Cicheng Rice Cakes 慈城年糕

Cicheng Rice Cakes (慈城年糕) are water-milled rice cakes (水磨年糕) from Cicheng (慈城), a town in Jiangbei District (江北区) of Ningbo (宁波), Zhejiang. Cicheng is known as China's 'home of rice cakes' (中国年糕之乡), and the Ningbo city gazetteer says that Ningbo's rice cakes, once famous for the Lianghu (梁湖) and Shuidiqing (水底清) kinds, are now at their best from Cicheng.

How it is made

The Ningbo Cultural Centre describes ten hand steps: new-season late japonica rice from the area is soaked, milled with water into a slurry, drained and rubbed into flour, steamed, pounded, gathered into lumps and pressed in moulds. Hangzhou Net adds that the rice soaks in clear water for three to four days and that the pressed-out flour is crumbled by hand and sieved before a fierce steaming, after which it is pounded or rolled into even strips. At the Cicheng rice-cake museum the ground floor is now a mechanised production hall, with the old hand method explained beside each step.

Flavour and texture

The finished strips are jade-white and glossy, and hold their shape through long boiling without turning mushy. Hangzhou Net sums them up as soft, sticky and sweet-scented, white and springy.

How it is eaten

People's Daily lists the everyday Cicheng dishes: rice-cake soup with pickled mustard greens and shredded pork, rice cakes stir-fried with shepherd's purse and winter bamboo shoots, and rice cakes fried with white crab. Rice cakes toasted on the stove and puffed rice-cake slices are remembered as childhood snacks. The name niangao sounds like 'higher every year', which made the cakes an important food in Cicheng, a town that produced many top imperial-examination graduates.

Where it comes from

The hand-making technique of Cicheng water-milled rice cakes entered Zhejiang's third provincial intangible-heritage list in 2009, and Cicheng Rice Cakes received geographical-indication protection in 2020. People's Daily Online reported in 2013 that the town held a large rice-cake festival every two years, with pounding, slicing and stacking contests; at the second festival makers produced a single cake 5 metres long weighing 2,300 kg, reportedly from 1,600 kg of rice.