I like the word "going into the water", it is warm, it is full of joy, and even hope and satisfaction. In the modern Chinese dictionary, the explanation in the Modern Chinese Dictionary is "edible livestock offal", and this cold interpretation makes all the emotional colors contained in this word disappear. I searched on Baidu for "why is the internal organs of animals called water", and saw an answer that read: "In the past, when people slaughtered pigs and sheep, there was a bucket or a large basin under the board, and the internal organs of the slaughtered pigs and sheep were put into the bucket or basin below, and later called the internal organs placed below as sewers." "This explanation may be almost the same.
Synonymous with "sewage", there is also the word "chowder", which I also like and live very much. The Modern Chinese Dictionary refers to "the internal organs of beef and sheep cooked and chopped for consumption". This explanation is a bit awkward and not very accurate. I feel that the extension of the concept of "chowder" may not be limited to the internal organs. Because, usually, among the cold mixed haggis we eat in the restaurant, there is sheep's head meat. In the haggis soup, there is no shortage of sheep's face, sheep tongue, and sheep's blood. Those who make up dictionaries are about to work in the office every day, never going to practice the stall. However, the lexicography should extract and regulate linguistic material from social life, and should not be produced only in the academy and applied only by the academy.
The dictionary only says that offal is "the internal organs of cattle and sheep", but what does this "etc" include? Are the offal of chickens, ducks and other birds chop? Usually, we are all "chicken offal" and "duck chowder" talking.
In the past, I never ate chicken intestines and duck intestines, but the master I studied when my wife and children worked has always cleaned the intestines after slaughtering chickens and ducks, and then brines them. At first I couldn't accept it, but since my wife did it to me a few times according to her master's practice, I immediately liked it. Chicken intestines, duck intestines are relatively thin, easy to taste when brine, the taste is also tendons, not as large as pig intestines, easy to eat greasy, so it is most appropriate to drink alone. The marinated chicken intestines and duck intestines are like melon seeds in the water, and it is not easy to eat a full stomach after eating a few bites, which is equivalent to artificially lengthening the mouth of eating good things. Now, when everyone goes out to eat hot pot, it has become a habit to plate duck intestines.
Jared Diamond, a professor of science at the University of California, mentioned in his best-selling book "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Society" that the ancestors of human beings often ate much richer food in the era of gathering and hunting than our contemporaries. Archaeologists excavated a site in the Euphrates River and found that between 10,000 B.C. and 9,000 B.C., villagers collected as many as 157 species of wild plants alone, not counting hunting. There are now 29 species of edible mushrooms that can be collected from a tribe in New Guinea called Fore. But look at how much we usually eat now? The cereals consume the most than rice, wheat, corn, sorghum, and barley. In terms of food abundance, we are far inferior to prehistoric humans and today's people who still live in primitive tribes.
Contemporary people, as far as the type of food is concerned, is not eating more, but eating less. From this point of view, we expand the scope of edibles a little, and there is not necessarily anything wrong with it. Those things on the recipes of prehistoric ancestors, they ate for millions of years, our genes, our stomachs, must be used to that recipe. Modern people suddenly shrink the recipe so much at once, theoretically, our bodies may not be able to get used to it, and if we are not used to it, we are prone to illness. If we let go of our bellies and try to eat something we haven't eaten, can it be a return to the eating habits of millions of years? Would it be more beneficial to the body? I don't know if it makes sense for me to find some arguments for my foodie image.
The topic returns to the launch.
Some ethnic minorities in China don't seem to eat much. I went to Xinjiang several times and saw that the Uighurs also eat the good meat of sheep. In their recipes, there are offal, there are roast lamb loins, I have not seen them eat lamb tripe, sheep heart or anything. The Uyghur roast lamb loin is so tender that if you put a few strings of roasted loins on the table for a while, you can immediately drip a layer of blood on the plate. Looking at this bloody sheep loin, I often can't get my mouth down, and I always take it to the charcoal shelf and bake it to be relieved, but this practice is often laughed at as a layman by friends who have been stationed in Xinjiang for a long time. They say that to eat a roasted loin is to eat a tender, and you will be old as soon as you roast it; it is okay to eat it with blood and water.
But uighurs sell boiled sheep's heads. When I was in Korla in 1992, I went with a friend to a small stall set up by a Uighur woman and bought a cooked sheep's head for only three dollars; I asked the woman to take out the sheep's head meat, and it was full of a large plate, piled up like a small mountain, and the two of us didn't finish eating at all, and we didn't know what sheep's head was so big that it could pick out so much meat.
