At the end of each forest, a cluster of round hawthorn fruits blooms with red smiling faces on the branches, adding joy to the harvest season. Hawthorn is one of the oldest and most prevalent tree species in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, and its fruit, hawthorn, is also a treasure food. It is even found in some important historical events in the West.
1 In ancient times, it was long regarded as a wild fruit
Hawthorn is a perennial woody plant of the family Rosaceae, native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, mostly wild, with many species in Asia, Europe, and North America. In China, there are mainly two major categories of hawthorn and hawthorn, and there are more than 30 varieties of hawthorn, mountain red, and fat fruit. Roughly speaking, the hawthorn fruit is small, sour, and mainly medicinal; the northern hawthorn fruit is large, fragrant, and the sweet and sour is moderate.
Hawthorn, which originated in ancient times, was not called this name at the beginning in our country. The "朹" (pronounced qiú) recorded in the Erya two thousand years ago is considered to be the ancient name of hawthorn recorded in early Chinese literature. Because li shizhen of the Ming Dynasty quoted according to the commentary of the Jin Dynasty scholar Guo Pu: "Erya Yun: 'The tree is like a plum, its son is as big as a finger, and the red color is like a tree (pronounced nài), edible. This is hawthorn also. In ancient China, hawthorn was also called monkey hawthorn and rat hawthorn, because "monkeys and rats like to eat.".
We know from the canonical records that more than 2,000 years ago, our ancestors already knew that wild hawthorns were edible. But for a long time, hawthorn was only used as a wild fruit and was not artificially cultivated to become the main fruit. Hawthorn does not appear in the 14 kinds of fruits listed in the Book of Zhou and the Book of Rites for "offering sacrifices and enjoying guests". The naturalist book "Guangzhi" written by Guo Yigong of the Jin Dynasty mentions hawthorn, which says: "The wood is easy to grow, and the variety is paid, and the field is fattened." It can be seen that most of the hawthorn trees were still in the wild at that time, and people occasionally collected hawthorn fruits as food for hunger, and the main use of hawthorn trees was firewood or fertilizer.
The main reason why hawthorn has long been regarded as a wild fruit in ancient times and not valued is probably because of its sour taste. In fact, the sugar content in hawthorn fruit is more than double that of apples and pears, but why do people still feel that hawthorn is more acidic than apples and sorbic acid, and even often "acid teeth" by it? This is because the organic acid contained in the pulp of hawthorn is two to three times higher than the content of apples and pears, and the high content of organic acids dilutes the sweetness of sugar, so hawthorn eats more sour than sweet.
By the Tang Dynasty, the status of hawthorn as a wild fruit had improved slightly, and it had been given to guests as a local specialty by the villagers. The great poet Liu Zongyuan wrote in the article "When Telling the Nostalgia of the Old Words with Liu Twenty-Eight Deans, The BookShi Feng Sent to Lizhou": "Slang er provides bitter bamboo shoots, and the father gives acid hawthorns." It can be seen that its status at that time was similar to that of bitter shoots, and it was still far from peaches, dates, and pears. It was not until the Qing Dynasty that the Beijing cake made of hawthorn, also known as the golden cake, was regarded as one of the "imperial diet products", and the hawthorn was corrected and recognized as a formal fruit.
2 Healthy spleen and appetizers of Kyo-style cuisine
The reason why the status of hawthorn can be significantly improved has a lot to do with the discovery of the medicinal value of hawthorn by famous doctors such as Zhu Danxi in the Yuan Dynasty and Li Shizhen in the Ming Dynasty. The "Compendium of Materia Medica" records: "The ancient Fang was rarely used, and it was written by the Danxi Zhu clan for hawthorn, and then it was used as a medicine. "The use of hawthorn in Chinese medicine is mainly based on fruit. Yuan and Ming physicians found that hawthorn is slightly warm, tastes sour and sweet, enters the spleen, stomach, and liver meridians, and is a good medicine for strengthening the spleen and appetizing, digesting stagnation, and activating blood and dissolving phlegm.
