The Moon Festival

September 12 was the day of the Chinese Moon Festival.  More properly, it is called the mid-Autumn Festival.  But make no mistake, it is all about the moon.

The holiday is a moveable feast.  It's based upon the lunar calendar and always comes on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month.  It's works out to be the full moon closest to the autumn equinox.   Or at least that's what Wikipedia tells me.  As the top most photo shows, the moon most certainly lived up to it's end of the bargain. 

In Suzhou there were no large celebrations, at least none that we heard of.  When I asked the locals how they traditionally celebrate, almost all answered that you go with your family out to some natural place - a lake or a hilltop -  and look at the moon.  No fireworks.  No parades.  You just look at the moon.   The photo below shows some of the folks out moonwatching along JinJi Lake.

 Oh yes, and besides looking at the moon they all eat moon cakes.

The moon cakes started appearing in the stores about mid-July.  At first, it was just a few shelves in the grocery.  By early August they took over the end-caps.  Mid-August saw them spread to promotional tables in the main aisles.  In the week before the festival, they grew explosively and took over entire sections of the store.  At the Auchan grocery, I kid you not, there must have been two semi-loads worth piled in the center section of the store.  More types and brands than you can count. 

And people were going crazy to snap them up by the cartful.  It's traditional to exchange Moon Cakes as gifts with family and friends.  Employers give out Moon Cakes to employees like U.S. business used to give out turkeys or hams at Christmas.  All shapes and sizes and prices.  You can get a single, small, humble, wax-paper-wrapped Moon Cake for 2 RMB, or about 30 cents.  Or you can get a gift package of 8 elegantly wrapped cakes with exotic fillings for 600 RMB, or about 90 dollars.

Near as I can tell, no one really eats the things.  Maybe a bite or two while looking at the moon.  The vast majority must be bulldozed into some gigantic landfill somewhere in Western China.  They're like Christmas fruitcakes.  They're traditional and historic.  But like most historic and traditional things (outhouses and bubonic plague, for example) you really wouldn't enjoy them as part of your daily life.

They come in all different shapes, styles and fillings.  Above and below is shown a very traditional style Moon Cake.  The inside is a semi-sweet mixture of bean paste, dates, figs, or similar dried fruits of Autumn.  This sweet center is wrapped in a shell of heavy cake-like pastry.  It's very similar to a fig newton in taste and texture.  But it's a fig newton on growth hormones.  This cake is probably 3 inches square and probably 1 inch thick.  Tradional recipes were developed before refrigerators....so fat and sugar are the primary preservatives.  Each one is a heart-attach waiting to happen.

 Below are Moon Cakes in the traditional Suzhou Style.  The biggest difference is the outer pastry.  The non-Suzhou styles (example above) uses a cake-like pastry that will hold the imprint of geometric patterns or Chinese characters.  The Suzhou style Moon Cake uses a flakey pastry similar to a biscuit or pie crust.  The pastry is much too dry and brittle to hold the decorative pattern.

 Historically, Moon Cakes started out as simple things.  They were filled with common-man stuff like bean paste, lotus blossom, or sugared egg-yolk.  Or they had savory fillings such as minced salt-pork or salted egg yolks.  In these days, you can get a million different fillings, many of them aiming to attract with a gourmet fillings at gourmet prices.  For a premium cake you could drop $10 to $20 apiece if you wanted to.

I'm a schmuck for tradition, so I'll defend the simple traditional recipes against the modern, gourmet abominations.  But truth told, I prefer a more modern variety - the Ice Cream Moon Cake.   The photo above shows a sampling of these.  The one at left is coated in dark chocolate and filled with green tea, strawberry, pineapple, coconut, or vanilla ice cream.  The two at right are filled with similar flavors of ice cream, but wrapped in a laywer of sweet sticky rice dough.  These I could eat all year round.