In Xinjiang, most of the people who make noodle lungs are Hui women, and the noodle lungs are roughly equivalent to the cold skins in the interior, and the big girls and little daughters-in-law eat more. Once I tried to buy a copy, but I just felt that the noodles tasted a little light, not very appetizing to me, and did not finish eating. The noodle lungs are boiled with rice flour from the lungs of sheep and are slightly yellowed. In the noodle lungs, there are often cut into a little rice-filled sheep intestines and the like. But they do not add sheep's blood, as if the Hui people do not eat sheep's blood, thinking that it is unclean. This may make some sense, because animal blood not only transports nutrients, but also metabolites.
My wife's master is from Jiangsu, and the old lady is very good at making lung soup. She said that in her hometown, women have the habit of eating pig lungs for confinement, which the locals think is a big supplement. But I always felt that pig lungs were not clean, so I didn't want to eat them. However, I appreciated the way the old lady handled the pig lung: put the trachea of the lungs on the tap, fill the lungs with water, and tap with your hands while rinsing; rinse for a while, turn the trachea upside down to control the water, and repeat it many times, until there is no more dirty stuff flowing out of the trachea, and the whole lung becomes white. Finally, put the trachea on the faucet, use the knife to gently cut the surface of the lung, and let the water come out of the knife edge, so that the pig's lungs can be completely washed. After the cleaning of the pig's lungs into the rice noodles under the pot to cook, fished out and cut into thin slices, after the pot, and then the second pot to make a lung soup, and finally the fried steamed steamed buns into the soup to eat.
In the medical book "Tips for Evidence and Treatment" written by Dai Yuanli in the Ming Dynasty, it is said that pig lungs cure lung weakness and cough. The method is: a pig lung, sliced, fried in sesame oil, and eaten with porridge. Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" also said that pig lung cures lung deficiency cough and coughing. From this point of view, perhaps the old lady's pig lung supplement is well-founded.
My wife once made lung soup according to her master's instructions, but after I tasted it, I didn't think it tasted good. Northerners are sometimes not used to southern flavors. For example, I am extremely disgusted by the sweet meat of the south, and I never buy the like Wenzhou sauce duck. One year when I went to Tibet, I wanted to buy some yak jerky, but I tasted it for half a day and found that there were many types, all of which were sweet. It's just strange, Jiangnan sweet we don't say anything, they have been like this since ancient times; but which door of your Tibetan sweet, blindly bustling! Don't think about the tastes of our Shandong people! We grew up eating salted fish and shrimp sauce, do you understand? Do you understand?
My mother especially liked to eat pig lungs before she died, saying that it was chewed up "Flutterer" and "Fluttershy", but it was delicious. Unfortunately, at that time, the family often did not even have enough food to eat, and there would be spare money to buy pig lungs. Now I can afford it, but the old man has been dead for more than thirty years. It is also a sad thing for a son to want to raise and not to be kissed.
My nephew also loves to eat pig lungs, and from time to time he buys a lung that has just come out of the pot, holds it in his hand and eats it while walking, and before anyone arrives home, his lungs have been eaten. He used to exaggerate the pig's lungs like flowers. One day, I was confused by his blowing, and I was going to accept the idea that pig lungs were delicious, so I went to a deli and bought a small piece, but I didn't finish eating it twice in a row - still not that lucky.
It seems that the Mongols don't eat much water. I once heard a friend who works in Inner Mongolia say that the Mongols kill sheep, never wash it with water, but just peel off the sheep skin on the grass, cut off the meat with the sheep skin as a trick board, and put it directly into the pot to boil, and most of the internal organs are thrown away. I don't know if this statement is true. If that's the case, it would be a shame to throw away the water.
In the 1990s, in the hydropower plant community of Zhongyuan Oilfield, a clean retired old man boiled pigs and sold them. The bitter sausages he made were particularly delicious. He is boiled in the large intestine of a pig stuffed with small intestines. I often go to buy. The intestine is cut into sections, the outer ring is the large intestine, and the inside is a small circle of small intestines, which looks good, the taste is slightly bitter, and it is marinated, which is very good. Later, the old man was gone, and the delicious bitter intestines he cooked could no longer be eaten.
