Hakka cuisine has nearly 200 kinds of snacks: lantern cakes, seven-layer cakes, fist peaches, taro buns, pizza, taro cakes, pearl balls, glutinous rice balls, beef balls, flat meat, taro dumplings, moxa dumplings, and tofu dumplings.

, rice jelly, tofu balls, bamboo shoots, chicken blood, clear rice noodles, stuffed tofu, stuffed mushrooms, stuffed tofu skin, abacus, yellow... Hakka snacks are made from a wide range of materials and varieties, with strong local characteristics.

It shows the traditional Hakka style and describes the customs of the Hakka era. It is an important carrier of Hakka culture.

It is full of flavor and fragrance, and you will never tire of eating it. The variety, careful selection of ingredients, and the appetite for food all fully demonstrate the Hakka food culture.

What’s interesting is that Hakka snacks include mostly rice products, with more than 100 kinds.

This is because the Hakka people migrated from the northern plains to the southern mountains, and food crops changed from mainly growing wheat in the past to mainly growing rice, sweet potatoes, cassava, taro, etc. It is also most convenient and suitable to process rice grains into various snacks.

Among Hakka rice products and snacks, whether it is old houses in the countryside or streets in cities and towns, the most representative, the most charming, and the most nostalgic is the Dengzhan cake.

Dengzhan cake is also called fried cake, iron spoon cake, spicy cake, bean paste, etc. It is the most popular snack in the Hakka area.

It is the combination of rice and beans, the product of fire and oil.

An ancient Tingzhou nursery rhyme goes like this: "Dengzhan cake is swollen. If you don't have copper coins, you will die." In Liancheng, it is: "Dengzhan cake is round and round. I want to eat it and I want money. Dengzhan cake is flat and that and that.

I want to eat it, but it’s hot.” ??From Zhizi’s mouth, the Hakka people’s love and thoughts about the dengzhan cake were revealed.

The origin of Hakka Dengzhan Cake in western Fujian has a lot to do with Huang Shen, one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou.

Legend has it that Huang Shen, a famous painter of the Qing Dynasty who was born in Ninghua, lost his father when he was young and his family was poor. In order for Huang Shen to concentrate on his studies, his mother sold fried pancakes on the street next to the county government office every day to subsidize the family.

Huang Shen's mother got up before dawn every day to grind rice pulp. Seeing how hard her mother worked, the young Huang Shen got up early to help her grind the rice.

After the rice milk was ground, Huang Shen's mother went out to fry the pancakes. Because the pancakes fried by Huang Shen's mother were golden and translucent and fragrant, they were very popular among customers, and there was an endless stream of people coming to buy breakfast every day.

Gradually, the fried pancakes made by Huang Shen's mother became more and more famous, and the supply often exceeded the demand.

Because the frying spoon used for frying fried pancakes resembles a lamp for lighting, the clever Huang Shen gave it a very poetic name "Lengzhan Cake".

From then on, the name "Dengzhan Cake" spread like wildfire.

The small lamp cake, in the memory of the older generation of Hakka people, is a bean of light burning under the old-fashioned lamp. Children study books under the lamp, and sew under the mother's lamp. The spirit of farming and reading is passed down from generation to generation in the dim light of the oil lamp.

The small lantern cake is a temptation on the children's tongue, the taste of hometown, and the resolution of the genetic code of generations of Hakka people.

What they ate was not only Hakka snacks, but also culture.