This is the steamed prune cake which many of us make and serve our friends during Chinese New Year. It takes four hours to steam, over a slow kerosene stove or charcoal stove.
Many housewives would find it very extravagant to use gas to steam this cake.
When we were young, only a few aunts could make cakes in Sibu. So we were very impressed when one of our aunts learned to make this cake and sent us one cake for our Chinese New Year. And our mother told us that we should eat the cake slowly and not finish it in one day. She told us that our aunt took six hours to make the cake. And the steaming itself took four hours!! the cake lovely after being steamed for a long time would not get mouldy.
She told my mother that the cake need not be refrigerated and it would still be good after one week! That was hard to believe actually as we all knew that food got mouldy very fast in our tropical land. However it was true that after four days of frugal eating of the fruit cake, we did not see any white moulds growing on the cake.
It was quite unbelievable.
So we quietly told each other that there was no Pig Shit Hair on the cake. Pig Shit Hair is the Foochow term for mould. Tii rai moh.
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