changed the fate of wheat. Grained wheat tastes bad, but once ground into flour, protein-rich wheat is transformed into a delicacy easier to cook than millet.
Stone
At first, the ancients called all foods made from noodles "cakes". Liu Xi, an exegetician at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, said in the "Interpretation of Names": "Cake, and also, and also, the wheat makes harmony and also." "The barley is made by mixing noodles with water, so it can be seen that the "cake" in his eyes is to process the wheat into flour, and then add water balls to form a cake and steam it and eat it. In other words, soup cakes are pasta cooked in soup, such as soup noodles, soup noodles, etc. It is no wonder that the famous "General Of The Eighty-Five" Liang Ji plotted to poison the young Emperor Of Han (138-146), using the method of "adding boiled cakes to the dove".
As for the "cake" in the concept of modern people, it may be traced back to the "Hu cake" in the late Eastern Han Dynasty. This is a food made by ground wheat into flour and roasted (rather than steamed). It is called "馕" in the western region and is pronounced in Persian. It indicates that it may have originally been a specialty of West Asia, because ancient hu cakes have also been found in the archaeology of the Silk Road. Depending on the practice, the "hu cake" at that time was divided into several types, one of which was a dough cake sprinkled with sesame seeds on it. According to the "Interpretation of the Name", the "hu cake" that "uses flax to write" can also be called sesame cake and hemp cake because it is made with sesame seeds. Compared with the traditional steamed cakes and soup cakes in the Central Plains, this kind of cake may taste more delicious, so even the great Han Tianzi has become a fan of it.
Naan
This Heavenly Son is the famous Emperor Han Ling, Zhuge Liang did not forget to regard it as a negative model in the "Table of Renunciation". The Book of Later Han also accuses, "The Ling Emperor is good at Hu Cake, and all the Jing masters eat Hu Cake, and Later Dong Zhuo supports Hu Bing to break the Jing Division's response"; it is as if this Heavenly Son's love for Hu Food is a precursor to the demise of the Han Dynasty. In fact, this is called "hate Uchiha and ya". Wouldn't the Han Ling Emperor, who did not eat the hu cake and make the world economically withered and the warehouse empty, not be a dimwitted monarch?
Of course, from the birth of "cake" to the emergence of "moon cake", there is still a considerable distance. There is a saying in the north called "delicious but dumplings". Of course, what is "delicious" is not the dumpling skin made of the layer of flour, but the filling wrapped in it. It is the variety of fillings that make the Chinese pasta represented by dumplings emit such a dazzling brilliance. Mooncakes are no exception. Around the time of the Wei and Jin dynasties, the ancients began to add fillings to round cakes, such as dried dates and walnut kernels. In the Song Dynasty, Su Dongpo mentioned in "Farewell to Honesty" that he had eaten a small round cake with ghee and caramel as filling. This is already very close to the current mooncake filling.
Also in the Song Dynasty, Wu Zimu also mentioned in the "Record of Dreams and Liang" and "Wulin Old Things" that there was a food with the name "mooncake" in the "city food", but both books clearly stated that this "mooncake" was "steamed from food", and steamed cakes like steamed buns were not baked or baked by fire, which showed that it was still far from the mooncakes of later generations. As late as the Ming Dynasty, mooncakes have generally become what they are today. Shen Bang, a native of Changsha, served as the governor of Wanping County (now part of Beijing) in Shuntian Province during the Wanli Dynasty. He wrote a "Miscellaneous Records of Wanju" to record the customs of Beijing at that time, including a "moon-made noodle cake to give each other", and called it "moon cake". Not only that, but this kind of bread should also be "filled with fruit". This record immediately conjures up images of the "discredited" Wuren mooncake.
Five Ren MoonCakes
Legends may not be reliable
Also in this "Miscellaneous Records of Wanju", Shen Bang also pointed out that this custom of sending "moon cakes" was carried out in the eighth month of the lunar calendar. This is no different from today's Mid-Autumn Festival customs. So, the next question is, although there is a "moon cake", but the habit of eating moon cake during the Mid-Autumn Festival, how long can it be traced back?
