[New Year Chronicle] Xiuning, Anhui: Ancient method of pounding sesame cakes to welcome the Spring Festival

  As the Spring Festival approaches, many people in Hecheng Township, Xiuning County, Anhui Province, are busy making a variety of delicacies. One of them is a hand-cooked sesame cake that has been passed down to Huizhou for two to three hundred years.

The local villagers continue to use the old method of iron pan frying and stone mortar pounding to preserve the original taste of sesame, making the sesame cake sweet and crispy.

  Making sesame cakes starts with frying sesame seeds in an iron pan on an earthen stove.

The black sesame seeds are put into the iron pan and stir-fried continuously, crackling and exploding, and the rich aroma diffuses.

The fried sesame seeds are put into a stone mortar and pounded repeatedly with a hard wooden stick and pestle.

  The crushed sesame seeds are mixed with sugar and placed in a wooden box, then beaten with a mallet to make it firm and flat, then overturned from the wooden box, and cut with a knife into a neatly uniform sesame cake.

  In addition to this method, some villagers also use molds to make sesame cakes.

The mold is printed with auspicious patterns, and the poured sesame cake is both beautiful.

(Edited by Liu Haosheng, Hongbing, Song Jianzhong, Zeng Chen)

Editor in charge: [Li Yuxin]