Vietnam’s Mid-Autumn Moon Festival (Moon Cakes)
cake Cookies
Everyone gets one (or many) Bánh Trung Thu as gifts for the holiday. And so many are never unboxed. Instead, special friends pass them along as special holiday gifts to other special friends?
Now, certainly many Vietnamese folk must love moon cakes – literally millions are sold each year in Vietnam as the mid-Autumn Festival arrives. But, I’ve never actually seen a Vietnamese friend go out and buy one to consume it for themselves. (I’ll await the onslaught of e-mails). And I’ve seen plenty of boxes of moon cakes sit untouched, week after week, on friends’ kitchen counters until, of course, I – a foreigner – arrive for a visit and am told, You must try a moon cake.
Of course, I do. And certainly, I really have nothing against sitting down eating a heavy brick for the holidays. After all, it’s tradition!
But it must be eaten in very small slices. And best consumed over the course of the several days surrounding the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival .
Almost always heavy (thus my eating a brick reference), the ingredients comprising a moon cake varies from bakery-to-bakery, and from family-to-family. I’ve encountered numerous filling variations, involving bean pastes, ground seeds and nuts, salted egg yolk, dried fruits and shredded meats.
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