Tangled Branches: Satiated
riveting tales of how we sustain ourselves
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Moon Cakes
Well, I finally found some moon cakes to buy. Tried to get some for last year's Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, but I waited too long or looked in the wrong shops or something and ended up with none. This year I was determined to find some. After a lot of Googling, I learned that there is a Chinese bakery called Maria's in Rockville, and they sell moon cakes. I know that Maria's is a chain (from reading S. J. Rozan's Mandarin Plaid, I think), but I figured it would be good enough since I had almost no expectations. So yesterday, I drove up to Rockville and found Maria's and bought the only kind of moon cakes they had that didn't contain egg yolk. Something about eating a hard-cooked egg yolk in the middle of a pastry is just unappealing. I saw a display of boxes of moon cakes with various fillings, all of which contained egg, according to the English signs in front of them. But in front of one pile of boxes was a sign written only in Chinese. So I asked the girl behind the counter if there were any moon cakes without egg, and she said the ones labeled only in Chinese were, and the filling was date. I bought a box and brought them home. When she put the box in a Maria's plastic bag, I learned from the bag that there are 3 branches of Maria's in northern Virginia. I guess you just have to know about them, because there sure is not much on the Internet.
The box was beautiful and contained 4 moon cakes of a square shape, about 2.5 inches on a side. I knew they were going to be heavy and rich, so I sliced off a tiny piece. It smelled of bacon grease. I ate the tiny piece. Then I cut another tiny piece and ate that. Then one more. Half the cake was gone before I realized just how heavy and rich it was. I liked it quite a lot, but you really have to exercise some restraint - half a cake is more than plenty. I'm still working on deciphering the Chinese label, but so far I have figured out that it says "pine nuts" and "date", which I already knew from eating it. Trying to determine where the bacon grease smell comes from. I think there is supposed to be lard in the pastry, but bacon grease? I know that some moon cakes contain ham, so that's another possibility, but I really don't see or taste anything in the filling that seems to be ham.
There will be no nibbling of moon cakes while gazing at the moon tonight here - we are getting rain from the remnants of Hurricane Jeanne. I wonder what they do in China when it rains on the Moon Festival.
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