Today is a light snow, and another wave of strong cold waves is coming. I don't know what you are going to eat today when you are all over the country? Instinctively, I chose to order a bowl of mutton soup to warm up.
Each delicacy carries a lot of my memories, but lamb, or lamb soup to be exact, should have left me with the most mixed memories.
Suzhou – Bistro Lamb Broth
Let's talk about the book mutton downstairs. In the winter, my dad would go downstairs every three to five minutes to buy a lamb soup, add some mutton blood, lamb liver and other haggis, go home and cook it into a pot, and the whole family would be warm and simple to eat.
Bishu Mutton originated from the original Suzhou Book Town, which was named after zhu Maichen, the Huijian Taishou of the Western Han Dynasty. He once hid the book here, and posterity felt that he had read the story of the end and changed the name of the place to The Town of Books.
The biggest feature of the book collection of lamb is that it is cooked in wooden barrels, but mutton is not directly thrown into wooden barrels. The Jiangnan people, who are good at hoop barrels, hoop a circle of fir wood outside the iron pot, and the lid is also made of fir wood.
After a long simmering, the smell of fir wood will emit some seep into the mutton soup. In addition, the book mutton chooses a free-range goat about two years old, and its own taste is relatively light, and the combination of the two, the cooked lamb soup is milky and unhurried, and the taste is delicious.
But to be honest, after all, it is sheep soup, how can it not be drunk at all. Especially when I encounter this kind of tongue-in-cheek. Moreover, the stew of the tibetan lamb is particularly heavy on the "original taste", and the more materials are put some ginger and green onions, and the stores with less materials only put water, not even salt, only rely on the umami taste of the sheep left in the old soup for many years.
But a small amount of smell highlights the umami taste of lamb, which is like stinky tofu that has to be a little smelly to feel more beany. Moreover, if you want to say what is the taste of winter in my mind, the mutton soup is.
Jianyang - Jianyang mutton soup
In my childhood memories, there is also a sheep soup, which is Jianyang mutton soup. When I was about 10 years old, I spent a month in Sichuan. At noon one day, I mistakenly ate a rice dumpling that I thought was bean paste filling, but it was actually pepper filling.
Just like that, I lost my mouth at noon, and I could hardly taste anything. But because of this, at dinner, the parents "showed compassion" and picked a shop that was not spicy.
This non-spicy shop is a shop that sells Jianyang mutton soup. The stainless steel basin was brought to the front, and the milky white soup contained lamb, sheep blood, lamb liver, lamb tripe and a green vegetable, and I used chopsticks to pull for half a day, making sure that there was no hidden peppercorns, and quickly filled a large bowl.
Looking back now, the bowl of soup is just one word--fresh, so fresh that my sense of taste has all recovered. Now that I think about it, this freshness probably comes from the special sheep breed of Jianyang mutton soup.
Jianyang lamb soup is made of "Jianyang big-eared sheep", which is said to be the offspring of the local native goat of Jianyang and the Nubi sheep introduced by the United States. The combination of the advantages of the two kinds of sheep makes the big-eared sheep an irreplaceable main raw material for Jianyang mutton soup.
Last year, I went to Sichuan and found a restaurant to eat the taste of this childhood memory. Only to know that the fresh and refreshing green vegetables are actually pea tips, and to say that Jianyang mutton soup is not spicy at all is only when I was a child, I automatically ignored the dry dish next to me.
Nowadays, with a dry dish of sea peppers, spicy lining salty, salty out of the fresh, this lamb seems to have another flavor in the mouth. Tell your friends around you about your childhood troubles, and your friends laugh like your family more than a decade ago, and your childhood memories have an extra layer of joyful filters.
Heze - Shan County sheep soup
The next lamb soup that impressed me, I haven't tasted it yet.
Ten years ago, I had just entered the university, and there was a dormitory of four people from all over the world. There was a roommate Xiao Qiu from Zibo, Shandong, we were very temperamental, and it happened to be playing the same game at that time, which was really the same at first sight.
In college dormitories across the country, there is a common activity - bedtime talk. Especially freshmen, everyone comes from all over the world, naturally there are endless words.
Xiao Qiu carefully talked to us about Shandong's sheep soup in a sleepy conversation. Almost every place in Shandong has its own sheep soup, and a few years ago, the top ten sheep soups in Shandong were also selected online. What Rizhao Juxian sheep soup, Zaozhuang Road North Sheep Soup, Weifang Wujing Whole Sheep Soup and so on are very famous.
Xiao Qiu said that as a Shandong native, he had never drunk it all, but of the sheep soup he had drunk, he felt that the best drink was Shan County sheep soup. Shan County sheep soup is probably also the most famous sheep soup in Shandong, known as "the world's first soup".
Shan County sheep soup uses Jining green goat, and the soup will be filled with rationed spices such as cloves, white root, tangerine peel, good ginger and so on. Therefore, Shan County's sheep soup is not only delicious, but also has a good warming effect.
Xiao Qiu also said that although most of the Shan County sheep soup in the restaurant is white soup, he drank it at a classmate's house, which is the Shan County Sheep Soup of Red Soup. The red soup is boiled with peppers, and it is spicy and delicious to drink. Although there are chili cans in the restaurant outside for diners to put themselves, the taste is still different from when they are boiled.
