Old yet new, like mooncakes.

Post:Bamboo

A friend of mine once said that she doesn't like eating mooncakes, but for some reason, every time the Mid-Autumn Festival comes around, she craves a piece of mooncake with a golden-brown crust brushed with egg yolk, and inside, a smooth mung bean paste filling encasing a plump salted egg yolk.

The Japanese believe that on Tsukimi (Otsukimi, or Mid-Autumn Festival), Dango is an indispensable treat. These small, delicate, white rice dumplings resemble glutinous rice balls in sweet syrup. Dango are baked and eaten with Kuromitsu (a type of molasses) or red bean paste. In Korea, the Mid-Autumn Festival is Chuseok, a Thanksgiving celebration with Songpyeon, a steamed rice cake made from rice flour kneaded with warm water, filled with mung bean paste, sesame seeds, chestnuts, and other nuts. These charming Songpyeon cakes carry the hope of bringing about lovely children for the baker. Meanwhile, Filipinos celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival with Bakpia Hopia, a baked rice cake filled with bean paste.

In Vietnam and China, mooncakes are even more elaborate and meticulously crafted. These fragrant baked mooncakes, filled with a variety of ingredients including Chinese sausage, roast chicken, lard, and pumpkin, originate from an interesting story during wartime. A general, wanting to secretly transmit a message to the people, noticed that mooncakes with such mixed fillings were easy to conceal small pieces of paper. So he distributed these mooncakes to the people; people gave them to each other, simultaneously passing on secret messages.

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As usual, every year in the eighth lunar month, families flock to mooncakes, and children run around the streets carrying lanterns. Our conversation about exploring Mid-Autumn Festival cuisine became lively when a friend asked, "If that's the case, why does every country celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival?", "Why don't other countries celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival instead of the Mid-Summer or Mid-Spring festivals?" Few people notice this interesting similarity among Asian countries, which are deeply influenced by rice-based civilizations. August is the harvest month, a time for people to rest and enjoy the fruits of their labor. This is when houses are full of rice, baskets are full of grain, and families gather to celebrate and admire the full moon. Therefore, the mooncake always has the flavor of glutinous rice, rice, beans, reunion, and a bountiful harvest.

The most classic mooncake recipe includes pork fat – the fat from the neck of the pig – which is stir-fried and cooked with other ingredients to enhance the richness of the dish. Other ingredients include candied winter melon, Chinese sausage, lotus seeds, white sesame seeds, roasted peanuts, roasted chicken or pork, and especially shredded lime leaves – the secret to its intense flavor. Salted egg yolks are a must-have. The eggs are salted with various spices such as ginger, cinnamon, rice wine, and sugar, depending on the chef's skill. The mooncake is a synthesis of savory, sweet, nutty, and chewy flavors, representing the culinary essence of the long-standing rice-farming culture of East Asia.

Today, mooncakes come in many attractive variations. Traditional varieties are more carefully crafted with the addition of healthy ingredients, such as mixed-filling mooncakes with roasted chicken and bird's nest, or sesame and chia seed mooncakes. You can also find new mooncake styles that combine Eastern and Western influences, such as green tea tiramisu or green tea with Japanese Azuki red beans (Green Tea Custard Azuki). For those who prefer the rich, creamy flavors of European pastries, cheesy mooncakes combined with chocolate Oreo are a new option. Mooncakes with the intense flavors of blueberry, grapefruit, and lotus are always popular, even among foreign visitors with different tastes. My favorite is the lotus seed mooncake. The lotus seeds are cooked until soft, ground, and simmered into a smooth paste; when you eat it, you immediately feel the nutty taste of the lotus seeds melting in your mouth.

In Vietnam, the Mid-Autumn Festival also features a unique sticky rice cake with the scent of pomelo blossoms. Glutinous rice is roasted until it pops, then ground into flour, creating roasted glutinous rice flour, also known as sticky rice flour. This flour is mixed with sugar syrup and pomelo blossom water, and left to ferment overnight to produce a fragrant, chewy, white, and smooth outer layer. This dough is then used to make cakes with fillings such as mung bean paste or young rice flakes, resulting in a light and refreshing sticky rice cake reminiscent of autumn days in the Northern Vietnamese countryside. In Southern Vietnam, a new and rather unusual variation is the fresh mooncake. The outer layer is made from agar-agar, and the filling is made from flan, mashed mung beans, or milk jelly.

Another Mid-Autumn Festival has arrived, and the image of women and mothers busily baking mooncakes, uncles and aunts meticulously stripping bamboo to make lanterns, and children excitedly running through the streets remains strangely captivating. These are traditional images that never grow old in the hearts of Vietnamese people.

In Ho Chi Minh City, you can find mooncakes for sale at:

Renaissance Riverside Hotel Saigon