I’m cooking a lot these days. A lot. Like 小笼包 from scratch including gelatinising homemade broth and rolling out dumpling skins. Leaving no stone unturned in the world that is Chinese cuisine, I went ahead and picked up a moon cake (月饼 yuèbǐng) mould. It’s only just now 春节 so I figure I have 7 or 8 months to get really good at this.

I bought the mould off eBay, being the quickest cheapest way to acquire one. I wasn’t really concerned with the design or inscription so long as it was somewhat traditional, i.e. round. I found one that qualified and placed my order.

You know how when you go to the antiques market they always sell porcelain busts of Mao and little red books, both completely slathered in 山寨 filth? The amount of dirt on the moon cake mould made the antiques market look like the newest lab at the CDC. Filthy doesn’t begin to describe it. After much scrubbing to get it back into shape for making food, the inscription began to be actually legible. Except for the fact that I don’t really know what it says. Here’s a photo of the inscription, flipped for legibility:

There’s also a bit of writing on the wood done in pen. On the handle, the single character 华 is written. At the top, the same text as found in the inscription:

The first two are obviously 隔 and 沙. 蜜 and 果 seem the likeliest candidates, and I know 蜜果 can mean fig or possibly dragon fruit.

My question is not so much about what the individual characters are, though that’s a small part of it. Instead I’d love to know if this is a phrase that appears elsewhere, and if so, where. I’m posting here requesting interpretations, knowing that Sinoglot readers are just about the best 人肉搜索 there is when it comes to this sort of thing.