The history of rice in Taiwan

The white rice that Taiwanese consume today is a variety that was introduced and improved in the era of Japanese colonial rule: a short-grain “japonica” rice known as hōrai or penglai rice, with a slightly elastic mouthfeel and grains that tend to stick together. Before that, the staple food of the earliest Han Chinese to settle in Taiwan during the Ming and Qing dynasties was long-grain “indica” rice known as zailaimi, with a firmer texture. The culinary historian and writer Wang Hao-yi, who published the book Snack Institute, explains that zailaimi was introduced to Taiwan in the late Ming, some 290 years before the development of hōrai rice. “This means that the rice-based snacks that have come down to us from the Ming and Qing, including radish cake and savory rice pudding, were certainly made using long-grain rice.” In other words, says Wang, “There was no hōrai rice in traditional rice snacks.”

Wang states that as a result of the need for different textures, in some snacks newly harvested rice is used, while for others older rice that has been in storage for at least nine months must be used in order to get that elastic, chewy texture. Thus dishes like radish cake and steamed bawan must be made with old rice. It’s clear that a lot of knowledge and care go into such snacks.

For example, to make radish cake, one must use rice that has been in storage for at least a year, which is soaked in water and then ground into rice milk. Next the daikon radishes have to be peeled, shredded, and boiled in water to get rid of any off-odor. Then the shredded radish and rice milk are stirred together evenly and the mixture is poured into molds and steamed over a high heat for five to six hours. The amount of water in the rice milk, how long the radish is boiled, the ratio of rice to radish, and control of cooking time and temperature are all matters requiring special expertise.

How have this tradition and the associated skills been passed down for hundreds of years? Wang Hao-yi has pored over historical documents and tells the following bitter­sweet story:

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, when the Zheng family ruled in Taiwan, the last Zheng ruler, Zheng Ke­shuang, decided to surrender to the Qing Dynasty. When this news reached Zhu Shugui, the last claimant to the Ming throne, he decided to take his own life as a sign of his patriot­ism. Zhu owned a large stretch of farmland south of the Erren River in Tainan, and before his suicide he called together local farmers and bequeathed his land to them. After the Qing took over Taiwan, to express their gratitude for Zhu’s generosity local people prepared rice cakes that were used as religious offerings in the Zheng period, such as taro cake, brown sugar cake, and radish cake, and secretly went to Zhu’s grave to worship on his remembrance day, on his birthday, and at the Lunar New Year. The skill of making these cakes was passed down from generation to generation, until in the era of Japanese rule, when people no longer feared reprisals, they began to sell these snacks in markets, and the dishes spread across Taiwan to become part of everyday fare for the common man.

The fragrance and texture of aged long-grain rice in combination with just the right proportion of shredded daikon radish adds up to the appetizing flavor of radish cake that the food writer Wang Hao-yi calls “a gentle delicacy.”

Simple breakfasts beneath a big tree

Daikon radishes are a winter crop in the lowlands of Taiwan, and before farmers began growing vegetables at high elevations, you could only get radish cake at the ­Lunar New Year.

But these days, thanks to novel cultivation techniques and improved crop varieties, radishes are also available in summer, and people can eat radish cake all year round. In Yunlin County’s Douliu City there is an eatery called Ah Niu’s Radish Cake that has been in business for two generations and even grows its own long-grain rice. Each day at sunrise you can hear the sound of sizzling from the griddle on their vendor’s stand under a big tree. Owner Lai Kuo Cheng fries piece after piece of radish cake to a golden yellow color, while his wife Hsieh Pei Chun ladles out sauce and puts the cakes into bags. They pour their own home-made rice milk onto the crispy radish cake and add other dishes such as pig’s blood soup or miso soup to make up an invigorating breakfast.

Lai, who insists on using Taiwan-grown radishes, says with a laugh that the more pungent a radish is, the better it tastes. After being boiled in water, the radishes become sweet. Lai’s mom, Lai-Zeng Meiye, who patrols her fields every morning, says that you can only be sure that rice is of good quality if you grow it yourself.

Mother Lai, who is almost 80 years old, shows us the many scars on her hands, both shallow and deep, and recounts that long ago radish cake had to be prepared over a wood fire, and she was injured by the power saw when out collecting firewood. Smiling, she says it’s a lot more con­veni­ent today to cook with gas. Looking at her fingers, which have been slightly deformed by sutures, she seems like a proud warrior protecting traditional Taiwanese flavors.

The process by which Mother Lai learned to make radish cake encapsulates the collective experience of women of her generation. Many women, including her, had to be able to make radish cake, which was seen as an essential food for the Lunar New Year. She and her husband decided to sell radish cake by the roadside in order to support their family. She says with a laugh that on the first day they sold only NT$360 worth. Fortunately word of their craftsmanship got around, and by now Ah Niu’s Radish Cake has long been established as a downhome snack that locals consume daily and those who have moved away insist on eating during visits back home.

Sizzling on a griddle under a big tree, the radish cake made by Ah Niu has an unforgettable flavor.

To ensure good quality, Lai Kuo Cheng grows his own rice to make radish cake.

