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Mid Autumn Festival and Food 25 September 2007 Tuesday (25 September) was the annual Mid-Autumn Festival in China which technically falls on 15 August during the Lunar Calendar. So, somehow - in a way that I certainly am unable to explain or even attempt to explain, 25 September is actually 15 August this year. Next year it will probably be on a different date, as it is based on the times that the moon is full.
Like most Asian festivals, the Mid Autumn Festival is based on mythology as well as, in this case, being related to the fall harvest of fruits, rice and other crops. From what I can determine, no one really knows the real version, so there are a number of different versions floating around. In fact, when I queried my students, they all gave somewhat different versions, though very similar in some respects. One version is: This festival is also known as the Moon Cake Festival because a special kind of sweet cake (yueh ping) prepared in the shape of the moon and filled with sesame seeds, ground lotus seeds and duck eggs is served as a traditional Chung Chiu delicacy. Nobody actually knows when the custom of eating moon cake of celebrate the Moon Festival began, but one relief traces its origin to the 14th century. At the time, China was in revolt against the Mongols. Chu Yuen-change, and his senior deputy, Liu Po-went, discussed battle plan and develops a secret moon cake strategy to take a certain walled city held by the Mongol enemy. Liu dressed up as a Taoist priest and entered the besieged city bearing moon cake. He distributed these to the city's populace. When the time for the year's Chung Chiu festival arrived, people opened their cakes and found hidden messages advising them to coordinate their uprising with the troops outside. Thus, the emperor-to-be ingeniously took the city and his throne. Moon cake of course, became even more famous. Another version is: A woman, Chang-O, was married to the great General Hou-Yi of the Imperial Guard. General Hou was a skilled archer. One day, at the behest of the emperor, he shot down eight of nine suns that had mysteriously appeared in the heaven that morning. His marksmanship was richly rewarded by the emperor and he became very famous. However, the people feared that these suns would appear again to torture them and dry up the planet, so they prayed to the Goddess of Heaven (Wang Mu) to make General Hou immortal so that he could always defend the emperor, his progeny and the country. Their wish was granted and General Hou was given a Pill of Immortality.
Chang-O grabbed
the pill (or the herb) and fled to the moon. In
some versions it is uncertain whether she ever
actually got there, because Chinese operas
always portray her as still dancing-flying
toward the moon. There is another version that mentions about an old man that lives on the moon, Yueh Lao Yeh. This old man, (very, very old by now, no doubt) it is said, keeps a record book with all the names of newborn babies. He is the one heavenly person who knows everyone's future partners, and nobody can fight the decisions written down in his book. He is one reason why the moon is so important in Chinese mythology and especially at the time of the Moon Festival. Everybody including children, hikes up high mountains or hills or onto open beached to view the moon in the hope that he will grant their wishes. Ultimately, it appears that all of the versions do not have a solid conclusion - other than the fact that somehow, it all comes together. Ultimately, unlike the Thanksgiving celebrations at my house when I was young, the Chinese gather together harmoniously, eat, drink, and gaze at the moon. In my family, the Sheriff's Department would always stop everybody at the end of the drive and confiscate their guns, knives and other weapons in an often futile effort, to keep as many of us as possible out of the hospital or jail during this festive time. Each moon cake tastes a bit different - some I have tried have a bit of ginger in them, which reminded me of the Suzy Brown cake my grandmother used to make years ago. Still, these cakes here are not as light and fluffy as grandmother's cakes were, but are quite firm and dense. I suspect that if they were left out in the open outside of their packaging for a few days they could be used quite effectively as hockey pucks. Some of my knowledge about the festival and moon cakes came from my students, I am happy to say. On the moon cake subject they all talked as though anyone with a lick of sense would know what a moon cake was. (Whether or not I have a "lick of sense" is not something that I will debate here - or anyplace for that matter.) So naturally, to get them to expound on the issue, I would ask them questions like: "Do the moon cakes come from the moon?" or "Are they made from the stuff on the moon?" That of course would get me the detailed information that I desired. Needless to say, my jokes about the moon cakes did not go un-noticed by some of the students. On the day of the Mid Autumn Festival I got an e-mail card from one of my students that had me rolling on the floor laughing. I don't know how long the link for the card will be working, but give it a try. Card Link. If it isn't working, Contact The Old Codger and we will see if we can't get it back up again using some devious trick or another... Speaking of food - (begin The Old Codger's Rant of the Week) - finding good food is next to impossible for him here. The Chinese food here is absolutely nothing like the Chinese food I had back home or in any other country for that matter. Food in restaurants here is typically bland or spicy, with very little in between. Vegetables are rare and typically look more like weeds than anything The Old Codger has ever seen - with the exception of some things in Thailand. Ask for some salt in a restaurant to give some flavor to things - and typically about the best that the waitress can do is bring you out a bowl of salt rather than a salt shaker. The same goes for sugar in most places as well. At one University sponsored dinner that I went to a couple of weeks ago, we were served a Chinese version of chicken