Yishui Fenggao Cake 沂水丰糕

Yishui Fenggao Cake (沂水丰糕) is a sugar-coated cake of fermented glutinous rice from Yishui County (沂水县) in Linyi (临沂), Shandong. Its making is traced back to the Jiaqing reign (嘉庆) of the Qing dynasty, and its name is read as "a good harvest every year, a step higher every step" (年年丰收、步步登高).

How it is made

The making runs to ten steps. Glutinous rice is left in water for more than 20 days to ferment naturally, and heritage bearer Huang Yuwei (黄玉伟) treats this fermentation, which gives the cake its rice-blossom aroma, as the heart of the craft. The rice is then fried and shaped into cakes. The last step is scattering a layer of white sugar over the formed cake: the sugar keeps it crisp and keeps out damp, and with too little the cake turns soft.

Flavour and texture

Dongying Net describes the cake as fragrant, sweet, crisp, crunchy and glutinous, with the smell of rice in flower. Younger buyers have found the traditional version cloyingly sweet, so Huang's Yishui company now also makes versions with sugar alcohols and sugar-free syrup, and with tea powder, honey, peanuts, walnuts, sesame, goji berries or raisins; the natural fermentation and all ten steps stay the same.

Where it comes from

Yishui Fenggao Cake is a Mid-Autumn Festival food: a late-Qing verse quoted by Dongying Net describes the bright moon of mid-autumn and "rice fragrance for a thousand li, cakes in ten thousand homes" (千里稻香万家糕), and on CCTV's quiz show the answer to when Yishui people eat fenggao was the Mid-Autumn reunion. The cake is on Linyi's fifth municipal intangible heritage list. In 2020 the Yishui County government reported that Yishui fenggao making was on the Shandong Department of Culture and Tourism's published shortlist for the fifth provincial heritage list, and Huang Yuwei, who began learning the craft at 16 in the state-run Yishui food factory, is now its provincial-level representative bearer.