A Cake Mid-Autumn Festival

This season, this title, a discerning person will know at a glance, this guy must be nostalgic. In order not to fall into this cliche, let's tell a joke first: a thief got into the warehouse of the food factory in the middle of the night and was found by the inspection director. The thief ran away in a hurry. The factory director conveniently took a piece of marshmallow from the shelf and threw it in the past, smashing the thief in a somersault. The factory director said proudly, "You know the power? If you run again, I'll throw mooncakes."

Of course, this joke is also a bit old.

When I was a child, moon cakes were a rare food. After all, the Mid-Autumn Festival is only once a year. This kind of thing that only appears on the Mid-Autumn Festival is naturally more interesting. Home on the farm, moon cakes are also the works of the regimental processing factory. They are large and heavy, baked to light yellow or brown, and the content is consistent with Wu Ren. Compared with the "Wu Ren Great Devil King" who had made countless jokes on the Internet a few years ago, Wu Ren was obviously much more simple and honest at that time. He not only had whole peanuts, but also had good luck and ran into large pieces of crystal candy, which was enough for small fart children to touch for a long time. There is also the most magical green and red silk, which is thin and long, tenacious and has a strange sweet taste. If you pull it out and chew it 1.1, you just can't eat what it is. If you don't find one after eating the whole moon cake, it's enough to make people feel sorry. Because of this inexplicable thinking pattern, when I learned several years later that it was actually dyed orange peel and dried wax gourd, I really despised myself.

Yes, gnaw. In those days, when eating moon cakes, one could not "cut" them with the plastic knife in the packaging box, nor could one "bite" them lightly. one could only "chew" them slowly with all one's strength-because it was rare, one could not bear to eat them immediately. Because there is less oil, a little more than a few days will dry up to the point of hitting the ground with sound, leaving only a white mark at the mouth, it is often half a piece of moon cake that is "gnawed" and the cheeks are so tired that their mouthing fluid. Bearded Su Dongpo's so-called "small cakes are like chewing the moon, with crisp and candy in them". Cakes are like the moon, and what "crisp" and "candy" are really inexperienced. Therefore, what the factory director said in the old joke was not ridiculous, but a naked personal threat.

For many years, I thought that moon cakes had only one appearance. After reading some books when I grew up, I realized that there were differences between Beijing, Jiangsu, Guangzhou and Yunnan, but I still took it for granted that at most there were regional differences in stuffing and taste. When I saw the Soviet-style moon cake for the first time, I couldn't help but be greatly surprised-this kind of thing that scum everywhere is also a moon cake? However, the dregs of moon cakes are still "cakes" after all. The famous Beijing-style moon cakes "self-made red" and "self-made white" have grown into steamed buns. Once again, they have refreshed the inherent concepts in their minds, which makes people wonder. Are these two goods not sent undercover by mooncake owners? After going through these foreshadowing, and then seeing Yunnan moon cakes like baked buns, it is called calm!

However, no matter where or what it looks like, one thing is very consistent, that is, moon cakes will disappear from the store shelves as if they had never existed before on August 16. This is very incomprehensible. Zongzi, which is also a seasonal food, can be met at the morning stalls all year round; dumplings invented by the winter solstice to protect the ears, are even more likely to be eaten sooner or later, so why give moon cakes a different treatment? Besides, people's psychology is originally very strange, and their interest in food within reach is far less than those that cannot be seen and eaten. A month before the Mid-Autumn Festival, mooncakes of different designs appeared in groups. Looking at the red and green packaging made people feel impaired, and their appetite was naturally lacking. As for the other eleven months, there is no place to eat. Therefore, the merchants work overtime before the festival to produce the behavior of crushing and feeding pigs after the festival, which is really... Alas!

Like other seasonal foods, there are many theories about the origin of moon cakes, and the most widely circulated one is "killing taritas on August 15". When I read "The Story of the Dragon Slaying by Heaven" and saw the passage of the Zoroastrians gathering to eat cakes, I was a little excited. Of course, the Chinese civilization is extensive and profound, and the history of moon cakes must be longer than that of the Middle-Turkish Zoroastrianism. Some experts have proved that in the Tang Dynasty, the emperor had the practice of giving cakes to Xinke Jinshi. In the Southern Song Dynasty, the specific term "moon cake" finally appeared. In the Ming Dynasty, moon cakes and the Mid-Autumn Festival were officially married. "August 15 is the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the folk use moon cakes to leave behind and take the meaning of reunion" ("West Lake Tour Records"), which was finally established as a seasonal food. However, the custom of eating cakes on August 15, when the moon is the largest and roundest in the year, can be traced back to ancient times, when ordinary people would sacrifice the moon god with cake bait on this day. It can be seen that this small cake also has a little identity background.

So I thought about it -- Moon God, isn't that Chang'e? Our ancestors offered moon cakes to the Moon God. Is it because the beautiful sister Chang'e liked this? In this way, the way the merchants deal with moon cakes during the festival should have fully considered the feelings of the second senior brother, which is not unreasonable.

The truth is that simple! (Hong Tao)