There are several folk legends about this. One of the more widely circulated accounts relates to the peasant revolt at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. Legend has it that Zhu Yuanzhang's adviser Liu Ji (Liu Bowen) instigated the people to revolt and spread the rumor that there would be a plague, asking people to buy "moon cakes" to eat during the Mid-Autumn Festival to avoid disaster. So everyone bought mooncakes and went home to cut open a look, which contained the information of the anti-Yuan uprising on the night of August 15, so the four seas responded and overthrew the Yuan Dynasty in one fell swoop. In order to commemorate the victory of the uprising, mooncakes are eaten every Mid-Autumn Festival. However, although this statement is legendary, it is not found in the literature of the Yuan and Ming dynasties, and it seems that it cannot be regarded as a history of faith.
Another theory is that there was a mid-autumn festival in the Tang Dynasty, and the merchants from the western region who came to the Tang Dynasty to do business offered a delicious cake. Emperor Tang looked at the beautiful round cake and felt that it was a little similar to the bright moon in the sky, so he said: "You should invite the toad of the Hu Cake", so he gave the cake to the courtiers and ate it together, saying that this cake was very delicious. Since then, every August 15th, I will eat "Hu Cake" while admiring the moon, and later, it will be renamed "Moon Cake".
This saying pushes the custom of eating mooncakes in the Mid-Autumn Festival further from the Yuan Dynasty by hundreds of years. The reason why it is the Tang Dynasty and not the more distant Qin and Han Dynasties is also reasonable. The saying "Mid-Autumn Festival" first appeared in the "Book of Rites", which said: "The mid-autumn moon nourishes the elderly and eats porridge." "August 15th, autumn is more than halfway through, is for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Autumn is the harvest season, and over time, the custom of moon worship and moon worship has been formed in the Mid-Autumn Festival. However, as late as the Southern and Northern Dynasties period, the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar has not yet become a festival. For example, there is no record of the "Mid-Autumn Festival" in the Jingchu Chronicle, which was written at that time.
It was not until the Sui and Tang dynasties that the Mid-Autumn Festival was regarded as a festival, and even the Emperor of the Tang Dynasty built a "viewing platform" in the palace. During the reign of Emperor Taizong of the Northern Song Dynasty, the official Mid-Autumn Festival was designated as a festival, which was actually a retrospective recognition of the Mid-Autumn Festival that had been formed since the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, the seasonal food at that time when viewing the moon was not a moon cake. According to the "Qing Yilu" record, in the fifth generation of Kaifeng, there was a Zhang Handmei who specialized in selling snacks for four seasons, and every Mid-Autumn Festival was "playing with the moon soup". This food is actually a soup made of cinnamon balls, lotus seeds, lotus flour and so on. It looks delicious, but it doesn't match the appearance of the mooncake.
As mentioned earlier, the Song Dynasty finally appeared with a food called "moon cake". But one thing, its approach is very different from today's mooncakes. Second, this kind of "moon cake" is not specially tasted during the Mid-Autumn Festival. The famous "Tokyo Dream Record" volume VIII "Mid-Autumn Festival" article records that the people of the Northern Song Dynasty capital of Beijing (present-day Kaifeng, Henan) wanted to drink new wine every Mid-Autumn Festival, and people competed to take a place in the restaurant to drink and admire the moon. The so-called "people in the city compete for drinks, until noon, there is no wine at home." When drinking "Playing moon", you also eat crabs and fruits, but there is no record of eating mooncakes. After the Jin Dynasty destroyed the Northern Song Dynasty, the mid-autumn drinking habit also continued in north China. For example, the great talent Yuan Haoqing (1190-1257) has a first word called "Partridge Day, Mid-Autumn Festival Night Drink Ni Zhongjia Lotus White, Drunk in This". As for the Records of Mengliang and the Old Events of Wulin, which record the local customs and objects of lin'an (present-day Hangzhou), the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, the records of the Mid-Autumn Festival are also roughly the same, and the records of eating mooncakes are also lost. From this point of view, the so-called "moon cake" in the Southern Song Dynasty, like the plum blossom cake, chrysanthemum cake and lotus leaf cake at that time, was only an ordinary market food that "resembled", and had not yet become a seasonal food for the "Mid-Autumn Festival".