Later, I found an old shop selling sewage on the south side of the oil construction company and opposite the bus terminal, and the name of the shop was Ding Zhaitianji. The water in this shop is very complete, the heart, liver, lungs, belly, large intestine, small intestine, small belly (urine bubbles) are available, and sell bitter sausage, the taste is very good. When I was hungry, I ran to this store to buy some wine. The advantage of this house is that the sewage sold does not add dye. Once, my wife and I went to buy some small intestines and small stomachs, and before we left the door, my wife said, "Buy another piece of pork liver." I looked at it and said, "Don't buy it, this pork liver ash will not slip away." The shopkeeper said, "It's not dyed." After he mentioned it, I remembered that this kind of gray pig liver is not the true color of pig liver. Think about it, the pork liver we cooked at home was originally this color, and now it is the kind of earth-red pork liver that is sold everywhere, which is stained. We eat dyed pork liver every day, and we have long forgotten what the true color of pork liver is. It seems that after eating abnormal things for a long time, you will become accustomed to it and forget what normal things should be. Thinking of this, I immediately went back to buy a piece of liver and went home to taste it, which was really good.
Why do I often buy pig intestines and bitter intestines to eat instead of large intestines? Mainly afraid of oil in the large intestine. Pig intestines are of course much more fragrant than small intestines and bitter sausages, but the oil is too big.
But my nephew, who loves pig lungs, loves the pig intestine even more. Sometimes at night, even if he had fallen asleep, he would get up to buy a pig intestine, come back to cut the bacheba, and then climb to the bed with the plate, sit in the bed and eat before sleeping. When his son was in elementary school, one day the teacher told him to use "love" to make a sentence, and the child made "Daddy loves to eat pig intestines."
Once, the nephew mentioned that Jinan's nine-turn large intestine is particularly fragrant, saying that every time he goes to Jinan, he first has to go to a fixed shop to eat a plate. When he said this, he hooked up my hungry worm at once. I searched on Baidu, heck, it was really disgusting to see the nine-turn large intestine on the picture that was golden and shiny. Just then, my third brother was coming from Jinan and asked me what I wanted. I said, buy nine turns of the large intestine. The third brother said that it was good to eat that thing while it was hot, and if it was taken so far away, it must have become a bag of white oil and it was not delicious. As soon as I heard it, I had to give up. When I go to Jinan in the future, I must ask my third brother to invite me to an authentic restaurant for a meal. Previously, I also searched on Taobao, but there was no nine-turn large intestine sold on the Internet. Those stores in Jinan really don't do business, and the whole bag is open and eats the nine-turn large intestine online to sell ah! Even if it is not authentic enough, it is okay to ask the people who think of it to beat the worms.
The donkey meat in my hometown of Guangrao, Shandong Province, is particularly famous and delicious. But what I think is more delicious than donkey meat is the donkey plate intestine. During the New Year, my nephew often bought me a jar and couriered it. Before the meal, I fished out a piece of donkey plate intestines from the jar, and everything, the sauce-colored meat jelly in the intestines, emitted a thick aroma and trembled and rolled out. I grabbed a piece of it in my mouth with my intestines, oh, it's delicious!
It is said that the manufacturers of donkey meat in Guangrao County also sell another thing: the donkey's words. I told me that a boss he knew had to go to the factory every time he went to the county to buy a donkey that had just come out of the pot. When the driver was driving in front, he sat in the back of the car and nibbled on the words while it was hot. The car ran from Guangrao to Dongying, and he just nibbled the thing from this end to that end.
I once asked the small hair who studied Chinese medicine, what to eat and what to supplement is reasonable? He said it didn't make sense. Because, no matter which part of the animal it is, cooked, it is nothing more than protein. What works for people is hormones, but as soon as the hormones are heated, they disappear. Theoretically, if you want hormones to work, it is best to eat them raw, but who eats lamb loins and pig loins raw? In the donkey thing, it is difficult to say whether there is a hormone or not; even if there is, it is even more difficult to say whether the donkey's hormones work for people, and in addition, whether it is harmful to people is difficult to say.
Originally, there was a shop selling boiled sheep's heads on Wuyi Road at the headquarters of the oilfield, and the façade was not large, but the boiled sheep's heads were delicious. The meat is rotten, and with a gentle break of the hand, the sheep's brain can be peeled out completely. The two sheep eyes on the top, as long as the chopsticks move, will roll out completely. At this time, ask for a bowl of haggis soup, one or two burnt cakes, and a breakfast can be eaten beautifully. According to a friend, the sheep's eye should be eaten while it is hot, but the bull's eye must be cold and cold, because the sheep's eye is hot and the bull's eye is cold. But why should the hot ones be eaten hot and the cool ones eaten cold? I don't know, I have to ask Chinese medicine.
