A festival glutinous rice cake from Huazhou tied to the lunar first-month Zhengqiong Day: dark-grey cudweed dough wrapped around a savory shrimp-and-sausage filling or sweet coconut filling, steamed until yielding, faintly bitter-fragrant, and traditionally believed to expel dampness and misfortune in equal measure.
Tian'ai rice cakes trace to Liangguan Township, Huazhou, with documented records from Qing Guangxu year 13 (1887). They are inseparable from the Zhengqiong Day observance — held on the final day of the first lunar month — when Huazhou households eat cudweed cakes to drive away poverty-spirits and dispel winter dampness. The plant called tian'ai (田艾), cudweed (鼠曲草), blankets the paddies in early spring and is harvested for these cakes at peak flavour. The craft was listed as a Maoming municipal intangible cultural heritage in 2015.
The dark-grey wrapper is soft and yielding with a faint herbal bitterness; inside, the savory filling releases umami from dried shrimp and sausage in compact bursts. Together they taste like the Huazhou countryside in early spring — clean, slightly wild, restorative.
Tian'ai cudweed (鼠曲草) contains flavonoid compounds including luteolin and quercetin, plus volatile terpenes; pounding releases these into the dough, giving the wrapper its herbal aroma, faint bitterness, and distinctive dark-grey-green colour. Glutinous rice flour's amylopectin content exceeds 95%, gelatinising upon steaming into a highly elastic gel network that makes the wrapper pliable and sticky enough to seal without cracking, and that stays soft at room temperature after cooling.
Variations
Two official filling camps: savory (dried shrimp, lap cheong, sesame, peanuts, cooked mung beans) and sweet (coconut shreds, melon seeds, sesame, peanuts). Some families use pineapple leaves as steaming liner for extra aroma. Modern Huazhou tea shops sell both year-round, no longer exclusively for Zhengqiong Day.
On the Palate
Where Tian'ai Herb Rice Cake sits in the Chinese flavor cloud
Ingredients
Serves 6
How it's made
7 steps · 30 min
- 18 min
Wash fresh tian'ai cudweed; blanch in boiling water 30 sec; drain and squeeze out all water; pound or blend to a smooth dark paste
- 215 min
Mix cudweed paste into glutinous rice flour; add warm water gradually and knead until a pliable, uniformly dark-green dough forms; rest 15 min covered
Watch outAdd the warm water bit by bit until the dough is pliable and holds together without sticking — flooded dough won't seal and cracks in the steamer.
- 38 min
Prepare savory filling: soak dried shrimp and dice; dice lap cheong; toast sesame seeds and crush peanuts; cook mung beans until soft; combine all and season with salt
- 48 min
Divide dough into 30 g rounds; flatten each into a disc, edges thinner than the centre
- 58 min
Place 1 tbsp filling in the centre; fold the dough up around the filling and pinch the top firmly to seal; shape into an oval
Watch outPinch the top firmly to seal after filling — a loose seam splits open and the filling leaks out mid-steam.
- 62 min
Line a steamer basket with banana leaves or parchment; arrange cakes seam-side down without touching
- 713 min
Steam over high heat 12–15 min; brush with a thin coat of peanut oil while still hot to prevent drying; serve warm
Watch outBrush the hot cakes with a thin coat of oil straight out of the steamer — skip it and the surface dries and cracks as they cool.
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