This extremely dense, honey-bound paste of peanuts and cashews, garnished with apricots and pistachios, was more salty than sweet. I'd bet that the price — at the time, an exorbitant Y50, about $6.25, per kilo — was ratcheted up at the sight of a guy with a camera hanging from his neck. Aggressive bait-and-switch bargaining tactics are reportedly typical of the Russian-speaking street merchants in this area west of Ritan Park; on a later occasion, I saw a slab of nutcake from another vendor flung back in his cart, with appropriately colorful comments.
Building My Bento makes similar observations about the vendors, "ornery cusses from Xinjiang," the Muslim-majority autonomous region of northwest China. The confection, he adds, is known both as má táng (麻 糖, literally "hemp sugar") and qiē gāo (切 糕, "cut cake"). Though these two photos are of two different carts, all the cakes in this part of the city had nearly identical simple decoration. Elsewhere matang, or qiegao, can be much more elaborate.
Nut-cake cycle
Near Yabao Lu, Beijing