On Zhongyuan Road, there is a White Gang lamb soup shop, and the soup and sheep's head are well done. One year, singer Li Lingyu came to the Central Plains Cultural Palace to perform, and my wife and sisters were responsible for organizing and receiving. Li Lingyu asked Puyang what was delicious, and as a result, the sisters were asked, and my wife quietly reminded her that she could take Li Lingyu to drink Baigang mutton soup and nibble on sheep's head. The sisters began to think that such a big star to drink mutton soup is indecent, but they could not think of a more distinctive famous food, so they tentatively asked Li Lingyu, did not expect her to be very happy. On that day, they went to this shop together to drink mutton soup and nibbled on the sheep's head, and Li Lingyu praised it as delicious. This shop moved away a few years ago, but last week I drove there and found that the store was open again, I don't know if it was the original store, I have to take the time to try it.
Now, on May 1st Road, there is also a Majia mutton soup; there is also such a family on the edge of the community where I live. In winter mornings, I sometimes go to a bowl and nibble on two burnt cakes. After eating and drinking, the body immediately warmed up and lifted the spirit.
North of Renqiu Road and south of the logging company, there is a single county mutton soup, which has been very hot, and the price is relatively cheap. In addition to lamb broth, haggis soup, and burnt cakes, this family also sells braised noodles. Braised noodles are added directly to lamb broth for a dollar, which is a good deal.
Human habits can be cultivated. As a child, I didn't eat lamb. Once, someone in the village killed a sheep raised by his family, cooked the meat and gave it to my family with soup and water. My father didn't think anything of it, and ate it all. When I was in college, I kept seeing shops with shabu lamb on the side of the road, and I never knew what shabu-shabu was like, and I never thought that shabu-shabu would have anything to do with me. Later, after working, I tasted the taste of shabu lamb, accepted it, and developed the habit of eating shabu lamb.
Similarly, I didn't know that the sheep waist could be eaten, and when I heard my wife talk about her sisters eating the sheep waist at the stall, I laughed in shock: "Huh? That stuff can also be eaten? "Later, I ate more and felt that the taste was really good." But this object does not seem to have entered the recipes of people outside Puyang. Once, when a colleague was crossing the Yellow River, he encountered a big man with two baskets of sheep on the boat, so he asked him what he was packing, and the man replied loudly: "Sheep eggs!" They Puyang people love to eat this thing!" The words are tinged with ridicule and disdain. The big man was a seller of sheep and eggs. In Heze, the eggs were not eaten, and he collected them cheaply and sold them to Puyang. Now, on the roast stall in Puyang, a sheep egg is ten yuan.
The word "outer waist" cannot be found in the dictionary I have at hand, but the "Tokyo Dream Record" once mentioned "red white waist", and I guess that the "red waist" probably refers to the inner waist of the sheep, and the "white waist" refers to the outer waist of the sheep. Because the inner waist is red, the outer waist is white. "White waist" and "outer waist" sound much more elegant than "sheep eggs", and they are also very graphic.
In recent years, for health reasons, many people have been reluctant to eat water. Mainly afraid of the cholesterol in there. It is said that people in many countries do not eat animal offal, and Americans simply do not eat it, kill livestock, and throw away the offal or use it to make fertilizer. Now it is a large number of exports to China.
Before, I never felt anything wrong with going into the water. When I was a child, in my rural hometown, if any son-in-law brought a complete pair of pigs into the water or a pig head to the mother-in-law's house during the New Year, the old man would be very happy and think that the son-in-law was very sensible. At the end of the Year, washing the stomach, liver and lungs over and over again with alkali noodles, and carefully scalding the pig hair on the pig's head with fire chopsticks, it is a very pleasant thing for the old man, and it can also bring inexplicable excitement to the children of the whole family, because this means that there will soon be meat at home. In the countryside, the water and the pig's head have always been regarded as meat. In the eyes of children, they are no different from the best pork belly, back meat and so on.
