The heat surges, the grease "sizzles", and the aroma of the roast meat rushes into the nose. At this time, the most primitive desire for delicious food, carved in the blood of the bones, is immediately activated, and it is forced to make people's index fingers move - this is the charm of barbecue alone.
Speaking of which, barbecue is a unique cultural phenomenon. Compared with many complicated cuisines, barbecue is really a bit unremarkable, but in the banquet of the royal family, in the glass world of white snow and red plums, in the sword world of martial arts novels, it can always be seen. Perhaps, this is related to his mysterious and bizarre life.
The "Liquor Store Map" in Mogao Cave 85 "Lengjia Jingchang" Source: "Dunhuang Grottoes Complete Collection" Hong Kong Commercial Press
Skewers of the Queen Mother of the West
"The Ancients... The people eat fruit clams (luǒ), fishy and foul smell and hurt the stomach, the people have many diseases, there are saints to do, drill flint to make fire to dissolve the fishy, and the people say (yue) it, so that the king of the world, the name of the flint people. "In ancient times, human beings lived a life of drinking blood and ru mao, until they learned the method of drilling wood for fire and keeping fire, which ended the primitive barbaric life and began to cultivate the habit of eating cooked food.
Humans have learned to use fire since they played, and they have learned how to grill meat. Judging from the excavated cultural relics, this can also be corroborated by the fact that barbecue pits found throughout the country are considered to be closely related to the behavior of the ancestors in grilling food, while the waist eaves pottery kettle and rectangular horizontal strip pottery fire rack (stove grate) excavated from the Majiabang cultural site show that by the Neolithic Age at least, Chinese had mastered the technology of barbecue cooking.
But it is quite paradoxical that it is this oldest and most civilized way of cooking that cannot be "found" in the classics. It is rumored that in the 1930s, the painter Qi Baishi was invited by a barbecue restaurant to create the word "roast" according to the method of forming sound and sound, and explained: "Zhong Ding did not have this 'roast' word, this is Qi Huang's invention." "This allows the barbecue to officially have its own name." The truth or falsity of Qi Baishi's creation of characters will be left for detail later, but it is certain that the word "roast" is indeed rarely recorded in ancient texts, and it is difficult to find traces.
So, in what capacity did barbecue exist in the long history of Chinese food? This matter may have to start from the Han Dynasty and follow the trail. Among the many classic murals, there is a Han Dynasty mural about the Queen Mother of the West that is particularly eye-catching. The Queen Mother of the West sits in the center of the painting, and at this time she has changed from a half-human beast with "leopard tail and tiger teeth and good whistle, and her hair is victorious" to a fairy sitting precariously and richly dressed, and on both sides of her stands the attendants who "serve tea and pour water", one of whom is holding a string of food in her hand and handing it to the West Queen Mother. According to Mr. Yang Zhishui's research, this is the most popular food today - grilled skewers, and judging from its shape, this is no different from what we eat now.
Shandong Jiaxiang West Queen Mother Kitchen Diagram Rubbing
The Way of Grilling Hides It
What the Queen Mother of the West eats is not possible, but various indications show that as early as the Han Dynasty, barbecue was the most fashionable food, and the ingredients were abundant, cattle, sheep, deer, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, fish are all wonderful things, even cicadas, quails (some people think it is yellow finches) and seafood are not rare things.
Later, Jia Sixun summed up the experience of his predecessors, described the way of barbecue in detail in the book, and summarized a set of barbecue methods from distinguishing meat quality, cutting, cooking to heat and seasoning. For example, roasted beef gizzard (xián, i.e. beef blinds): "Old beef gizzard, thick and crispy." Shovel, wear, pain to make the gathering. Forcing the fire to burn, causing the upper to split; and then cutting it, it is brittle and beautiful. If you pull the order Shu Shen, the slight fire is far away, it is thin and dirty. According to the meat characteristics and form of the beef louver, Jia Sixun believes that after squeezing the crepe hard, it should be roasted near the fire quickly, so that there is a crack in the surface, and then cut open to eat, which will be crisp and chewy. And the way of seafood cuisine is not to be described as meticulous, such as grilling car claws: "juice out, shelled, defoiled, three meats and one shell." With ginger, orange crumbs, heavy searing to make warm. Look up to the four; And instructed: "Don't be too cooked, then be satisfied", not only mastered the appropriate heat, but also summed up a relatively complete set of fishy and seasoning experience.
As the anthropologist Levi Strauss put it, "The process from raw to cooked food characterizes culture." From the history of human diet development, it is obvious that the contribution of barbecue is not only in the raw and cooked meat, but also means the enzymatic effect on the birth or discovery of oil, salt, sauce and vinegar seasoning. With spices, cooked food also has a higher pursuit of "color", "aroma", "taste", etc., and barbecue has led to food into the cultural vision, and has also guided the establishment of Chinese diet structure.
From this perspective, what the Queen Mother of the West is about to hold in her hand is a kebab, which may have foreshadowed all this. According to the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic, "The Queen Mother gave the emperor a nine-flower lamp, and anointed oil with it to burn the lamp." That is to say, the essential spice of barbecue, oil, was taught to the Yellow Emperor by Xi Wang's mother. The earliest names for oil are "ointment" and "fat", both of which are animal oils extracted from animals, and the use is to apply food and grill.
