Mooncakes Made by Hand: Eating the Season and the Terroir | Grandma Kouzi
I. Everything but the Iron Pot is Homegrown
The mooncakes I had eaten before—whether flaky-pastry mooncakes, soft-skin mooncakes, or snow-skin mooncakes—always had filling, with the type specified: red bean paste, jujube paste, lotus seed paste, five-nut. But in Chezhu village, the mooncakes had no filling at all.
“Our mooncakes simply have no filling. They never have.” The elder sister making the mooncakes dismissed it firmly.
She brought out a vast wooden basin for the dough. The basin had been hewn from a single block of wood—round-rimmed, flat-bottomed, wider at the top than the bottom in an oblong shape, crudely made, its facets clearly hacked out one blow at a time.
First the flour went in, then a golden stream of rapeseed oil, then eggs cracked in. As she added each one, she explained: the wheat and the rapeseed were grown by her own family, the eggs laid by their own hens. The village was too small for a mill or an oil press; grinding grain and pressing oil meant walking to the larger neighbouring village or into town.
The last ingredient was a thick, brown, sticky liquid I did not recognise. The elder sister said it was maltose diluted with water, made from her own sprouted wheat and glutinous rice. Maltose has a semi-fluid, sticky, almost solid consistency; before use it must be warmed in a water bath over a gently heated pot, with a little more water stirred in to thin it, making it easier to work into the dough.
The kneaded dough had almost no elasticity, yet it did not fall apart—it was soft. It was first divided into fist-sized balls, then rolled into discs roughly fourteen to fifteen centimetres across and five or six millimetres thick, placed on squares of red paper cut in advance.
Baking mooncakes called for a giant flat-bottomed pan, sixty to seventy centimetres across and perhaps five or six centimetres deep. The kitchens in the village were spacious, with two heat sources divided into the vigorous and the gentle: a large wood-fired stove for cooking rice, stir-frying, and simmering pig feed, lit only when needed; and a hearth kept alight year-round, a kettle dangling above it, a soup pot nestling alongside, its heat adjusted as required. Baking mooncakes used the gentle heat accumulated in thick layers of embers and ash.
Once the fire was set, the mooncakes—still on their red paper—were arranged in the pan, which sat directly over the hearth. A second, identical pan whose base had been cleaned was placed on top. The two pans were nearly the same, but the upper one slightly larger, fitting snugly without pressing down on the cakes. Pine-wood shavings were piled into the upper pan and lit; once burning well, a great aluminium lid was set over it—baked below, steamed above—smothering the flames yet keeping them alive.
II. The Rough Beauty of Mooncakes
“Eat. Everything but the iron pot is homegrown.”
My reason for being in the village was that I was a documentary filmmaker. Back then, my credentials as a food lover were shallow, and I was still counting calories like many city dwellers of my age. So when the elder sister thrust a finished mooncake at me with hearty generosity, I did not take it; instead, I daintily pinched off a tiny piece with two fingers.
The moment it touched my tongue, I regretted it. Nothing I had eaten before—no mooncake, no pastry, nothing—was like this.
This mooncake was not, in any conventional sense, delicious. It was neither fine nor smooth, had no elaborate filling, and seemed to tick every minus point. It was a little like our kousu, but less oily, softer, not so crumbly. Yet in the mouth, you could almost taste the character—and the flaw—of each ingredient. Perhaps the flour from the village mill had not been milled as fine, lending a grainy roughness.
Yes! The texture in memory was exactly that granular. She had not used snow-white flour; there was a faint tawny tint, and the texture was far from fine. Only now do I understand that this unbleached, additive-free flour carries, in itself, a kind of rough nobility.
Of course, the pale-brown, filling-less mooncake gave me more than a sensory jolt. The “everything but the iron pot is homegrown” mooncake was the first thing that made me, a city-dweller who had never touched soil or farming, truly feel the bond between a person and the land. And the rhythm of food and season: wheat sown in autumn, harvested in spring, gathered alongside rapeseed; the paddies then flooded for transplanting rice; rice sown in spring, harvested in autumn. After a year’s labour, at the autumn harvest maltose is made and mooncakes baked—right on time.
III. The Flower Cakes of Erren Valley
The heart of home-made mooncakes is the filling. This year I made rose and gardenia—fresh-flower cakes, in short. But please do not confuse them with those trendy souvenir pastries; this cake is not that cake.
I once brought friends to Erren Valley to make them together. They kneaded the dough themselves; although most skins burst and the look was less than elegant, the flavour was astonishing. They all said: all those flower cakes I had eaten before were for nothing—I never knew whether the filling was real rose or just rose-flavoured essence.
Roses are plagued by so many pests that surviving is a stroke of luck. In Erren Valley we planted over a hundred edible rose bushes in succession, mainly Mohong and Dianhong, but fewer and fewer survived. Only a dozen remain now, and every rose that makes it is precious indeed. My entire garden, gathered over a full year, yields only enough for a dozen flower cakes.
That day there was little rose jam to spare. The filling was sugar-preserved gardenia paste with a little pre-toasted wholemeal flour stirred in. The gardenia paste used for just a few dozen flower cakes came from bowl after bowl of petals. My friends calculated as they worked: at my rate of flower consumption, not even all the roses in China could supply a week’s worth of flower cakes.
Roses are hard to grow, but gardenias thrive. Along both banks of the little stream behind the house, I have set aside a dedicated gardenia section on the slopes: large double-petaled on the western side, small double-petaled on the eastern. Every tree, every branch—I planted myself from transplanting and cuttings. Tender them for a few years, and you will have gardenias carpeting both hillsides. This year I expanded my bees to six hives, so that when the gardenias come in a great wave, I can make honey-preserved gardenia paste.
But achieving “everything but the iron pot is homegrown” still has its challenges: two months of unbroken rain this spring meant a total crop failure on the wheat, and the peanut yield is barely enough to eat—let alone press for oil.
Yet, like those farmers in Chezhu village, tend slowly, gather slowly, and one day under the full moon I will use my own flour, my own oil, my own honey and flower paste, kindle firewood I felled myself, light the kiln I built by hand, and bake a batch of honey-gardenia cakes—for myself, for the land, and for the seasons.