It can be said that in the Ming Dynasty, only a more detailed record of "eating mooncakes in the Mid-Autumn Festival" appeared. In the Ming Dynasty, from the south to the north, from the folk to the court, there was a habit of eating mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival. In addition to the "Miscellaneous Records of Wanju", Liu Ruoyu, the grand eunuch during the Apocalypse, wrote a book "Zhi Zhongzhi", which can be called the first-hand information of court life in the late Ming Dynasty. It is mentioned, "August ... Since the first day of the first month, there are people who sell mooncakes. ...... By the fifteenth day, the family offered mooncakes and melons and fruits..." The Records of the Qing Dynasty are also like this, for example, on the tenth day of the first month of August and the thirteenth day of August in the twenty-second year of Qianlong, Lingfei and Yufei used "eight hundred" mooncakes! The "Yanjing Chronicle" simply asserts that "mooncakes are everywhere", except that "the former door to the beauty of the people is the first in Kyoto, and there is not enough food elsewhere". It seems that the taste of its author, Fu cha Dun Chong, is still quite "diao".
From offerings to food
Why was it in the Ming Dynasty that the custom of eating mooncakes in the Mid-Autumn Festival was finally formed? This is first of all related to the main activities of the Mid-Autumn Festival. If the main activity of the Tang and Song people during the Mid-Autumn Festival was "moon viewing", the Ming Dynasty became "moon worship" and "moon worship". In the late Ming Dynasty, Liu Tong and Yu Yizheng wrote a book about Beijing customs, "Imperial Scenery and Material Strategy", which mentioned that the central content of the Mid-Autumn Festival customs at that time was to sacrifice the "moonlight god" ("the family set the moonlight position, the moon is out of the square, and worship the moon"), followed by family reunion, eating mooncake melon fruit, and again relatives and friends giving each other mooncake melon fruit. Among them, the main function of the "moon cake" is to serve as an offering food for the moon sacrifice during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Because of the full moon in the Mid-Autumn Festival, if the offerings are round, the so-called "fruit cakes of their sacrifices will be round". In this way, the shape of the mooncake is made into a circle. A round mooncake is placed on the offering table and can symbolize the full moon. On the other hand, Chinese pay attention to reality, and the folk have always had the habit of sharing sacrifices after the completion of the ceremony, so after the mooncake was removed from the offering table as an offering, it was not thrown away, but naturally became people's delicacy again. This is what the "Good Diet Shang Jiluo" said: "On the fifteenth day, the family offers moon cakes, melons and fruits, and after burning incense on the moon, it will drink heavily, and many people will disperse at night."
Today, there is still a custom of moon worship in some areas
It is worth noting that the "Imperial Scenery and Material Strategy" also wrote a sentence when summarizing the customs of the Mid-Autumn Festival, "(Mid-Autumn Festival) is also known as the Reunion Festival". Since the night of the full moon in the Mid-Autumn Festival is regarded as a good day for the whole family to reunite, the mooncakes as offerings in the Mid-Autumn Festival naturally carry the meaning of "reunion" and are used to contact relatives and friends. Tian Rucheng of the Ming Dynasty wrote in the "West Lake Tour Zhiyu": "August 15 is the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the people give moon cakes to each other, taking the meaning of reunion. Later, Gu Lu, who lived in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, pointed out more clearly in the "Qing Jia Lu" that there was a custom in Hangzhou, "Mid-Autumn Festival moon cakes, night festival moon, take the meaning of 'double circle of people and moon'." In the future, the original intention of "worshiping the moon" gradually faded, and the status of mooncakes as "reunion cakes" became more and more important. As a result, although mooncakes no longer become tributes, eating mooncakes has become the main food custom of the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Fresh meat mooncakes common in Jiangsu and Zhejiang
Then again, just like today, the mooncakes that are "reunion cakes" are actually often eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival. According to the "Diet is Good and Good", "If there is any leftover moon cake, it is harvested in a dry and cool place, and it is eaten by the family at dusk." This practice remained until the time of Fucha Tunchong's life (late Qing Dynasty). Otherwise, he would not have added a sentence in the "Yanjing Chronicle", "There are those who eat after sacrifice, and there are those who stay until the Chinese New Year's Eve and eat"—although such eating habits are of course unimaginable today.
Editor-in-Charge: Shanshan Peng