Techniques for Consumption

I was reading about the recently passed Mid-Autumn Festival, the holiday which celebrates the full moon of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, which then got me reading about Mooncakes, which are the official pastry of Mid-Autumn Festivals, and also sound like they should be sort of supernaturally delicious.



Judging by some of the ingredients on the Mooncake Wikipedia entry (mung bean paste, watermelon seeds, salted egg yolks), I'm not sure their real-life deliciousness can stack up to my imagined deliciousness, but I did notice another interesting thing on the Mooncake page. Some of these cakes are flavoured with jujube fruit.

Wait, you're telling me jujubes are a real life thing, and not just a gummy confectionary? No way.

Well, as it turns out, yes way. The jujube plant produces a small, red fruit which can be dried and used in Mooncakes, among other things. I assume it is also the inspiration for Jujubes (the candy), but I haven't been able to find anything online to verify my hunch.

I did, however, find some great suggestions on the Wikipedia entry for Jujubes (confectionary). Specifically, the "Techniques for Consumption" section offered some sage advice:

"Due to the hard, dense, and resinous nature of Jujubes, the candies are often consumed as a type of hard candy - "sucked on" rather than chewed with one's teeth. If multiple Jujubes are placed in the mouth at once, saliva will congeal the candies into a single mass. Individual Jujubes can be allowed to gradually rehydrate in the mouth with gentle chewing. It is due to their density that the 1996 Gummi Reviews published by NewTimes, Inc., stated that Jujubes are "a nearly inedible delicacy that has less in common with gummis than with those prehistoric amber droppings that were always trapping insects."

It should be noted that these consumption techniques refer to the harder "American-style" jujubes (pictured below), and not our soft, yielding Canadian ones. Usage of American-style jujube consumption techniques on Canadian jujubes should be pursued at your own risk.



Also, I'm not sure how one goes about getting a copy of the 1996 Gummi Reviews (Google Scholar?), but I want one.