At home, my family cuts the mooncake in to wedges, and we eat packed around your kitchen table or bent on the drain to avoid pouring crumbs. I've been ingesting these pastries since I can remember, and I start yearning them proper at the cusp of fall, as sunsets get earlier in the day and the days develop colder.
Mooncakes are about the size and heft of a baseball puck, with a slim crust. A thick rich stuffing of sweetened lotus seed paste envelops the yolk from a salted duck egg. The salty, crispy yolk crumbles when reduce and contrasts with the very nearly cloying sweetness around it. The yolk isn't the best part, therefore my mother gets nearly all of what eventually ends up within my portion. Mooncake fillings are more often than not sweet and could be built with different nuts, vegetables or beans. There's a type referred to as "five kernel mooncake," which, according to my dad, could be the Asian fruitcake that's usually skilled and re-gifted to regrettable recipients.
It's a pretty clever food (describing them to buddies typically results in furrowed eyebrows and exclamations of "What are lotus vegetables? Delay, a duck egg?!"), and they might appear completely out of position at an American warehouse chain. But I spent my youth in the San Gabriel Area, among the United States' biggest and quickest growing ethnoburbs, wherever many of the cities are bulk Asian.
In my own particular town, Asian food markets and companies occur alongside 7-Elevens and McDonald's on streets with names like "Las Tunas" and Del Mar." Rather than a Starbucks on every part, we'd boba, or bubble tea, a Taiwanese tea consume that has soft tapioca pearls at the bottom. (The song "Asians Consume Odd Things" was recorded in the Asian supermarket wherever my loved ones shopped weekly. It's a spot of pride that I will say I've enjoyed most of the presented foods.) It made such feeling that Costco — the place where you could see almost anything — might also provide mooncakes so it was very nearly unsurprising to abruptly see them on the list of granola bars and trail mix.
