MEDIUM RARE
According to the lunar calendar, today, Sept. 3, is the first day of the eighth month. (August in the Chinese calendar is September in the Gregorian.)
Exactly half a month or 14 days later, Sept. 17 (Gregorian) will be the day to celebrate the mid-autumn festival. As understated as it has always been, even with mooncakes, lanterns in red silk, and dice games played in the moonlight as harbingers of joy. Chinese families gather to dine at home or in restaurants, and the louder their happy noises make, the more fun and fortune they may expect.
By this time, sweet shops and restaurants in Chinatown should be one big advertisement for mooncakes. But lacking a driver who could park our car on any of its busy streets, the five of us decided to take our Chinese lunch in Quezon City instead, at Shangri-la’s Summer Palace, to celebrate cousin Ann’s birthday. Toward the end of the meal, Ann decided we should take dessert in her townhouse, where this balikbayan from Los Angeles now lives in a garden-like setting several meters away from a mall. (Not far from the gate, the wall showed the watermark several feet high left by typhoon Carina. “Nothing like this has ever happened before, not even after Ondoy!” she pointed out.)
What she did not tell us was that a treasure trove of mooncakes in different flavors awaited us, each with the yolk of a golden moon enclosed within its sweet, sticky-yummy filling. Even better, she gave me my share – my own leftover – in a pretty, highly decorative tin box. On its bottom appears a list of more than a dozen ingredients for “white lotus paste mooncake, one yolk.”
“Use the box for coins or jewels,” Ann laughed. Or love letters, I should’ve teased back.
In olden times, the mid-autumn festivities were held to honor and thank farmers for their harvest. At one point, the celebration became a cover to hide a secret plot to overthrow the emperor when the mooncakes were distributed with messages hidden inside their sweet fillings to signal the day and time for the revolt. Today the secret of the mooncake lies in asking you to guess the ingredients for each flavor and how it’s made.