Hawthorn has a significant effect in eliminating food stagnation. In traditional Chinese medicine, all types of dietary stagnation, whether it is the "meat accumulation" of overeating high fat and protein, or the "grain accumulation" and "area" of eating rice noodles, can be used to eliminate hawthorn food stagnation. Relatively speaking, the eating effect of hawthorn is better on the "meat accumulation" effect of overeating fat and protein. In this regard, there are relevant experimental records in the "Compendium of Materia Medica": "Boiling old chicken and hard meat, a few hawthorns are easy to rot." Then its elimination of flesh accumulation, cover can be pushed. "So when we stew meat every day, add a few hawthorns to stew together, and the meat is particularly easy to rot." Hawthorn is not only used as a single medicine to treat diseases, but also to form a variety of prescriptions with other Traditional Chinese medicines. For the "grain accumulation" and "area" caused by eating rice noodles, it can be fried with hawthorn plus malt and divine comedy to make fried three immortals or scorched three immortals, which can digest abdominal fullness and belching. In the "Bohol Pill" created by the famous doctor Zhu Danxi in the Yuan Dynasty, hawthorn is the main ingredient, with Divine Comedy, Half Summer, Poria, Tangerine Peel, Forsythia, Lai Shu Zi (Radish Seed), made into pills, mainly used for the treatment of gastrointestinal indigestion, nausea and anorexia, food stagnation and its caused bloating pain, stool congestion and other symptoms. Hawthorn pills, commonly used in the treatment of pediatric accumulation, are also derived from the formula of "Bohol Pills". Modern medicine has found that the flavonoid components in hawthorn can resist free radicals harmful to the human body, thereby regulating immunity.
After more than a thousand years of cultivation, today's hawthorn taste is far from Liu Zongyuan's "sour hawthorn" at that time. In the north of our country, mature hawthorn acid is sweet and has a unique flavor. When eaten as a fresh fruit, it can be eaten directly, and it can be used to quench thirst, and it can also be made into fried red fruits, rock sugar gourds, and can also be squeezed to drink. Dried hawthorn comes in a variety of forms, and can be directly brewed in water as a tea substitute, or processed into hawthorn slices, hawthorn cakes, fruit dan peels and other delicious snacks. Hawthorn cake is also known as Beijing cake or golden cake, and the Beijing cake pear shredded is a classic cold dish in Beijing cuisine. Various forms of hawthorn products enrich people's taste buds at the same time, but also play a certain role in health care.
Although hawthorn is good, there are also a few points to pay attention to when eating. Chinese medicine believes that hawthorn is only consumed without supplementation, and cannot be taken at the same time as ginseng and other supplements, so as not to offset the tonic effect of ginseng. People with weak spleen and stomach should not eat more, and healthy people should also have moderation in eating it. Because of its high acidity, it is best not to eat it on an empty stomach. Hawthorn tablets, fruit peel and other snacks contain a lot of sugar, children, especially those who are in the period of teeth change should not eat more. After eating hawthorn products, brush your teeth and rinse your mouth in time to avoid caries.
3 Hawthorn trees that have influenced Western history
Hawthorn not only has high food and medicinal value, but also has a high appearance. Hawthorn trees bloom in early summer, full of flowers as white as snow; in the middle of summer, the branches are luxuriant and green; in late autumn, red fruits are abundant, and whenever the snow falls on the branches, it is beautiful. In Europe and North America, hawthorn trees are very common green tree species, and have witnessed some major events in The history of Europe and the United States.
Hawthorn trees bloom in May and June, and the flowers bloom with a unique aroma, with about 15 to 30 flowers in a cluster. Most of the hawthorn flowers in China are white, and the hawthorns in Europe and the United States are more pink and red flowers. In Europe, Britain, France, Sweden and other countries, hawthorn flowers are called mayflowers, and hawthorn trees are called mayflowers. In the European countryside, May Day is celebrated every May. At this time, every household will decorate the courtyard with the flowers and branches of hawthorn trees, and people will sing and dance around the "May Pillar", worship the tree god and the grain god, and pray for the wind and rain to be smooth and the grain to be abundant. The "May Pillar" is a ribbon wrapped around a hawthorn tree to symbolize hope and a good harvest. In recent years, China has introduced the British hawthorn tree varieties "Red Cloud" and "Red Paul" that have introduced flowers, and the flowers are bright and dazzling, adding a new color to the early summer of China's cities.
The leaves of hawthorn trees are edible. In the UK, young leaves from early spring can be used to make salads. The flower buds of hawthorn can also be eaten, and in the English countryside, people refer to the young leaves and flower buds of hawthorn as "bread and cheese". Some hawthorn varieties of wood are hard and very resistant to rot, and are commonly used in north American villages as tool handles and fence piles. In carving, hawthorn wood is also the best substitute for boxwood.
