Steam does something to rice that no oven imitates. At the Zhuanqiao cake fair in Shanghai’s Minhang district, the smell inside the marquee is wet fir and hot sugar, and the queue for it forms at eight in the morning. The event, an annual Double Ninth folk-culture programme, ran from 16 to 18 October at Longsheng International Plaza and sold about 12.5 tonnes of cake for close to 260,000 yuan (roughly 36,000 US dollars) over three days, according to the organisers.
Why the Queue Starts at Eight
The centre of the fair is the Zhuanqiao barrel-steamed cake, and two heritage shops, Axiaodi and Jijixiang, carry most of the demand. Shen Jing (沈静), the municipal-level inheritor who runs Jijixiang, said the peak before the festival had already consumed a tonne of rice, and that the first morning alone moved five or six hundred cakes. Buyers are largely people taking cake to an elder, which is why the queue is heaviest early and why the same faces return each year.
What sets the texture is the method. Rice is soaked overnight to soften and partly ferment, then steamed in a fir barrel, which is where the resinous note comes from. Two layers of brown sugar sit inside the cake and a crust of mixed nuts goes on top; the result is soft and chewy without sticking to the teeth, a finish home steaming rarely reaches because the steam path in a domestic pot is uneven. Barrel volume and the geometry of the steam set a hard ceiling on output, and the ceiling does not move by adding staff. It moves by adding barrels.
Guest Cakes From Across Shanghai
Guest stalls make the fair a survey of the city’s rice-cake geography. Qibao brought its farmhouse cakes; Chongming cake arrived with a filling of raisins, pine nuts, melon seeds and candied dates, made from one in the morning and delivered at half past six, with the stall expecting about a tonne across the three days. Lüxiang sent its White Dragon cake and Yexie its soft cake.
Gaoqiao pastries were the outlier, and the one that shows how a different technique produces a different pleasure. The method traces to the late Ming and early Qing, the finished pastry should be yellow on top, white at the centre and crisp at the base, and the bakers roll the dough twice to build dozens of flaky layers. Lard carries the aroma and red bean paste supplies the sweetness, which is a completely different register from the damp, sugar-soft weight of a steamed cake. Visitors voted for a favourite on site while eating their way through the row.
Craft demonstrations ran alongside the food: Shanghai paper-cutting in its Zhuanqiao form, Su embroidery, Shanghai-style lacquer, Yexie bamboo weaving, Fengcheng wood carving and traditional printing and dyeing. Zhou Ruomei, a paper-cutting inheritor, worked through auspicious patterns with visitors at the table. An outdoor car-boot market filled the plaza’s edge.
Nineteen Years, and a Mascot
This was the nineteenth consecutive edition, and the organisational ambition has grown past the cake itself. The programme was built around five zones covering the heritage food market, technique demonstrations, stage performances, hands-on sessions, a golden-wedding anniversary exhibition and shopping promotions. The main ceremony on 18 October, the festival day itself, introduced Zhuan Tuantuan, a mascot built on the municipal heritage item for Shanghai rice-cake making in its Zhuanqiao barrel-steamed form. A submission campaign for cake-shop visits and original cake recipes had run from 14 September to 7 October.
The ceremony also staged a fashion show for older residents, Huangmei opera excerpts and a comedy set by Wang Rugang. A mould exhibition of traditional Jiangnan pastry shapes and a folk performance from Yongshan in Yunnan’s Zhaotong filled out the programme, and foreign visitors turned up among the regulars. One of them told reporters the cake was softer and sweeter than any rice cake they had eaten, sticky without greasiness and heavy with dried fruit, and said marking the Double Ninth festival at a fair like this was a way into the culture they had not expected.
What the organisers are testing is whether a seasonal food can be stretched into a day out: browse, eat, watch, buy, rather than one purchase on one afternoon. Nineteen years of returning customers suggests the cake will keep selling itself. Whether the mascot, the mould exhibition and the wedding display convert a festival purchase into a habit is a different question, and one that the twentieth edition will begin to answer.
