Cooking these soft, golden holiday treats is an undertaking: one recipe is four pages long, takes 22 steps and requires a special mould
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskMooncakes are a stuffed pastry eaten for the Mid-Autumn Festival, a harvest holiday celebrated in much of East Asia, second in importance only to the Lunar New Year. This year it fell on September 10th. Gary Chan, a Chinese-American baker who owns Bibble and Sip in midtown Manhattan, compares it to Thanksgiving: a family reunion with food as its anchor.
As with the cakes and pies that conclude a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, mooncakes are celebratory. And rich: they have lard-enriched wheaten crusts and fillings traditionally made from bean paste, mixed nuts, lotus seeds, fatty pork and other unusual sweet foods. Miranda Brown of the University of Michigan notes that in the past they would have been a particular treat in rice-centric southern China.
They are still mostly bought rather than made. These days cooking them at home is easier, but it is still an undertaking. A recipe from Andrea Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American cook, is four pages long, takes 22 steps, requires a special mould to shape the cakes, and includes salted egg yolks, sausage, fruit-cake mix, sorghum and rose-petal liquor, and canned chicken.
Or, they do now. The tradition of eating mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival dates back to the Tang dynasty, well over 1,000 years ago; but the cakes themselves have varied in form and filling. When many ethnic Chinese left Vietnam following the Communist takeover, Ms Brown explains, they brought their style of mooncakes with them. These “snow-skin” cakes are served cold, with a soft crust made from steamed rice flour, and have grown popular around the world.
Mr Chan makes highly Instagrammable mooncakes with a mochi and organic sweet-potato filling and inventive moulds . He feels pressure each year to do something novel and delicious; that, combined with the manpower involved, leaves him a little frazzled by early September. The upshot will be familiar to anyone who has cooked a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. “Every year,” he says, “we go, ‘We’re not doing this again.’ And then every year we come right back to it.
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