Food of Spring – Huawen Tulou Rat’s Tail Cakes
Freshly baked rat's tail cakes.
Cleaning rat's tail grass by the well.
Packing the cakes.
Taiwan Net News, April 11th report by Fujian Daily: In the third month of the lunar calendar, everything sprouts.
The footsteps of spring have once again visited the 'World Heritage' Fujian Tulou (Huawen) – the Huawen Tulou group. This group of tulou consists of three tulou, including the 'King of Tulou' Ergui Lou, the 'Fujian Tulou Museum' Nanyang Lou, and the 'Model of Residence' Dongyang Lou. Among them, the 'King of Tulou' Ergui Lou is the most outstanding representative, the first of the Fujian Tulou to be listed as a national key cultural relic protection unit, and is regarded as a world-class folk architectural treasure.
Every spring, the households living in these tulou will bring rat's tail grass, as one of the ingredients, to make rat's tail cakes. This tradition has been continuing for over 200 years.
Rat's tail grass is most tender before the Qingming Festival, and when used to make cakes, they are particularly fragrant and moist. Villagers bring rat's tail grass back from the fields and after washing, steaming, pounding, and selecting, they make a soup, which is added to a mixture of red sugar and sticky rice dough to make the cake skin, and then they can start wrapping the cakes.
Rat's tail cakes come in salty and sweet flavors. The fillings are diverse: mushrooms, diced meat, shrimp, peanuts, black sesame… no matter what combination, it has a sense of proportion in the minds of the makers, and the fillings are always fragrant and delicious. After selecting the filling and wrapping it into the cake skin, it is then placed in a steamer lined with fresh bananas and steamed.
After steaming for half an hour, the freshly baked rat's tail cakes are hot and steamy. At this time, the villagers who have been busy all day will put down their work and carefully taste them. The diverse flavors of the fillings combined with the unique fragrance of rat's tail grass is the taste code passed down by the people of the tulou for generations.
Time flows, and years accumulate. For the simple people of the tulou, rat's tail cakes are not only food but also a memory of life preserved in the years, reflecting the villagers' wishes for abundant harvests, thriving livestock, and good health and well-being. (Huang Jianhe, Text/Photo)
