Mooncakes

The Mid-Autumn Festival recently passed in China. This is the second biggest traditional holiday in China, after Spring Festival (which in known in Western countries as Chinese New Year – if you talk to someone Chinese about Spring Festival they’ll think you’re pretty savvy). It’s a lunar holiday, like Easter, so it doesn’t fall on the same day each year. Families get together and celebrate under a full moon, traditionally eating a celebratory meal outside and presenting their food to the moon before eating. One of the big traditions of this time of year is the giving (and eating) of mooncakes. Mooncakes are circular in shape, usually about the diameter of a racquetball and have a pastry shell on the outside. The inside was traditionally a sort of sticky sweet red bean paste filling, but it sometimes has a lotus root filling and maybe a hardboiled egg yolk in the center. When I first tried these about six or seven years ago on a trip to Singapore, I didn’t like them too much, but now they’ve grown on me. In the last few years, mooncakes, like everything else in China, has both modernized and bowed to commercial pressure. Now there are lots of new and different flavors, including caramel, tapioca, apple, peach, even grapefruit. There are even ice cream mooncakes. Haagen dazs even makes them now.If you have a business, you usually get a bunch from suppliers etc. Sometimes they are given via gift certificates from certain shops or bakeries. Fancy hotels make their own also. I got a box given to me that was from the Shangri-la Hotel in Shanghai – where Yao Ming recently had his wedding banquet. What could be cooler? The fancier the origin, the better perceived in a very status conscious society.

As a side note, there are number of common dessert components in China which are basically unknown in the West. Red bean and lotus root are two that come to mind. These are both sweetened and used in various ways in desserts, much like chocolate in other places (you almost never see anything chocolate in a real Chinese restaurant – too sweet). The only place in the U.S. I’ve run into anything similar is at shaved ice stands in Hawaii where you can usually order red bean as an extra with your shaved ice.

Anyway, someone told me that they had read a Wall Street Journal article that said that mooncakes were analogous to fruitcakes in the U.S. at Christmas. I disagree. First of all, there is almost no one over 85 years old who likes fruitcakes, as far as I can tell. When we set out the mooncakes at our office party before Mid-Autumn Festival, they get downed in no time. While some people don’t like them, most people do. Second, I think fruit cakes are basically a thing of the past in the U.S. I haven’t seen one in quite a few years at Christmas. As was a child it seemed like there were always a few that my grandparents would pick at. They do get re-gifted a bit. The mooncake giving season starts 3-4 weeks before the holiday and the coupons in particular can see several different temporary owners. Whoever ends up with the coupon a few days before the holiday rushes out to redeem it for the mooncakes, since the coupons expire on the day before or the day of the holiday. The difference between mooncakes and fruitcakes is that the person who ends up with them is rarely disappointed.