Kueh, the ‘quintessentially Taiwanese’ rice cake that’s ‘no less than a Western or Japanese sweet’
- Some people believe that the quality of kueh, a rice cake similar to mochi, correlates to the quality of the year
- From Minnan - a part of southern China - the snack spread all over Asia, to Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and beyond
Years ago, when Taiwanese couple Chou Pei-yi and Huang Teng-wei were vacationing in Thailand, some fellow travellers asked them about Taiwan’s iconic foods. They were stumped.
The question had been nagging at them. They had just taken a cooking class and wanted to set up something similar in Taiwan.
“We started listing out some famous night market snacks,” Huang says, “like beef noodle soup, braised pork over rice, soup dumplings and bubble tea.” But none of the dishes really resonated with them.
When they returned to Taiwan, they started searching and landed on a dish called kueh that Chou’s grandmother used to make during Lunar New Year. They decided it was the perfect choice, a quintessentially Taiwanese dish.
Simply put, kueh refers to any bite-sized steamed snack usually made with rice. It’s a term as broad as “cookie”, though kueh is geographically specific to a part of southern China called Fujian. If we want to get even more nitpicky, it’s actually specific to a southern part of Fujian called Minnan.
