Rock sugar gourd, sour and sweet, men and women of all ages like to eat. The taste of hawthorn makes many people salivate at the thought of it, and when the name rock sugar gourd is heard, people take it for granted that it must be made of rock sugar, and from its appearance, crystal clear, is not it made of rock sugar.
In fact, the earliest rock sugar gourd is made of brown sugar, and later replaced by white sugar, sugar gourd after being done, will be covered with a layer of sugar shell on the hawthorn fruit, it looks crystal clear, as if wrapped in a layer of ice, so people call it rock sugar gourd.
So, why was the rock sugar gourd originally used to treat diseases? The answer to this question has to start with an emperor during the Southern Song Dynasty.
There was an emperor in the Southern Song Dynasty, Emperor Guangzong of Song, Zhao Huan, who during his reign, had a very favored concubine named Huang Guifei. One day this Huang Guifei had a serious illness, and it was a strange disease, and the symptoms showed were that the yellow muscles were thin all day, and they did not eat or drink, in fact, they had no appetite, resulting in malnutrition. The imperial doctors in the palace used all kinds of precious medicinal materials, and they all couldn't take Huang Guifei's illness, and finally they didn't recruit. Song Guangzong watched his concubine getting more and more haggard day by day, and it hurt in his eyes and heart.
In the end, Song Guangzong really did not have a move, so he announced to the world that if anyone could cure Huang Guifei's illness, he would definitely be rewarded. Shortly after Zhang Bang, a barefoot doctor on the jianghu volunteered that Huang Guifei could cure this disease. So the barefoot doctor showed Huang Guifei, and after understanding the illness, told Song Guangzong, "Your Majesty, your concubine Niangniang's disease is easy to cure, you just need to do so..."
Song Guangzong ordered people to immediately follow the barefoot doctor's words, and the noble concubine began to take the medicine prescribed by the barefoot doctor, and as soon as the medicine was drunk, the condition got better and better day by day, the appetite was getting better and better, and the people were more and more energetic, and Song Guangzong was very happy to see it. Huang Guifei has been taking it for half a month, and the illness is all healed, and the whole life is like a dragon and a tiger.
The prescription prescribed by the barefoot doctor to Song Guangzong was actually very simple, that is, to use hawthorn and brown sugar to fry soup together, eat 5 to 10 hawthorns before three meals a day, and eat for half a month continuously to be cured.
Over time, this kind of sweet and sour hawthorn has spread more and more widely, and brown sugar has also been replaced by white sugar. Later, people always felt that it was troublesome to eat in a bowl, so they simply found a bamboo skewer to wear one hawthorn after another into a bunch, so there was the rock sugar gourd we eat today.