Zhejiang Travel Notes

During this trip to Zhejiang, I discovered a "strange" snack in Xinshi Ancient Town, Deqing, Huzhou. Its name is: tea cake.

The first time I ate tea cake was in a big hotel opposite the ancient town of Xinshi. Their family is well-known in the local area.

When we asked for a few "specials," the waiter recommended it to us. Because tea cake is "a unique snack here and a must-try for tourists."

In addition, the display of tea cakes in the hotel brochure is really tempting: the white outer skin vaguely reveals the ruddy filling inside, and the slightest heat almost reaches the tip of the nose. You can see it even through the picture. It feels sweet and delicious. After all, there are old people and children at our table, so it is a good choice to order a soft, glutinous and flaky snack. Okay, let's have one. But I never expected that——

After the tea cake was served, it was actually filled with meat.

Ah this...

How should I put it? Look, this little pastry is square and juicy, and the outer shell is the kind of rice cake dough commonly used in desserts. Logically speaking , the brown stuffing in the bun here should be bean paste, right? Or jujube puree, brown sugar, and purple sweet potato are also logical... In short, both emotionally and logically, they "shouldn't" be sauce-flavored. This operation... was really unexpected.

Calm down and eat one steadily. Don't tell me, although the making of this tea cake is weird, it tastes really good.

The "glutinousness" of the rice paste and the "mud" of the meat filling are so harmonious with the salivation in the mouth. It tastes a bit like meat dumplings, but the texture is more refined than rice dumplings; it is a bit like meat buns, but has a stronger staying power. More delicious than steamed buns.

After I ate the meatballs inside the tea cake, I found that the "shell" with the meat filling soup on the outside is more delicious when eaten alone. The slightest sweetness is the sweetness that comes with glutinous rice. .

The clerk said: You can’t eat this tea cake anymore after you leave the ancient town of Xinshi. There are no similar Jiangnan ancient towns in the surrounding area.

Indeed, almost all the "rice cakes" we ate on our way from north to south were sweet, and meat fillings were rarely seen. But I have to say that each of us is extremely impressed by the exquisite craftsmanship and the exquisite rituals of Jiangnan pastry. For example:

The orange-red cake in Nanxun Ancient Town uses special honey kumquats as a base. The cake is easy to make, but kumquats are hard to find;

Shaoxing’s rice cakes look different. It is not very eye-catching, but its history can be traced back to the Han Dynasty, and more than a dozen methods have been derived so far;

There is also a pastry that looks like a rose. It is rose red, looks very good, and is very beautiful. Son.

The real thing looks very "fake", but people say that this cake has no artificial additives at all. It uses dragon fruit juice (after removing the seeds) to give the color to the rice surface... You have to sigh that this is a land of fish and rice. The "naturally selected" materials give the people of Jiangnan the infinite creativity of this "wonderful craftsmanship".

Later on, I got used to it. The first thing I do when I travel to a travel destination is to “fix” the food: what to eat, how to eat, and why to eat... The wonderful humanistic interests of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai make Our group of northern tourists has seen a lot.

But just "knowledge" is not enough. We have to understand how this Xinshi tea cake came from, and where is the origin of "the only one in Jiangnan", so that this trip is not in vain. Come on.

Tea cake, as the name suggests, is a snack related to tea. After all, it has been an old specialty of this town since 1517 AD when "Xiantan Zhi" listed it as a "new city product".

It is said that it originated in the Southern Song Dynasty, but this statement has no historical facts. Taking a step back, even if we start from the Ming Dynasty, it has a history of about 600 years -

Let's start from the Ming Dynasty.

The early Ming Dynasty was an era when the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal was becoming increasingly prosperous. I shared in my travel notes a few days ago that a "unique" large market (Silkworm Flower Temple Fair) in the south of the Yangtze River will appear in the ancient town of Xinshi during the Qingming Festival.

