Malaysia artisanal mooncake makers keep baking into old age for the love of the job
They launched chocolate and butter mooncakes in Malaysia and at their peak turned out 100,000 a year; now couple and their daughter work at a smaller scale, hand-making the seasonal treats in batches as small as four dozen
Upstairs in a nondescript shophouse in the Sentul neighbourhood of Kuala Lumpur is where Goh Kean, his wife W.Y. Shue and their daughter Rebecca Goh operate Fook Pan Food Industries.
September is a busy time for the family because Fook Pan specialises in making mooncakes, which are eaten and given as gifts by ethnic Chinese people around the world in celebration of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which this year falls on September 24.
The couple, both in their 70s, founded the business more than four decades ago as a bakery school to teach the art of making various types of popular Chinese pastry, particularly mooncakes. Both had parents who ran traditional coffee shops – known as kopitiams in Malaysia – where they learned the necessary skills.
Before long the couple’s students were asking if they could buy ready-made mooncakes to take home, and their food-producing business was born. Shue chose the name Fook Pan, which is Chinese for “Food in Prosperity”.
In the 1980s, 10 years after setting up the bakery school, the Gohs opened their first factory and began producing mooncakes on a far larger scale. The most common traditional varieties of mooncake have a filling of red bean or lotus seed paste, with the yolk of a salted duck egg in the middle, representing the full autumnal moon. Legend has it that they were used by spies who would hide secret messages inside them in 14th century China, or were originally made as offerings to the moon goddess.
They represent a time of togetherness in Chinese culture in China and wherever diaspora communities are found, including Malaysia.