soup. It is apparently quite simple to make: Heat up a pot of water. Take a whole chicken - that includes the head and the feet - all still attached - and boil until tender. No salt. No seasoning. No nothing. B-L-A-N-D. Tasteless. Even my students from other parts of China complain about the food here in Nantong, saying that it has no taste, no color and not "smell." I am going to presume that they mean "smell" in a good way - but then again, I could be mistaken. A trip to the grocery store here can be a whole new experience as well. All of the stores that I have been to are well stocked with biscuits, candies, liquor, wine, monosodium glutamate (MSG), noodles, noodles, noodles and noodles. The bigger stores have more selections. In the meat department you can find a little bit of beef, a bit more pork (none of the beef or pork cuts are really clearly identifiable, other than the pork ribs) chickens, ducks, pork feet, chicken feet, chicken heads, chicken and duck innards, pork belly, pork intestines, pork uterus and stuff that I couldn't quite identify. Next to the meat market is the fish market with tanks of live fish, fresh fish that has been cleaned (presumably) and turtles. I must admit that when I was in the check out line and saw a turtle on a Styrofoam meat tray wrapped up with saran wrap, I kind of felt sorry for the little fellow. Despite the girl tapping him on his shell, I just knew that he was not going to be a pet when he got home. I do hope that his demise into the final stage of the food chain was quick and painless. Something tells me that they cook turtles here the same way that we cook lobsters. I would take a turtle as a pet before I would take a lobster as one, but that is neither here nor there in the long run I reckon. Of course, there are plenty of other things on the grocery store shelves - a hell of a lot of noodles to start with. Besides that, in the dairy section, there is plenty of yogurt - something that I might eat or drink if nothing else was available. The problem is that with the majority of the other products on the shelves, it is difficult to determine what in the hell it is. Everything about the product is in Chinese except for the name of the manufacturer, who inevitably is located here in China someplace. The name of the manufacturer, and the address is always in English as well as the brand name on most of the products. I presume that there is a logical explanation - or at least one that is somewhat comprehensible - for that practice but it certainly does escape me. Sustenance demands that a person must eat. The options are quite simple - continue eating at a restaurant where you have figured out what you are ordering - or take a gamble. You do that every time that you go into a restaurant and order something different, and the same principle applies in the grocery store. If the picture looks good on the package, you buy it and hope for the best. If something is spicy, typically there is a chili or two in the picture, but their absence from the picture does not guarantee that they do not exist in the product, or to what extent. Yes, I do have a number of Chinese recipes that I have gotten off from the internet, but once again, those recipes are in English and do not identify the Chinese characters for the ingredients that one needs. Finding simple things like spices - basic ones at that such as salt and pepper - in stores is extremely difficult. Not all stores carry them. One store had "pepper salt" but not one of each. After a bit of traveling around, I finally did find a store that had a fairly decent array of spices to give the food some flavor. (I also, after three stores, finally found some deodorant. What does deodorant have to do with cooking, you may well ask? The answer is quite simple: I want to make damned sure that when I am cooking something that what I smell is the food and not me.) Whatever you buy, you never know what it will taste like. You can buy something one time, and it tastes pretty good. Buy the same thing the next time, and it will quite possibly taste a bit different. But, there is one culinary cure for that problem that works every time. It is called "ketchup." That stuff can cure most anything in the culinary department. It is so effective that I am up to three bottles a month right now! Even though I am getting around in the kitchen quite well these days and experimenting and trying different things - some known and some completely alien to me - I am surviving. I am confident that I am not going to emerge from this experience as a qualified Chinese cook or chef, but then again, considering the food that is in this region, I am not certain that I would like to emulate the local talent. Monday through Wednesday of next week is a Chinese Holiday of greater magnitude than the Mid Autumn Festival. This one celebrates the founding of the PRC - Peoples Republic of China back in 1949 which is called National Day Holiday. As a result, school is closed for the week - more or less - which means a week off with pay - more or less. Students 'technically' are not allowed to go home for the holiday until Sunday. Since Thursday and Friday are not holidays, students who have classes on those days will have those classes instead this Saturday and Sunday - which means that teachers have to work this week end in exchange for having Thursday and Friday off. Doesn't really affect me too much - other than shortening my Friday and Saturday evening "happy hour(s)" considerably. Both days I have early morning classes. Once class on Saturday - and two classes on Sunday. It will be interesting to see how many students show up for the last class on Sunday since it starts at 3:50 PM. I am fairly confident that I can convince the students in that class on Friday to all make a commitment to me that they are going to be leaving the campus for home at 3:00 PM. I suspect that, weather permitting, I will have some opportunities to get out and do some exploring around Nantong next week. Heaven knows I have been working so hard here since school started that I am definitely ready for some well deserved time off. The Old Codger
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