During this trip to Zhejiang, I discovered a "strange" snack in Xinshi Ancient Town, Deqing, Huzhou. Its name is: tea cake.

The first time I had tea cakes was in a big hotel opposite the ancient town of Xinshi. Their family is quite famous in the local area.

When we asked for a few "specials," the waiter recommended it to us.

Because tea cake is "a unique snack here and a must-try for tourists."

In addition, the display of tea cakes in the hotel brochure is really tempting: the white outer skin vaguely reveals the ruddy filling inside, and the hot steam almost reaches the tip of the nose. You can feel the sweetness and deliciousness through the picture.

After all, there are old people and children at our table, so it is a good choice to order a soft, glutinous and flaky snack.

Okay, let's have one.

But I never expected that when the tea cake was served, it was actually filled with meat.

Ah this... How should I put it? Look, this little pastry is square and juicy. The outer shell is the kind of rice cake dough commonly used for desserts. Logically speaking, the brown filling inside should be delicious.

It's bean paste, right?

Or jujube puree, brown sugar, and purple sweet potato are also logical... In short, both emotionally and rationally, they "shouldn't" be sauce-flavored.

This operation... was really unexpected.

He calmed down and ate one steadily.

Don't tell me, although the making of this tea cake is weird, it tastes really good.

The combination of the "glutinous" rice paste and the "mud" of the meat filling creates saliva in the mouth. It tastes a bit like meat dumplings, but the texture is more exquisite than rice dumplings; it's a bit like meat buns, but the stamina is more delicious than steamed buns.

After I ate the meatballs inside the tea cake, I found that the "shell" with the meat filling soup on the outside tastes better when eaten alone. The slight sweetness is the sweetness that comes with glutinous rice.

The clerk said: "You can't eat this tea cake anymore" outside the ancient town of Xinshi. There are no similar Jiangnan ancient towns in the surrounding area.

Indeed, almost all the "rice cakes" we ate on our way from north to south were sweet, and meat fillings were rarely seen.

But I have to say that each of us is extremely impressed by the exquisite craftsmanship and the exquisite rituals of Jiangnan pastry.

For example: The orange-red cake in Nanxun Ancient Town is made with a special honey kumquat base. The cake is easy to make, but kumquats are hard to find; Shaoxing’s rice cake may seem inconspicuous, but its history can be traced back to the Han Dynasty, and it has been derived from

There are more than a dozen ways to make it; there is also a pastry that looks like a rose. It is rose red and looks very pretty.

The real thing looks very "fake", but people say that this cake has no artificial additives at all. It uses the juice of dragon fruit (after removing the seeds) to give the color to the rice surface... You have to lament that this is the "naturally selected" material in the land of fish and rice.

Give the people of Jiangnan this "wonderful workmanship" infinite creativity.

Later, I got used to it. The first thing I do when I visit a travel destination is to “fix” the food: what to eat, how to eat it, why to eat it... The wonderful humanistic interests of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai have given us a group of northern tourists a lot of experience.

many.

However, just "knowledge" is not enough. We have to understand how this Xinshi tea cake came from and the origin of "the only one in Jiangnan". This trip will be considered to be worthwhile.

Tea cake, as the name suggests, is a snack related to tea.

After all, it has been an old specialty of this town since the "Xiantan Chronicle" listed it as a "new city product" in 1517 AD.

It is said that it originated in the Southern Song Dynasty, but this statement has no historical facts.

Taking a step back, even if we start from the Ming Dynasty, it has a history of about 600 years - let's start from the Ming Dynasty.

The early Ming Dynasty was an era when the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal was increasingly prosperous.

I shared in my travel notes a few days ago that a "unique" large market (Silkworm Flower Temple Fair) in the south of the Yangtze River will appear in the ancient town of Xinshi during the Qingming Festival.

This market is held once a year, and the streets are packed with people, and the scene is extremely spectacular - but can you imagine, people from Xinshi told me: What kind of market is this?

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, there was nothing new at all. Fragrant markets, morning markets, night markets...we have all the “markets” you can think of here. It can be said that “new markets are seen every day”.