Fermented Rice Cake Craft

Name and batch

The public notice of January 2024 lists the Fermented Rice Cake Craft under traditional crafts among the newly included projects of the recommended list for the fourth batch of district-level representative items of intangible cultural heritage; the applying area or unit is Jingqiao Town and the recommended guardian unit is the Jingqiao Town Culture and Sports Station.

Among the items held in this library, Jingqiao Town applied for three traditional crafts in the fourth batch, this one belonging with the Lishui rice cake craft and the ancient-method brewing craft to the food items of that town and batch. Among the seventeen recommended names of the fourth batch held in this library, this is the only one whose title ends with the word for cake.

How far the search went

Two rounds of searching were carried out for this title, and no source describing its materials, its leavening process, the form of the cake or its taste has been found. The materials that did come up on fermented rice cakes, such as accounts of a dough made from fermented rice and flour and fried over a gentle heat, belong either to recipes on the internet or to accounts of other places, including the Suzhou legend of the "saving-mother cake", and are not evidence of a Lishui craft; none of them is written here.

The only local material that can be linked to the title is a report of the Hefeng Town People's Government of May 2024 on the black-rice festival, which records that a market set up at Chengguo village for the event offered snacks including black-rice dumplings and fermented rice. The entries at that market are names of food stalls, which are not the same thing as the present project name, and no inference about the process or the form of this project may be drawn from them; they are noted only as a record that fermented rice is used as food locally.

Transmission and safeguarding

The public notice lists no representative bearer for this project, and none of the eight bearers of newly included projects named in that notice belongs to it. The third-batch district-level list of bearers (2017) records none either.

Uncertainties

First, almost nothing is available on the process. Two rounds of searching yielded no local source, so the proportions of the ingredients, the way the dough is leavened, the form of the cake, its taste and the occasions on which it is eaten all remain to be added; no detail of the process is written here until a reliable source is found.

Second, the relation to the ancient-method brewing craft of the same town is undetermined. The title of the present project contains the words for fermented rice, while another item of the same batch in the same town is the ancient-method brewing craft. Whether the two are related in materials or in process is not stated in the notice, and no inference is drawn here.

Third, the market entry of fermented rice at Hefeng Town is a different name from the fermented rice cake of this project, and the two are not merged.

Fourth, no date is established. Neither the notice nor any source used here records when this craft began.

Fifth, the recommended guardian unit is the Jingqiao Town Culture and Sports Station and the applying area or unit is Jingqiao Town. These are two different columns of the notice's table and must not be used interchangeably.

Sixth, two negative search results need to be recorded, so that they are not later mistaken for a search that was never made. First, the volumes of the Kangxi Gazetteer of Lishui County examined in this library, namely volume 1 on the annals of the county, volume 3 on establishments, volume 4 on government affairs and land tax, volume 5 on rivers and mountains, volume 6 on biographies of famous officials and volume 11 on literature, contain no passage on fermented rice cake or on the leavening of pastries; the project therefore has no gazetteer basis within the range examined. The Shunzhi, Qianlong, Wanli and Guangxi editions have an archive status in this library of catalogue-only or link-registered and have not been read volume by volume, so no claim is made that the old gazetteers contain no record of it. Second, a report of 26 March 2024 in the Nanjing Morning Post states that the intangible heritage exhibition hall at Shishanxia Village, Jingqiao Town, displays together four items, namely Jingqiao Lishui white tea, the Xisong horse lantern, Shishanxia special rice cakes and malt sugar; this project is not among the four items named in that report. That is a verifiable result of searching, but the full range of the exhibition hall's display has not been published, so this entry does not conclude from it that the project was not exhibited or is not valued.

Seventh, this project is placed in the traditional techniques category in the notice, and its wording differs from the "Shishanxia special rice cakes" of the same town; whether the two are the same project has not been verified here, and they are not merged.