According to this saying, the reason why human beings can enjoy barbecue is entirely due to the fulfillment of the Queen Mother of the West. It seems that the passage "fairies only drink dew" is afraid that it will be corrected. Autumn has passed, people have begun to fully "paste autumn fat", if you let the Queen Mother of the West to be a food blogger, I am afraid that I will spare no effort to recommend barbecue!
Shandong Zhucheng Liangtai Han Tomb "Kitchen" Portrait Stone (Facsimile, Partial)
Judging from the Han Dynasty murals that have been handed down from generation to generation, barbecue food customs are highly respected by the people of the time, and even barbecue utensils such as ovens, trays, meat sticks, etc. have also developed a relatively mature system. The Shaanxi History Museum houses a green-glazed pottery oven with a leaking hole in the bottom of the oven and two sticks with cicadas along the mouth. It can be seen that the maturity of the barbecue process in the Han Dynasty is not inferior to that of now.
When did the barbecue have a name?
Even though barbecues achieved such a status in the Han Dynasty, they still did not have a name of the Eight Classics at that time. It is only a continuation of the customary old language of the Zhou Dynasty, and according to the firing method, it is replaced by words such as "cannon", "lie", "burn" (fán), "burning" and so on. For example, these four barbecue methods are recorded in the "Book of Poetry, Xiaoya, and Leaf": "There are rabbit heads, and the burning of the burnt ... There are rabbit heads, burnt cannons. "We're talking about grilled rabbit meat here.
Specifically, "cannon" is "to coat with dirt and eat it with cannons." "This is still common among the Dong and Miao people today." "Lie" is to roast the whole animal on the fire, which is very similar to the Roasted Whole Sheep in Mongolia. And "burnt" and "hot" often appear together, which is what we call "barbecue". For example, "Poetry Sutra Daya 凫鹥": "The purpose of the wine is gratifying, and the burning is fenfen." At that time, there were also those who pursued refinement who tried to distinguish between "burnt" and "hot" in terms of the size of the meat, the distance from the fire, and the use of utensils, such as Zheng Xuan's opinion: "The soft one is hot, and the dry one is burned." Kong Yingda said: "The name of the burner is the name of the fire, and the name of the burner is far away." Those who are difficult to ripe are close to the fire, and those who are easy to ripe are far away. But discernment and discernment, from beginning to end, there is no result that everyone can agree with, so the most common term is still "burnt" and "hot" homologous, "burnt" is seen as "roasted with fire", which is what we call "barbecue" today. After the Han Dynasty, the use of "hot" became more common, and "animal (part) + hot" became a conventional naming method, such as belly burning, liver burning, beef brisket burning, fish burning, etc.
Back to the word "roast". When exactly did the barbecue "justify the name"? The idea of Qi Baishi's characters is found in an article in Mr. Deng Tuo's "Yanshan Night Talk", which is closely related to Beijing's time-honored barbecue wan: "There is a sign written by Qi Baishi in the barbecue wan, written on a piece of rice paper and embedded in a mirror frame. Wen Yue: 'Halal grilled meat wan. Between the main text and the title, a line of small letters (look at the status, which was added after writing at that time) said: "There is no baking word in the books." At the request of others, I made myself ancient ' (originally without punctuation) to see, so that people think that this old man is really very interesting! Because when writing the letter, he asked Zhu Dexi whether the books really had no baked words, and said that if he sued Manang Estate at this time, he could write a Yanshan night talk. Before deok hee replied, Yun: 'Baking words says that there is nothing in the text. Broad rhyme, set rhyme and have a character, bitter Haoche, yin kao, note cloud: fire dry, set rhyme or provincial cooking, immediately baked characters. The fire also saw the dragon shrine handbook, bitter old anti, fire dry also. There is no Kangxi dictionary, and as Bai Shi said, there is nothing in the books. "This point in time, around the 1940s and 1950s.
Nowadays, with the help of modern search tools, you can find the word "roast" that is not found in the dictionary, which can be found as early as the different texts of the Great Tibetan Classics of the Yuan Dynasty, and many modern Buddhist translations have also been used. In the manuscript of "Dream of the Red Chamber", the word "roast" has also appeared many times, such as the forty-second time: "Bao Chao laughed: 'What do you know!'" The coarse magnetic sauce could not keep the fire from being roasted, and it was roasted without ginger juice and sauce on the base in advance, and once it was on fire, it was to be fried. ’”
Guangxu 10th to 12th year (1884-1886) "Guangxu Shun Tianfu Chronicle" in the "barbecue meat" entry
Whether it is a translation of the Buddhist scriptures or the dialogue in "Dream of the Red Chamber", it is a more special or colloquial usage, so it can be seen that although the word "roast" is not necessarily the first creation of Mr. Qi Baishi, it is really a very strange word before modern times, and it is not closely related to dishes. In the Guangxu Shun Tianfu Chronicle of the tenth to twelfth years (1884-1886), the term "barbecue meat" finally appeared, according to the saying: "Take the piglet and roast it." It does not use piglets, called stove meat, and there are local stove butcher shops. At this point, "barbecue" is finally justified.
The use of fire, Engels said, "for the first time man dominates a force of nature, and thus ultimately separates man from the animal kingdom." "In the face of barbecue, people are inheriting and inheriting the eating habits of ancient times, recalling and tasting the original taste of food, and even more grateful for the twists and turns and legends of human social development." With the afterscent of the roasted meat, at the time of the heart's understanding, it is a time to communicate with the hearts of the ancients.