Shen Shaoguang carefully removed a multi-layered osmanthus cake from its mold, placing it on a large plate. She decorated it with walnuts, hazelnut kernels, pine nuts, red dates, and other dried fruits, then drizzled it with a layer of osmanthus honey. It smelled sweet and looked beautiful.
This was ordered for tonight’s Kitchen God worship.
Ayuan circled the preparation table, “Such a big cake must weigh at least ten jin.”
While drizzling honey, Shen Shaoguang teased her, “That’s nothing – there were even eight-hundred-jin cakes!”
Ayuan stared with her round eyes, her face showing she thought the young lady was fooling her again.
“They say in the previous dynasty, there was an Empress Dowager’s thousand-year celebration. A flower cake shop in the capital, wanting to please the Empress Dowager, decided to present a unique birthday cake. But in the imperial palace, what kind of cake hadn’t they seen? How could they make it different?”
Achang and Ayuan tilted their heads to listen to Shen Shaoguang’s story. Yu San glanced at them, continuing his work but keeping his ears open.
“The cake shop figured, since there were limits to designs, they’d make it huge – that would be spectacular and show our celestial empire’s grandeur, right?”
“So they made an eight-hundred-jin peach-shaped flower cake. The problem was, that getting such a thing to the Empress Dowager wasn’t so simple… By the time they’d navigated the palace relationships and presented the cake, it had grown green mold.”
Ayuan asked eagerly, “Then what?”
“Then they threw it away,” Shen Shaoguang looked at her.
Ayuan stomped her foot and pouted.
Shen Shaoguang smiled and called Ayuan to help her place the decorated osmanthus cake in the large food box.
After securing it and putting on the lid, Shen Shaoguang added the story’s ending, “Then a saying spread: ‘An eight-hundred-jin birthday peach is just wasteful pastry.'”
Ayuan burst out laughing, “Young lady is so mischievous!” Achang laughed too, and even Yu San’s lips curved upward.
Shen Shaoguang smiled slightly. This story teaches us not to dream too extravagantly like that cake shop owner – for instance, about buying back the old residence.
Since returning from the Lin residence, Shen Shaoguang had several consecutive days of old dreams, mostly about the original body’s childhood – catching butterflies, fishing, riding swings, writing, painting, and eating cakes. Her parents were always young, and her brother was an adorable young boy. After waking, Shen Shaoguang would always feel melancholy for a while.
In her previous life, Shen Shaoguang had slept well. These frequent dreams now were perhaps a symptom of transmigration syndrome.
Amusingly, Shen Shaoguang even had more absurd dreams. She was grown up, but her parents remained young.
Father was dejected.
Mother asked him why, and Father said, “Aqie is getting married – I really can’t bear to part with her.”
Mother sighed helplessly, “Young master, you really can’t find fault with him. A noble family’s son, passed the imperial examinations, such looks, such steady character – what more do you want? Besides, he’s here in the capital – you can see her whenever you want.”
Her brother, still a youth, shook his head with Father, “Still, being married off isn’t the same as staying at home.”
But in the dream, she just smiled mysteriously, catching a glimpse of a tall figure among flower shadows.
Ha, so it was just a spring dream.
Thinking of this dream, the single Shen Shaoguang looked at the kitchen full of pots, pans, and pastries, feeling even more melancholic. What a pity – the flowers and leaves were too dense to see clearly what her dream fiancé looked like. Perhaps it was a young Andy Lau?
Someone called from outside, “Shop mistress!”
Shen Shaoguang responded and went out of the kitchen. It was someone coming to collect the large osmanthus cake.
Shen Shaoguang lifted the food box lid to show him, then placed his other ordered pastries in another box, instructing him to be careful not to jostle them.
The customer, who looked like a steward, left the silver payment, thanked Shen Shaoguang with a smile, said they’d return the boxes later and left with his servant carrying the cakes.
Customers came one after another to collect their ordered pastries and honey offerings. By the first evening drum, all orders had been collected.
Shen Shaoguang had Ayuan put out the “Closed for Business” sign, then prepared their own Kitchen God offerings and dinner with Yu San.
Kitchen God worship was much more elaborate than in later generations. There had to be chicken, duck, fish, meat, and pastries, especially wine and sticky candy. The palace even specially slaughtered yellow sheep and cooked the meat.
The sticky candy came in blocks and strips, quite different from the “sugar gourds” Shen Shaoguang ate as a child.
Shen Shaoguang felt those sugar gourds tasted better – about the size of small eggs, gourd-shaped with thin shells, hollow inside, decorated with green or orange patterns. Bite into one and it was initially crispy, then became sticky and sweet.
The current sticky candy lacked that initial crispiness.
Whatever the sugar, it was all to sweeten the Kitchen God’s mouth, same as the wine. Most bizarre was the current custom of actually smearing wine and sugar on the Kitchen God’s mouth – just like children playing house.
