🍽️ Mugwort Rice Cake

Rice cake with mugwort, a Hakka Qingming-season snack.

Mugwort rice cake, or ai ban, is the most representative seasonal snack of the Meizhou Hakka region around the Qingming festival. Fresh mugwort is boiled until soft and pounded into a green paste, mixed with glutinous rice flour into a jade-green dough, wrapped around sweet fillings such as red bean paste, peanut-sesame or shredded coconut, lined on banana leaf and steamed. The cakes are dark green, fragrant with herb, and soft and chewy on the tongue, with the mild bitterness of mugwort balancing the sweet filling at its best when warm. Hakka people must make ai ban for Qingming ancestor rites, using them both as offerings and as treats shared by the family, symbolizing warding off evil and remembering ancestors. The mountains around Meizhou are rich in wild mugwort, giving the snack a fresh, rustic character. It shares a common root with the mugwort cakes of southern Jiangxi and western Fujian, and is a spring taste carried along the Hakka migration routes.