Beautiful and practical hawthorn trees are actually very good to feed. Hawthorn trees grow fast and can flower and bear fruit in the third year after planting. It has a large range of adaptation to temperature, and the average annual temperature can meet its survival needs between 4.7 °C and 16 °C. Hawthorn trees are highly adaptable, drought-tolerant and flood-tolerant, barren and thin, living well in neutral or weakly acidic soils, and resistant to pruning, extensive management, fewer pests and diseases, and can maintain a better landscape effect even if they are not taken care of for many years after planting.
Perhaps because of these advantages, hawthorn trees have also been closely associated with some important events in Western history. One of the most famous is the enclosure movement during the British Industrial Revolution, when people used hawthorn trees to enclose land. The English Parliament legalized land enclosure in 1688, and during the enclosure movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more than 200,000 miles of hawthorn hedges were planted in Britain. People use hawthorn trees as hedges, an important reason is that hawthorn trees grow vigorously, have many branches, form quickly, have thick foliage, and have sharp thorns, which is the most ideal fence against animal and human invasion. The English name of the hawthorn tree is hawthorn, of which thorn is the finger thorn. Since the enclosure movement, hawthorn hedges have become a natural hedge popular in Europe and the United States. During the famous Normandy military operations during World War II, French villagers planted a labyrinth of hawthorn hedges that almost led to the failure of the Allied operation. In 2018, the Commercial Press published a book by American author Bill Vaughn, "The Legend of the Hawthorn Tree", which detailed the important influence of the hawthorn tree as an unremarkable tree species on European and American history.
White hawthorn flowers
Hawthorn trees
Pink hawthorn flowers
4 Into the poem into the painting of rich meaning of red fruits
Hawthorn, which has a long history and is widely distributed, has also frequently appeared in literature, paintings, songs and films in ancient and modern China and abroad. Due to the different customs and histories of various ethnic groups, the symbolic meaning of hawthorn fruit and hawthorn tree is different in Eastern and Western cultures. But as globalization deepens and cultural exchanges become more frequent, this difference in hawthorn imagery is becoming smaller.
In classical Chinese literature, the hawthorn as a wild fruit is a symbol of tranquility and simplicity. A poem written by the monk Zhiyi, "Yin Shan Hawthorn", is a typical representative of it: "The branches are stubborn and vicious with the sun tilting, and the wind is facing the wind and the head is simple and unhuatous." Calm years with a smile, indifferent to life sour fruits and flowers. The great southern Song Dynasty poet Lu You also wrote about hawthorn many times, and one of the more widely circulated poems was "Outing": "The road winds into the valley obliquely, and the donkey comes to rest the wild people's homes." Mountain boys bear the burden of selling red fruits, and village girls pick green flowers on the fence. The campfire cooks rice and draws water from the spring to brew noon tea. Idle travel is self-no-go number, encounter why not laugh. The sentence "Mountain boys bear the burden of selling red fruits, and the village girls pick green flowers on the fence" uses white painting techniques to outline a colorful and quite dynamic pastoral picture. Lu You has mentioned "red fruits" many times in his poems, such as "tired red fruits are green, and the sour is picked before frost", describing hawthorns that are not yet fully ripe; "when the red fruits are ripe, the yin is gradually formed", describing the hawthorn trees planted in their own yards.
Hawthorn is a frequent visitor to Chinese paintings. Among the paintings of flowers and birds passed down from the Song Dynasty in the Collection of the Shanghai Museum, there is such a "Red Fruit and Green Crane Diagram", which freezes the interesting moment when the green woolly bird flies up the hawthorn branch. In modern times, Qi Baishi, Wu Changshuo, Pan Tianshou and others also like to paint hawthorns, in order to express a simple and plain attitude towards life.
In modern Chinese literature, the red hawthorn fruit is a symbol of love. One of the representative works of the poet Haizi is "Hawthorn Tree". In Haizi's eyes, the hawthorn tree inhabited the goddess in his heart, and the fire-like fruit of the hawthorn was as hot as Van Gogh's sunflower. In this century, the writer Amy wrote "Hawthorn Tree Love" to show a beautiful and pure love, and was later put on the screen by director Zhang Yimou, becoming a household name classic love movie.
In fact, hawthorn represents love because of the Influence of the Soviet song "Hawthorn Tree". This old song, which was circulated in China in the 1950s and 1960s, expresses the confusion of a young woman in the face of two young men who love her and have no choice. The song has a beautiful melody and has been covered by many domestic singers. But in fact, the original Russian name of the song is "The Catalpa Tree of the Urals", which is translated as hawthorn tree because it blooms white in summer and bears small red fruits in autumn like catalpa trees, and catalpa is far less well-known in China than hawthorn. Later, the Chinese people generally recognized this cultural interpretation, and hawthorn became popular in the Chinese literary world as a symbol of love.
