mooncakes for mid-autumn moon festival '09

i.
apples have returned to the market and it's time to make mooncakes again.

until recently, mooncake making had been a communal act. grandma, grandpa, and me at our respective posts: grandma with her rolling pin for the dough, grandpa and his scale to portion the filling, me with my wooden mold to shape the whole thing into mooncakes. a big part of the enjoyment of making mooncakes is the stretch of time in spent together in toil; the exchange of an afternoon for a few stacks of mooncakes; the satisfaction of admiring our handiwork at evening time. even when grandma's health declined and she could no longer hold the rolling pin, she'd still be in the kitchen, supervising our mini-production line from her wheelchair. and when grandpa's eyesight got so bad that he couldn't read the numbers on the scale and i started to make mooncakes on my own, it was comforting to know that he was still reachable by car and phone. now that grandpa's gone too, it's become more difficult to muster the energy to take down the wooden mold.

with the dinette only 6 months old, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of good reasons for not making mooncakes this year: payroll, bookkeeping, laundry, a haircut, sleep. but there are plenty of compelling reasons to make the cakes: to celebrate another arrival of autumn; to have edible sweet potato-filled gifts that i can give out to my long list of people to thank; to conjure up my former teachers in my kitchen.

ii.
mid-autumn moon festival '06. for my first year of making mooncakes on my own, i decided to forego my grandparents' traditional mung bean-salted duck egg filling and try a new filling instead. i baked up a batch, wrapped and packed four cakes in a paper box, and brought them home for grandpa.

grandpa: the crust is very pretty. what kind of food coloring did you use?

me: i just used some caramel sauce that you taught me and mixed that with an egg.

grandpa: that was smart.

me: taste it, grandpa.

grandpa: you did put a salted egg in?

me: no, grandpa. just taste one.

grandpa (taking a bite): wha... what is this?

me: it's sweet potato! i know how much you love sweet potato, so -

grandpa: why did you do that?

me: you don't like it, grandpa? no one would make a sweet potato mooncake in vietnam?

grandpa: only during the war, when we couldn't afford mung beans!

me: but grandpa, these sweet potatoes are more expensive than mung beans. and they were dug up just a few days ago.

grandpa: sweet potato filling. such a waste.

iii.
i love it that my innovation is no innovation at all. i love it that my mooncake is a war-time mooncake, and that even during war, my grandparents found time to make them.