The Chinese Delicacy that You Never Heard Before - Sesame cakes from Yuanjiang

You might have heard of Chinese delicacies like Mapo Tofu, Kungpao Chicken or sweet and sour pork chops, you might even have had some of them in those local, self-claimed Chinese restaurants even though they serve with ketchup sauce and a cup of Coke.

But today we are not talking about the bastardized Chinese food or delicacies, today we get to know a delicacy that’s so regional that even some Chinese have never heard of before, I’m talking about the kind that will never be found on the shelves of Walmart or even Chinatown stores. I’m talking about the Yuanjiang sesame cakes.

Yuanjiang is a small town in the Chinese southern province of Hunan; it is also the name for the second largest river in the province. Yuanjiang is a rather insignificant place all but for its regional delicacies: Asparagus and sesame cakes.

Yuanjiang sesame has been around since 1821, in the early days the locals took nearby resources, namely black rice, sesame and sugars and processed with a dozen different cooking and crafting procedures, and turned them into these crunchy, sweet biscuit-like sesame cakes. It gained its national renown when a local manufacturer Yichang (億昌) was established and dedicated to producing these delicious cakes.

That was in 1911 when Yuanjiang first founded its own regional commerce association. Before Yichang joined this association and become a dedicated sesame cakes manufacturer, it was already a well-known local Chinese cake bakery. After its membership, Yichang has establish industry standard for this yet-to-be-known Yuanjiang sesame cakes and set the mass-producing in motion. Luckily, Yuanjiang is also centered in the second-largest river in the province, making the town a some-what traffic and commerce center back at the time, which helped immensely for spreading the word around and making those delicious cakes popular; coupled that with the standardized producing and refinement which helped improving the end quality a lot, Yuanjiang sesame cakes have become a cultural delicacy for the Chinese and probably one of the most prominent tourism phenomenon for the otherwise less-known town Yuanjiang.