Since the Kitchen God was male, and it wouldn’t be proper for Ayuan to feed him wine with bamboo chopsticks, Achang did it.
After he finished, Shen Shaoguang smiled and prayed, hoping the Kitchen God would ascend to Heaven’s gate well-fed and drunk, and not speak of long or short ladles, but return with good fortune to share.
Usually, men performed the Kitchen God worship – “men don’t worship the moon, women don’t worship the Kitchen God” – but with no other men in the Shen household, Shen Shaoguang had to do it herself.
Shen Shaoguang also burned paper money and paper horses. Yu San, Ayuan, and Achang also kowtowed, sending off the Kitchen God, the kitchen’s boss, to heaven. Thus ended the worship.
Then came the Kitchen God Festival Eve dinner. There wasn’t yet the term “Little New Year,” and there were no prescribed foods for this day – people generally just ate along with the Kitchen God.
Shen Shaoguang prepared the pot, closed the shop, and the four of them had a lively hot pot meal.
Shen Shaoguang scooped boiled tofu into her bowl, dipped it in a triple sauce of sesame paste, shrimp paste, and chive flowers, then cooked Chinese cabbage, radish, taro, and such. She ate little meat, just a few fresh meatballs.
Ayuan and Achang were meat lovers, unable to resist various meat slices, meatballs, tripe strips, and blood tofu. They kept adding plateful after plateful to their pot, eating with great gusto.
Yu San was more reserved, only cooking lamb and Chinese cabbage in his milk soup pot.
Seeing Shen Shaoguang stop after a few small soup dumplings, Yu San stood up, “I’ll make some noodles – who wants some?”
Ayuan and Achang shook their heads, eating happily – who wanted noodles? Why was hot pot never enough? Were they hot pot spirits from their previous lives, as the young lady said?
Shen Shaoguang raised her hand, “I’ll have a little, thin one – easy to cook and digest.”
Yu San frowned, giving her a “why so picky” look, then went to make noodles from the prepared dough.
Shen Shaoguang, routinely disdained by Princess Yu San, smiled with diminished owner’s dignity.
Soon, Yu San returned with noodles on a small bamboo tray – some were pinched into fine pleats like flower petals, others were plain and chive-leaf shaped.
Shen Shaoguang cheerfully took some flower-petal noodles for her pot, while Yu San took the rest for his.
Having eaten their fill, Shen Shaoguang and Yu San just sipped their drinks, watching the two youngsters eat.
Shen Shaoguang remembered being able to eat a lot at sixteen or seventeen in her previous life – she could eat a whole roast chicken plus a baked flatbread. She was only nineteen in this life – why was her appetite so poor now? Did appetite somehow accumulate across two lives? Watching the two hearty eaters, Shen Shaoguang could only feel envious.
The two young ones were satisfied with meat and vegetables, not requiring Yu San to make another batch of noodles.
After dinner, Yu San led Ayuan and Achang to clean the kitchen and tidy up, while Shen Shaoguang took the lantern Ayuan had lit and slowly walked back to the rear residence.
Old Bai (Bai Juyi) wrote in his poem: “After the small feast, songs return to courtyards, lantern light descends from towers.”
Yan Shu considered this “skillfully expressing prosperity.” But Kou Laxi’s lines “Old feeling the gold at waist heavy, lazy finding the jade pillow cool” were vulgar, too vulgar, “not the language of prosperity.”
Later, Mr. Lu Xun also believed Bai Letian truly knew how to write about prosperity – not using words like gold, jade, or brocade for decoration, not a single word directly about wealth, yet fully displaying prosperity.
Shen Shaoguang also felt Bai’s poetry was very prosperous and believed she had achieved half of what was in Lord Bai’s poem – no “songs” but she had “courtyards,” no “towers” but she had “lantern light.” Thinking about this made her laugh at herself – her humor had nowhere to go!
The one who truly had “towers,” however, had few “songs.” He was instructing the servants attending his grandmother for the night: with charcoal burning in the room it might get dry, so keep some warm water in the tea stove – when the madam wakes, let her drink a sip or two. The maids all bowed and acknowledged. After a few more instructions, Lin Yan left his grandmother’s courtyard.
Behind him, the maid closed the courtyard gate. A servant boy carried a lantern ahead as Lin Yan walked toward his study, thinking about the New Year’s Court assembly’s capital patrol arrangements that needed adjusting and refining tonight.
The north wind shook the dried branches in the courtyard, passed through the carved lattices of the corridor, brushed across Lin Yan’s somewhat stern face, disturbed the ties of his great cloak, and whipped at the corners of his robe, harmonizing with the distant watch drums and the footsteps of master and servant, echoing in this cold, quiet winter night.