Manchu Oak-Leaf Cakes 玻璃叶饼

Manchu Oak-Leaf Cakes (玻璃叶饼), called "glass-leaf cakes" in Chinese, are cakes wrapped in oak leaves, a food of the Manchu (满族). In Siping (四平), the city's culture and tourism bureau names them, together with the Manchu eight-bowl banquet (八大碗), among the Manchu foods of Yehe Town (叶赫镇), where they form part of the local ethnic culture along with Manchu rites, shamanic songs and New Year customs.

Ingredients

The Chinese name comes from the wrapper. Recalling the snacks of his home region, the writer Duanmu Hongliang (端木蕻良), one of the leading Northeast writers of the 1930s, described a tree with large leaves whose smooth surfaces reflect the light; local people called them glass leaves, and cakes wrapped in them glass-leaf cakes. In an essay in the Wenyibao (文艺报), the Manchu writer Gao Weisheng (高维生) explains that the glass leaf is in fact the leaf of the oak (柞树), which country people call "菠离蕻子" (boli hongzi, a folk name for the oak). He recalls Duanmu's account of his mother setting a hot glass-leaf cake on a small dish for him, and calls the leaf-wrapped cake fragrant.

Where it comes from

Gao writes about the cakes in an essay on bobo (饽饽), known as efen (额芬) in the Manchu language, the Manchu name for foods made from flour. The oak leaves were eaten in harder times too: Gao's mother told him that during the hard years of the 1960s people picked them in the hills, dried them in a wok, pounded them and mixed them into cornmeal. Sometimes the narrow oak leaves gave way to large, round linden (椴树) leaves, which made linden-leaf bobo.