Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
What’s in a Moon Cake?
We’re closing on our house this week, which means I’m taking the week off to get our crap moved from Santa Rosa to Bakersfield. Not my idea of a fun vacation; a necessary evil, that’s a better designation. So this morning I did some shopping at our local Chinese market to buy some bao and shumai. That way, Karen and Jake can steam their dinner tonight, and they won’t have to order takeout.
Karen told me “no more bean paste snacks” because the stuff I’ve brought home hasn’t been too fresh. But today, they had Moon Cakes. The real deal. The stuff you only find in Chinese markets a few weeks out of the year, since they’re a special snack for the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival.
According to this Anne-Marie Slaughter Op-Ed for the times (whence the pic), Moon Cakes
are the Chinese equivalent of fruit cake at Christmas – tradition demands that you have one, but no one actually eats one.
I beg to differ. Even the worst Moon Cake is better than the best fruit cake I’ve ever sampled — and I’ve made my own fruit cake, so I left out all that citron crap. But what’s in them? Anne-Marie again on one particular brand:
which is made with an Asian version of phyllo pastry and which has fillings of chopped nuts, red and green bean paste, poppy seed and lotus seed paste, as well asa number of more savory fillings, one of which smells a great deal like truffle.
I was always partial to the kind with a salted egg yolk in the middle — just weird enough to be memorable. Wikipedia claims they’re duck egg yolks. Ours contain egg yolks (no word on the ingredient list as to whether this yolk would go cluck cluck or quack quack), lotus seed paste, and hopefully very little melamine. Yes, they’re made in China.
Not surprisingly, there’s no single answer to the question, “What’s in a Moon Cake?” That Wikipedia article has a nice overview of regional differences in the treat. The Japanese, for example, rarely use salted egg yolks, and prefer red bean (azuki) paste to lotus seed paste. The Vietnamese use mung beans, sometimes coconut, and even durian, which would be a nasty surprise.
The cash register woman wanted to know if I was Chinese. Was she kidding? I told her I grew up in Monterey Park, which isn’t entirely a lie, and that satisfied her, for the obvious reasons. “I know the good stuff,” I told her. Which, sadly*, is true.
D.
*Because apparently, you just can’t find the good stuff outside of the Monterey Park / Alhambra / Rosemead corridor. Not in restaurant food, anyway. Not to save your gwailo soul.
you know waht i just realized? totally not on the subject of moon cakes, sorry, but i realized yoiu havent done a liveblog thing in a long time! cuz well i just won kris starr’s contest (HOLY CRAP YAY!) and i was thinking about how we “met” in one of your chatrooms. you should do it again soon. 🙂
I just got a new laptop and I damn near ruined it spraying coke out my nose laughing.
Are you Chinese? Too funny. She had to be joking. Right?
Moon cakes and fruit cakes are not so good. Either one.
Shaina: I’ll need to find a new host, since I got fed up with Stickam. Too buggy. Congrats on winning all that candy!
Driver: Moon Cakes are comfort food. Perhaps fruit cakes are, too. I think one’s comfort food fetishes are established early in life, although I didn’t sample Moon Cakes until high school.