In European and American cultures, hawthorn trees represent thorns and isolation, while hawthorn flowers represent hope. In 1620, in order to escape religious persecution, more than 100 Puritans and more than 30 sailors in England sailed to the New World on the ship "Mayflower", thus beginning the history of North America. The "Mayflower" is the hawthorn flower, heralding a new world full of hope.
Read more
Kangxi with Guodan Pi
When it comes to the delicious snack fruit dan peel made from hawthorn, everyone is familiar with it. But you know what? It also has a legendary story in the ancient Chinese military history, which makes posterity look at this ordinary snack.
According to records, Kaldan, the chief of the Dzungar tribe, one of the four Mongol tribes, led his troops to annex the other three Mongol tribes and made several attacks. The Kangxi Emperor took command of the conquest and conquest of the Gardan Department. On the front line, in order to prevent the leakage of intelligence, the Qing army secretly wrote the information and instructions transmitted between the Kangxi Emperor and the important generals with ink on the skin of Guodan, rolled into a cylinder, and passed on by special personnel. After reading the information and secret orders, the generals and relevant personnel ate the Godan skin and destroyed it. In this regard, gao Shiqi, a poet and calligrapher who followed Kangxi in his conquest of Gardan in March 1697, gave a poem "Fruit List" on his march to Ningxia: "Cyanosis through bone oil fist thin, slippery light powder wax evenly." The grass strike army book is still extinct, and it is chewed up and dried up. Gao Shiqi wrote in the self-annotation of the poem: "Hawthorn boiled pulp, shaped like paper thin, even, can be curly, cyanosis, so the name fruit list, sweet and sour, quench thirst." It is said that after Kangxi read the verses of the "Fruit List", he thought it was very appropriate and praised it as "pleasant and pleasant, reaching the heart and reaching the heart".
The "oil fist" and "powder wax" written in Gao Shiqi's poems are the famous names of high-quality tissue paper in the Tang Dynasty and Song Dynasty, respectively, to describe the Guodan pi used to write secret orders of intelligence. It is not difficult to imagine that during the march of the wind and food, after these fruit dan skins are eaten into the mouth, not only will the thirsty mouth be immediately moistened, but also the combat intelligence and secret orders can be extinguished. The ink used for writing at that time was mainly made of soot from burning pine trees. This pine soot is also a traditional Chinese medicine, and the Compendium of Materia Medica records that it has the effect of "stopping bleeding, generating skin, and alloy sores". The so-called "alloy sores" are meant to promote the healing of wounds wounded by metal knives and guns. Therefore, writing military intelligence in the form of fruit dan bark and pine soot was indeed a good thing in that period.
Delicious stories
The origin of the rock sugar gourd
When it comes to the most popular hawthorn food, of course, it is the rock sugar gourd. Bamboo skewers wear a bunch of hawthorns, dip them in the fiercely cremated ice syrup, wait for it to cool naturally, the crystal is permeated with fiery red, bite, crunchy, sour and sweet and sticky teeth, this is the unique winter memory of northern children.
There is a folklore about the origin of the rock sugar gourd. Legend has it that during the Southern Song Dynasty, after a banquet, Song Guangzong's concubine suddenly fell ill with a strange disease, her abdomen was swollen and painful, she did not think about tea and rice, and her body was becoming emaciated. In the imperial court, the imperial doctors all thought that this was caused by weakness, and used a large number of supplements, but they did not see any improvement. In desperation, the court posted an imperial list to the society to recruit famous doctors for diagnosis and treatment. A walking party Lang Zhong unveiled the entry into the palace for the treatment of the noble concubine, and after the pulse diagnosis, he said: "The illness of the noble concubine is not serious, just use hawthorn and rock sugar to boil together, and eat five or six pieces per meal." Sure enough, after the concubine ate, her appetite gradually improved, and it was not long before she returned to her former appearance. Later, the practice of hawthorn spread to the people, and the people wore it one by one and made it into today's street food - rock sugar gourd.
(Original title: Hawthorn from wild fruit "regular" treasure food)
Source: Beijing Daily
Author: Zhang Pinqiu
Process Editor: L061
Copyright Notice: The text copyright belongs to The Beijing News Group and may not be reproduced or adapted without permission.