This market is held once a year, and the streets are packed with people. The scene is extremely spectacular - but can you imagine, people from Xinshi told me: What kind of market is this? In the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was nothing new at all. Fragrant markets, morning markets, night markets...we have all the “markets” you can think of here. It can be said that “new markets are seen every day”.

And snacks such as tea cakes came into being with the development and growth of the "Canal Market".

In the early days, tea cakes were only sold in teahouses in the ancient towns of Xinshi, but at that time (probably) they were either meat fillings or ordinary rice cakes, sweet or without fillings at all. . Legend has it that the earliest practice of wrapping meat fillings into rice cakes was accidental:

Xinshi people attach great importance to the Qingming Festival, which stems from the development of the local sericulture industry - at that time Xinshi people Almost every household in the town raises silkworms and plants mulberry trees, and the spring silkworm breeding every spring almost determines the harvest of the year.

Therefore, every time during the Qingming Festival, people in Xinshi (and surrounding areas) spontaneously burn incense sticks to the "Silkworm Flower Empress" to pray for everything going well for the whole family.

One year, the Tomb-Sweeping Day came later than usual. The cook of a family docked on the Xinshi shore made a small and unintentional move by chance. , invented the snack tea cake.

When the cook was offering sacrifices to the "Silkworm God", a sudden thought came to her mind: Why not make the sacrifice look like "I don't want to eat it", then the "god" will be happy after eating it. Yeah, our family's harvest will definitely be good this year. OK, just do it:

She spent a lot of money to prepare many ingredients that her family would only eat once during the holidays. First, the best glutinous rice is ground into powder with a stone mill, and then the large meat stuffing, diced bamboo shoots and skin jelly are wrapped into rice noodles, and steamed in a pot.

The soup flows down the cake body, and the aroma is fragrant, which is particularly tempting.

Immediately, this rice cake making method was learned by neighbors who opened teahouses, and it soon became popular throughout the ancient town of Xinshi.

As an important transportation hub on the Jiangnan Canal, Xinshi Ancient Town naturally has many teahouses.

I found that the tea-drinking habits of Xinshi people are somewhat similar to the Cantonese people’s morning tea habit. The old people in Xinshi town also like to gather at a table in twos and threes early in the morning to chat and eat a small snack. ——Looking at all parts of the country, the living customs on the docks always have the characteristics of connecting the north and the south. So this new "Xinxin customs" gradually took shape along with this small piece of tea cake, and then, Along with the Qingming Incense Market in the Ming Dynasty, the prosperity of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal in the Qing Dynasty, and the "teahouse culture" in the early years of the Republic of China, it has been spread to this day.

Just like people in Shaoxing drink wine with a plate of fennel beans, people in Xinshi now drink tea with a piece of tea cake, so that their daily life can be considered complete and complete.

It is worth mentioning that the tea cake in Xinshi Ancient Town has been called this name since the first day it was born. It is this shape, and the bread inside is mostly meat filling. Never changed the name, never changed the shape, never changed the material.

There have been attempts to improve it, but they have been unsuccessful.

It can be seen from this that the word "tea cake" is not only a kind of food, but also an identification in the minds of Xinshi people. Perhaps we can better understand it this way: tea cake is Xinshi people’s determination and persistence in their hometown culture.

In the eyes of a northern tourist like me, Xinshi Ancient Town tea cake is the best "souvenir" on the road to Deqing, Huzhou.

Today, Xinshi tea cakes are no longer exclusive to teahouses.

As a must-have item in Xinshi people’s daily lives and on the dining table, tea cakes have entered small restaurants and also appeared in lobbies. Perhaps in the future, Xinshi tea cake, as a unique specialty of Jiangnan ancient towns, will be protected like many "intangible cultural heritages".

In the long history, in the dazzling list of Chinese food culture, although tea cakes are not eye-catching, their "status" is indispensable.

A small piece of tea cake is the "evolutionary history of the water town" of the canal in the ancient town of Xinshi.

I am Sister Dahong, an audio radio travel channel anchor, a professional travel player, focusing on niche gameplay and sharing unpopular destinations. Travel is not an attitude, it is life itself.