During the New Year, the production team will report the old cattle that cannot be moved to the commune, and the commune can kill and eat meat after approval. But to kill the pigs raised in the production team, you don't have to go through this cumbersome procedure. On the day of slaughtering pigs and cows, children are also the most excited. Piece by piece of meat is divided into families, which are generally not for children—they are used by adults to entertain relatives. But that night, the children could eat cows or pigs in the water—if he could survive until the water was cooked and not sleepy. After the meat is divided, the adults often get together to discuss who will cook the water at night, who will produce firewood, and who will produce spices such as oil and salt sauce and vinegar star anise peppercorns. The water, the pig's head, the pig's trotters were washed, the pot was put down, and the fire in the hearth burned red, and the smoke filled the whole house. The adults smoked dry cigarettes, pulled the croaks, and waited for a pot of meat to be slowly cooked. About the middle of the night, the meat was rotten, and it was fairly served in the clay pot brought by each person, and the family members of each family brought back the soup with steaming water.
Often, when my father came home, I couldn't stay up and fell asleep on the kang. At that time, my father would often shout me up and stuff my stomach and stomach into my mouth. I chewed with sleepy eyes, and my heart was full of enjoyment: how can it be so fragrant! Perhaps, at that time, the craving for protein in all parts of the body was concentrated in the mouth. There is only one word that comes out of the mouth: hungry! Pigs into the water, cows into the water, can eat a few bites, two words: unsatisfied!
Liang Shiqiu wrote a "Hunger", which has this passage: "The most hungry time for people is during the period when they want to eat something and cannot get it... I had been obsessed with the flavor of Peking sheep's head meat for seven or eight years; after returning home after victory, one winter night, I heard the shouts of the sheep's head sellers in the deep alleys, immediately crawled out of the bed, called the vendors into the doorway, I sat in a lazy chair and watched him under the dim illumination of the oil lamp, pull out a snowy thin knife, cross the blade of the sheep's face, slice it thin, and then take out a gauze-covered horn and sprinkle it with some burnt salt. I held a plate of sheep's head meat, repeatedly drilled into the bed, put a piece of sheep's head meat on the pillow into my mouth, and unconsciously entered the sleep, very satisfied to solve the addiction. "I have always liked Liang Shiqiu's words, which are full of the true taste and true disposition of life, and this text makes me tireless to read." In particular, the words "sheep's face" and "the pieces are thin", as well as the sentences such as "put a piece of sheep's head meat on the pillow into the mouth", are really very impressive!
There is a "Zhouqiao Night Market" in the "Tokyo Dream Hualu", which mentions that Suzaku Gate has a seller of "batch cut sheep's heads", and the annotation says that the word "batch cut" means that it is cut very thinly. I think that the peddler who sold Liang Shiqiu's sheep face may have inherited this batch cutting craft from the imperial capital of the Great Song Dynasty. "Zhouqiao Night Market" also mentions a kind of food called "rotary fried sheep white intestine", which refers to the freshly fried and sold sheep intestines. The book doesn't say anything specific, but this summer, I used a woman selling blood sausages outside the mass supermarket on May 1st Road. Pig intestines are filled with pig blood, cut into sections, and fried and sold. Once I bought a little bit of a taste, there was a smell of turbidity, the taste was not good. I don't know if the fried sausage mentioned in "Zhouqiao Night Market" is not a thing.
There is also an article in the "Tokyo Dream Record" "East Corner Lou Street Alley", saying that in the southeast corner of the Imperial City, there are "sheep's heads", "belly lungs", "your room" and "belly" at night. "Your room" here refers to breasts. "Belly" refers to tripe and ox pages. Although the book does not mention how to eat these things, it can be seen that in the Song Dynasty, people had a great love for the sewing of livestock, and at that time, people ate a wider range than they do now. I haven't seen anyone who eats your room now.
When mentioning the "Manchu Han Quan seat" in the "Yangzhou Painting Record", it lists the dishes that served the six divisions and hundreds of officials when the Kangxi and Qianlong Second Emperors who were touring the south at that time, including the two dishes of "pig miscellaneous shi" and "mutton miscellaneous shi", which are estimated to be the sewage of pigs and sheep, but how these two dishes are made is not elaborated in the book. Being able to entertain the emperor and hundreds of officials with the sewage of pigs and sheep is enough to show that these two kinds of sewage are still very high-grade.
Now, although I also know that eating too much water is not good for my health, the eating habits I have developed over the years are really not easy to change. When I'm hungry, I still like to buy something to get addicted to. Isn't it good to eat too much of this stuff, and there's not always too much to eat less, right? It is not easy to stay up until the pigs, cattle and sheep go into the water to eat as much as they want, and eat as much as they want, but they dare not eat, isn't it blessed!