Hello everyone! Welcome back! Today I will introduce Double Ninth Festival and its traditional food--Chongyang Cake for you.
A brief introduction of Double Ninth Festival
The Double Ninth Festival, also known as Chongyang Festival, is held on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month. It is also known as the Senior Citizens' Festival.
In this year, it takes place on 7, October, 2019.
In the past, people believed that the double ninth day was worth a celebration. Since folk people had the tradition of climbing a mountain on that day, the Chongyang Festival is also called the Height Ascending Festival. The Chongyang Festival also has other names, such as the Chrysanthemum Festival. As "double ninth" is pronounced the same as the word meaning "forever," ancestors are also worshipped on that day.
On this traditional Festival, people hold many activities in celebration, such as enjoying the chrysanthemum, inserting Zhuyu, eating Chongyang cakes, and drinking chrysanthemum wine, among others.
What is Chongyang cake?
As I mentioned above, Chongyang cake is the most representative food for Double Ninth Festival.
On the day of Chongyang Festival, one traditional activity is to climb mountains. However, mountains are not everywhere for people to climb. Therefore, for those people who live in flat regions far from any mountain, the problem is solved by going for a picnic and eating cakes. The Chinese word for cake is Gao, a homonym of the Chinese word for high. Mountains are high, so eating cake can, by a stretch of the imagination, take the place of going for a climb.
Chongyang Cake is made of rice flour, which is classified into two types: paddy rice flour and millet rice four. Chongyang Cake was also called Hua (Colorful) Cake after the Ming & Qing Dynasty and became the food for the season in urban and rural areas. Hua Cake is divided into Unpolished Hua Cake, Refined Hua Cake and Gold Coin Hua Cake. Unpolished Hua Cake is marked with caraway leaves, sandwiched with date, peach kernel and other unpolished dry fruits.
How to make it?
Here is a video for you!
I hope you can have a better understanding of Double Ninth Festival! If you have question, you can leave a comment below.
Have a nice weekend and see you next week!