That night everyone talked a lot about their hometown delicacies, and now that I think about it, we have been planting grass for ten years. Later, something happened that I didn't want to talk about, and Xiao Qiu and I never saw each other again. Only that night remains in my memory.
The mutton soup in Shan County has always grown grass in my heart after all. Last year, I went to Shandong on a business trip in a hurry, and I didn't have a good drink, but I didn't have to see things and think about people.
Xuchang - Zhangdi mutton soup
Another of my college roommates, Xiao Fu, is from Pingdingshan, Henan, and I have the impression that he is a person who has little interest in eating. There are only two memories of his cuisine.
One is that we once got a copy of the sheep scorpion and secretly cooked it in the dormitory (good kids don't learn). He tasted it and said it was too light, and before we could react, he picked up the pepper bottle and directly unscrewed the cap and poured down most of the bottle.
The rest of us were really stupid at the time, and everyone felt like their whole body was burning after tasting it. But Xiao Fu insisted that Henan Hu Spicy Soup was this spicy, and finally a little unhappy and scattered, we picked the sheep scorpions and ate them, and the soup almost didn't move.
Image credit: @Bilibili Prosperity in the fields
The second thing is that he once mentioned to me a kind of Henan special mutton soup called stew pot mutton soup. Based on the shadow of the first thing and the inability to search for a single shop selling this soup in Shanghai (which can't be found now), I was skeptical of what he described as delicious.
However, I obviously blamed him, and later I learned that the representative of the stewed pot mutton soup, Zhangdi Mutton Soup, was actually included in the third batch of Xuchang City Municipal Intangible Cultural Heritage List.
As the name suggests, the key step is to boil the lamb, fish out the boiled lamb, then boil it in oil, and finally pour it into the lamb soup. The stewed lamb had a Maillard reaction, releasing more aromas, and dozens of herbs were added to the soup to make the soup aroma overflowing.
Henan people generally eat Zhangdi mutton soup with a fire. Eat it directly, or break it into soup, soup and vegetables, hot bowl of belly warm and full.
Xi'an – water basin lamb
Stepping into society and going to work, the diet of food editors is actually not very regular, so they often eat light meals. In recent years, the cuisine of the northwest has landed in Shanghai, so I have also eaten a lot of mutton in the water basin.
But I don't know if it's a different atmosphere, and later I tasted the water basin lamb in Xi'an, which felt a little rougher, but it was delicious.
Many people can not distinguish the difference between mutton and lamb steamed buns, in fact, it is quite simple, the water basin mutton is heavy on drinking soup, with the "steamed buns" is a hollow crescent cake, is noodles, you can directly eat soup, or eat lamb in the cake.
The steamed bun of lamb is dead noodles (or 90% dead noodles), which must be taken back to the kitchen to cook.
Image source: TV series "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an"
Lei Jiayin's "Twelve Hours of Chang'an" has a scene of eating water basin lamb, which has spoiled many audiences. In this scene, it can be seen that he ate the cake directly, and did not break it into pieces.
The water basin lamb pays attention to the soup as clear as water, the lamb is tender, sprinkled with the finishing touch of coriander, and then spoonful of oil to pour spicy seeds, it is really comfortable. On many nights this bowl of soup soothed my stomach and heart.
Inner Mongolia - Hailar mutton soup
The last bowl of mutton soup, right this year. I went to Inner Mongolia, where I always wanted to go on a business trip, and the delicious offal soup and the crispy roast on the outside were really endless.
Back in Shanghai, I talked with my friend Xiao Ji from Hu Meng, and Xiao Ji proudly said: "Of course, our sheep in Inner Mongolia are delicious." Especially our Humeng, but there is the best Hulunbuir grassland in China, Hailar mutton soup is one of the four major mutton soups! ”
I really haven't heard of the four major mutton soups before, go check the good guys, and the other three are Tibetan mutton soup, Jianyang mutton soup, and Shan County mutton soup, all of which are old acquaintances. All of a sudden I was in a hurry, so I quickly asked her to bring some back for me when she came home.
"Hailar" means "the land where wild leeks grow" in Mongolian, so the sheep in Hulunbuir grew up eating wild leeks. The environment of the Hulunbuir Grassland is also indisputable, and the picture of the green sky and white clouds and green grass in the dreams of countless people is the appearance of the Hulunbuir Grassland.
With such a unique natural environment, I don't think I need to use words to describe how delicious this mutton soup is. Although I always say that lamb should still be a little bit fatty, this lamb and haggis are really not fat, or almost negligible.
I finished eating it all in a few days, and kept praising Xiao Ji (also to pat her on the back and let her bring it to me again).
However, hailar mutton soup is not as famous as the other three kinds of mutton soup, probably because there are too many ways to eat sheep in Inner Mongolia, and the lamb soup does not appear tall in the middle of a group of "tall men".
From childhood to adulthood, it is not inseparable from sheep soup, but I am always drinking sheep soup. Slowly, this bowl of soup condenses family affection, friendship, study, and work. The little boy had grown into a man, unchanged, only good memories, and the love of food as always.
Note: In order to protect the privacy of the parties, the names of the people involved in this article are pseudonyms. Some of the content has been re-created and is not a complete fact.
Text | taro
Figure | Liu Siyu, Zhong Heng
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