Huaining Tribute Rice Cake 怀宁贡糕

How it is made

The cake is made from a top-grade local glutinous rice called sanlicun (三粒寸), with white sugar, sesame oil, candied orange (橘饼), osmanthus, walnut kernels and red and green shreds (红绿丝). The rice is soaked, dry-roasted and milled, and the flour is then aged in a dedicated store for more than three months.

Wu Zuosheng (吴祚生), general manager of the Dingxue food company in Huaining, says the subtlest step is the sugar: it is softened (绵化) until it tastes sweet with a touch of sourness, which he says keeps the cake sweet without being cloying, unlike cakes made by simply adding powdered sugar. In the old street of Shipai (石牌), a group of older craftsmen still keep up more than twenty traditional hand processes.

Flavour and texture

The cake is described as "thin as paper, pliable as a card, white as snow, burns like a candle" (薄如纸、捻如牌、白如雪、燃如烛). The name Dingxue, 'summit snow', comes from the colour, likened to snow on a mountain peak.

Where it comes from

The earliest place of production is Shipai, a thousand-year-old town in the Wan River (皖河) basin, now named a national opera-culture town, which grows all the ingredients the cake needs. When the county seat moved from Shipai to Gaohe (高河) in 2002, the main production moved with it.

Legend says that under Emperor Shenzong of the Song dynasty, Wang Anshi (王安石), then vice-prefect of neighbouring Shuzhou (舒州), was given the cakes by a Huaining craftsman after a trip to Mount Tianzhu (天柱山), named them after the snow on its peak, and later presented them to the emperor, who made them a tribute cake. The Huaining county gazetteer of 1916 records the cake as a noted Anhui folk speciality by the Ming and Qing dynasties. In 1875 Sheng Ziyuan (盛梓元) opened the Sheng Tianchang (盛天长) general store in Shipai; its cake workshop, described as the largest, hired the pastry master Yin Weibing (尹维炳), who added further ingredients, and its slices were praised as able to be rolled into a tube and lit as a spill for a water pipe.

The cake was named a quality product by the former Ministry of Light Industry in 1985 and 1989, has been recognised as a national geographical-indication protected product, and entered the Anqing municipal list of intangible cultural heritage in 2010.

How it is eaten

In Huaining the cake is a traditional snack found in ordinary households and has moved from a New Year gift to an everyday purchase. For moving house, New Year visits and birthdays, guests bring one or two strips as a blessing, playing on the sound of gao (糕, cake) and gao (高, high) in wishes such as "rise step by step" (步步糕升).