Magnolia Fried Rice Cakes 玉兰饼
Magnolia Fried Rice Cakes is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
Magnolia Fried Rice Cakes (玉兰饼) are a local snack of Wuxi (无锡) in Jiangsu: a glutinous rice-flour cake, filled and fried in oil, named because it was made and sold while the magnolias were in flower.
Where it comes from
The cake grew out of a batter-fried magnolia-petal fritter that households south of the Yangtze made at home. Chinese Wikipedia gives two dates for its start: the Guangxu reign of the Qing dynasty, and 1850, when the Sun family rice-cake shop (孙记糕团店) at Yingya Pavilion (迎迓亭) in Wuxi took the idea from that fritter. The shop washed and chopped magnolia petals into a filling, wrapped it in a case of glutinous rice flour and fried the cakes in oil.
Chinese Wikipedia's article on Suzhou-Wuxi cooking (苏锡菜) lists the cake among Wuxi's dishes, next to plum-blossom cakes (梅花糕) and crabapple cakes (海棠糕).
Ingredients
The traditional filling at the Sun family shop was a paste of magnolia petals. Later versions added a savoury-sweet fresh pork filling seasoned with a lot of soy sauce and sugar, in the manner of Wuxi's small steamed buns (无锡小笼), and sweet fillings of greens with lard, rose, red bean paste or sesame. These fillings are recorded in the Wuxi Cuisine Canon (无锡菜典), a reference compiled by Wuxi catering specialists.
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Suzhou rice-flour sweets 苏式糕团 →
Both are rice-flour snacks of the Suzhou-Wuxi area; Wuxi's magnolia cake has a glutinous rice-flour case that is filled and pan-fried in oil.