The wood-fire taste of the mountains

Another person who has preserved the flavor of tradi­tional radish cake is an elderly Hakka woman named Zeng Zhaohua in Hsinchu County’s Emei Township. She and her husband Zhuang Huanzhang live deep in the mountains in a house that emits the fragrance of wood and charcoal fires. Amid the crackling of burning wood, on the ten stoves before us they are steaming the radish cake that they will sell in the market the next day.

“It’s tough to put up with! It’s really hard work, especially in June and July, when the temperature in here gets up to 70 or 80°C after the fires are lit,” Zhuang tells us as we are nearly knocked prostrate by the heat. It takes five or six hours to steam the radish cake, and throughout the process the Zhuangs have to tend the fires and keep an eye on the water level in the steamers. And that doesn’t count the labor required to collect and chop the firewood. Zeng is well aware of the effort and hardship involved, but she says that she did once try switching over to gas, and somehow the taste wasn’t right. It is the fragrance of charcoal that radish cake gets from being cooked on a wood fire that gives the authentic traditional flavor that she learned from her mother-­in-­law.

It is more than 20 years since Zeng decided to start this small business to help raise her four children and earn some money for the family. She learned to make radish cake from her highly skilled mother-in-law. It took a continuous process of trial and error to eventually produce radish cake with which she was satisfied. Zeng says that to make good radish cake you can’t skimp on the ingredients. She uses Taiwan-grown long-grain rice and finds suitable radishes in different places depending on the season, using ones from southern Taiwan in autumn and winter and ones from Nantou County’s Puli Township in summer. The shredded radish is completely coated in rice milk, and ­every bite of the finished product has the fragrance of radish.

In earlier times in rural communities, every household used wood fires to cook radish cake, but today this practice is very rare indeed. But for Zeng, no matter how arduous it may be, she insists on preparing her radish cake over a wood fire, to enable the next generation to enjoy this delicious traditional flavor. Seeing the happy faces of her customers, she feels deeply contented.

The Zhuang family put up with the rigors of tending wood fires so that the flavor of their traditional radish cake can be carried forward to the next generation.

Zeng Zhaohua (left) learned how to make radish cake from her mother-in-law and today is passing on her skills to her daughter.

The changing face of Rice Cake Street

Lin Jhen, the founder of a rice snack business established in 1964, started out with a small vendor’s cart in Taipei’s Da­dao­cheng area. The business later supplied rice cakes wholesale, and many of the rice snacks sold on traditional markets in Greater Taipei in fact were made by the Lin Jhen store. However, as dietary culture has become more Westernized, and with people today eating away from home more often than in previous generations, it seems like the custom of buying radish cake in traditional markets and bringing it home to fry up has been disappearing among the younger generation. The Lin Jhen shop has been witness to the changing consumption of traditional rice-based snack foods.

Dadaocheng was one of the earliest areas of Taipei to develop, and in the early days many laborers lived there. Rice-based foods sold by street vendors became a source of energy for these workers, and there were so many rice food businesses in the shopping district around Yanping North Road Section 3 that the area was nicknamed “Rice Cake Street.” John Lin, second-generation operator of the Lin Jhen shop, recalls that when he was in primary school there were at least 20 or 30 rice cake stores on Rice Cake Street.

As times changed, rice cake shops closed up one by one, but Lin Jhen continued to lead his sons John Lin and Lin Chai-ching in operating his business. A few years ago, the original site of the shop was targeted for urban renewal. Lin Jhen, who had spent a lifetime making radish cakes, didn’t want his children to have to start from scratch, and half-jokingly told them they might as well just close down. But the two brothers were unwilling to see the taste of their traditional family products disappear, so they moved the shop to Xinzhuang and began to make the transition to factory-scale food processing.

These wooden steamers, which have witnessed the glory days of “Rice Cake Street” at Lin Jhen’s rice cake shop, are still in use today.

Innovativion in traditional rice foods

Faced with the fact that while customer numbers were growing, the average spend per customer was falling, and with consumer habits changing, John Lin knew he would have to pioneer a new path to keep the rice cake business alive for the long run. Therefore he asked his son Lin Fan-kai, who was working as a landscape designer in the US, to come back and develop branding for the shop, and launch e-commerce sales.

Positioning the brand as an innovator in the field of traditional Taiwanese rice foods, Lin Fan-kai experimented with using traditional radish cake as the foundation to develop more diverse flavors. For example, the company devised “XO double-fresh radish cake” with a seafood flavor, made using XO sauce, sakura shrimp, and pearl oyster. With the addition of packaging with a simple and straightforward design, the Lin Jhen company boosted the popularity of rice-based snack foods and got a lot of attention online.

Next, Lin Fan-kai is planning to open a shop at the site of the original store. Besides selling rice-based foods, he also intends to hold seminars and lectures there. This old rice cake business, which is tirelessly exploring new possibilities for Taiwanese rice foods while upholding tradi­tional techniques, will continue to come up with novel ideas in the future.

Lin Jhen’s rice cake shop has conscientiously upheld its approach to making rice cakes, and is painstakingly designing packaging and novel flavors in an effort to let even more people get to know Taiwan’s rice food culture.