Mooncakes
Today you get two posts because I need to assuage my guilt. Would you believe that I fully intended to post yesterday but that I forgot? A friend sent me a book I had been longing to read and I had a big day and I thought “I’ll just read a few pages and then get online again.” The book is finished and was tremendous fun, but I didn’t get online again at all last night.
It’s Spring here already – only three days away in the calendar, but the street are lined with bright golden wattle. You can tell it’s Spring in south-easterly Australia when everyone is sneezing, and that’s happening too.
My amazing powers of deduction tell me that this makes it autumnal up north, where most of you live. Autumn normally makes me think of Japanese food, and maybe I will do a post one day about Japanese autumn food traditions, but today my thoughts are with the Chinese diaspora still.
My own culinary traditions make me creative about cooking food in opposite seasons, and every year I remember that Chinese festive food also has that –out-of-hemisphere problem. I ate mooncake for morning tea (white lotus, in case anyone is interested). I adore mooncake. It’s a once-a-year treat normally, but this year I might have to make it a twice-a-year treat because my local provider has some varieties I’ve never seen before. Which is not the point. The point is that mooncake has a history as rich and interesting as the cake and that the Chinese Diaspora has carried that history with it, every Spring/Autumn, for a very long time. It’s a memory of political rebellion and independence and freedom, just like Chanukah is for me.
Here are some recipes. Buy some mooncake or make some mooncake. Use it to fuel your intellectual energies and find out a bit more about Chinese history. That’s what I’m going to do.
August 29th, 2008 at 9:37 am
My own culinary traditions make me creative about cooking food in opposite seasons, and every year I remember that Chinese festive food also has that –out-of-hemisphere problem. I ate mooncake for morning tea (white lotus, in case anyone is interested). I adore mooncake. It’s a once-a-year treat normally, but this year I might have to make it a twice-a-year treat because my local provider has some varieties I’ve never seen before.