Shen Yin
In modern cities, the New Year has become more and more simple. However, before Chinese New Year's Eve, the process of making various preparations for the New Year goods was full of the atmosphere of the New Year. From the winter solstice, every household will begin to prepare New Year goods, and the meat stalls in the wet market are full of bacon and sausages, which means that it is almost the New Year.
In Yuan Ming's "Suiyuan Food List", there are three kinds of meat products eaten in winter: sauce meat, bad meat, and cured meat. He concluded: "The above three flavors are all winter and moon vegetables, and spring and summer are not suitable." "These three dishes actually happen to contain the New Year goods for the New Year.
Let's start with the sauce meat. Yuan Ming recorded the practice, "First slightly pickle, use noodle sauce sauce, or mix it with autumn oil alone and air dry." ”
It seems very simple, that is, after the pork is salted, or brushed with the noodle sauce, or soaked in soy sauce, and then air-dried. In fact, the sauce meat here can be broken down into two kinds, the latter of which is dried with soy sauce, similar to the "soy sauce meat" said by Shanghainese, or the "green sauce meat" of northerners.
Soy sauce meat
The origin of the former kind of brush noodle sauce is much older.
Legend has it that the sauce was created by Zhou Gong, and Zhang Dai's "Night Sailing Ship" reviews the history of food, which has "the flint people's clan making breasts and making chests." ”
Dried meat is air-dried meat, and zì is a large cut piece of meat. "Yellow Emperor as hot", the searing is roasted; "into soup as hǎi)", the sauce is meat sauce; "Yu Zuo ( xiǎng)", the fish is dried fish; "Wu Shou Meng as a fish (zhǎ)", the fish is pickled fish. "Sister 嫘作醷 (yì)", 醷 is plum pulp. "Yin Guo zuo 醯 (xī)", the mash is vinegar.
Fish Carp Visual China Figure
"Zhou Gongzuo sauce", the sauce is actually a generic name, including 醢 and 醯. The Zhou Li (周礼) features the Qiu (醢人) and the Qiu Ren (醯人), who are specifically responsible for the brewing of sauce for the court.
Pickles, originally a type of food that was chopped fresh meat or fish, marinated and fermented with wine and salt. There are many sauces in the Zhou Li, such as the Zhou Li Tianguan Tsukasa Zai, which records the diet of the court, "The king's gift eats six grains... The sauce is made with a hundred and twenty urns. ”
In addition to the imaginable pork sauce such as pigs, cattle, sheep, poultry, rabbits and dogs, there are also "oyster sauce" (ant egg sauce) in the "Seven Pickles", snails (field snail sauce) and so on. Of course, vegetables and beans can also be made into sauce. In the Qin and Han dynasties, sauces made from soybeans and flour appeared.
Today, it seems uncommon to use meat marinated fermentation to make sauce, sauce meat also uses soy sauce, but it is often done after winter "stir-fry sauce", some inherit its spirit, with fresh pork, bamboo shoots, tofu dried diced sauce, but do not need to be sealed to ferment, but fried.
If you want to be careful, mix in the cool cooked peanut rice when you are ready to eat, so that the peanuts can maintain a crisp taste. Generally Shanghainese stir-fry sauce at home, a stir-fry is a large bowl, can eat for several days, whether it is dinner with rice, or in the morning "over" rice, are complementary. If the ingredients are extravagant, put some shrimp and upgrade it to "Eight Treasures Hot Sauce", which is enough to be placed on the table where Chinese New Year's Eve rice.
Shanghai soy sauce meat is an important New Year dish. Soy sauce meat, as the name suggests, is cured in soy sauce and dried. In the past, after the winter solstice, you can see that in the alley and on the balcony, the soy sauce meat is hanging out, and the pieces are black and shiny. The degree of wealth in the home can also be seen from the number of new year goods hanging on the balcony. But now it is less, the main reason is that the production is too troublesome, after all, a piece of meat to be soaked to dry, but also to worry about the sunscreen, rain and mildew, living on the first floor of the second floor, but also to beware of not to steal from stray cats and dogs in the community, so troublesome, it is really not as good as online shopping finished products.
Soy sauce meat is delicious, and after steaming, it has a rich aroma, which is the taste of soy sauce ripening. To make soy sauce meat, you also need fat meat, so many people prefer to pick pork belly, steamed after the fat part of the crystal like amber, if steamed pad some dry silk under the meat, dry silk sucks full of meat oil, exceptionally delicious.
When did soy sauce meat originate? It should always be after the birth of soy sauce, but it is impossible to know when soy sauce was invented, and in the written records, the Song Dynasty's "Mountain Family Qing Offering" first appeared in the soy sauce to fry Chunxun, fish or shrimp.
If you have to count forward, you can see the "clear sauce", the Qin and Han Dynasties have appeared soybeans and flour as raw materials of the sauce, the sauce after a long period of storage, the surface of the surface of the smell of aromatic, the color of the crystal red sauce, known as "clear sauce". The "sauce qing" and "bean soy sauce" in the Northern Wei "Qi Min Zhi Shu" may be the prototype of soy sauce.
Beijing has a kind of clear sauce meat, which is famous and can be called China's three famous meats together with Jinhua ham and Guangdong bacon. But Liang Shiqiu feels that the sauce meat is better: "Some northerners are afraid when they see ham, and they always feel that there is no sauce meat to be refreshing, and the authentic northern restaurants make ingredients, never use ham, it is always sauce meat." Qing sauce meat in the Republic of China era is "net red", it is said that when the Famous Peking Opera performed in Shanghai, he carried Qing Sauce Meat as a souvenir.
Meat with clear sauce
Tang Lusun's "The Unique Diet of Beiping" also wrote about the sauce meat, saying that the wife of the wealthy Shanghai merchant Hartung loved to eat clear sauce meat, and one year bought five or six hundred pounds in one go and shipped it back to Shanghai, directly buying a store.
However, the qing sauce meat disappeared after the Republic of China, as if deeply hiding the merit and name, but a few years ago, Beijing's old brands began to try to restore it again.
Once, I ate at Cheap Fang in Beijing, and the restaurant mainly promoted "Soy Sauce Meat", because the four dishes that Cheap Fang is famous in history are Qing Sauce Meat and Roast Duck in the Oven, Bucket Chicken, and Box Dish. In 1937, after Qu Shuwen, the former old manager of the cheap shop, closed his business to boycott the Japanese Kou Guan Zhang, the production skills of barrel chicken and clear sauce meat were lost. Today, Cheap Shop has spent a lot of effort trying to restore it.
The soy sauce meat was brought to the table, and I looked at the black and shiny meat and wondered: Isn't this shanghai's soy sauce meat? It looks very similar in appearance, but it is much richer in eating methods, in addition to steaming or stir-frying with vegetables, you can also cut and fry horseshoe and other ingredients, wrap cakes or eat them over fire. In contrast, the salty aroma of Shanghai soy sauce meat is direct and coarse, while the salty aroma of clear sauce meat is more abundant and the aftertaste is more abundant.
It is said that the method of making clear sauce meat is complex, and it is necessary to "salt seven sauce eight", first salt and peppercorns marinate for seven days, repeatedly press out the moisture of the meat, and then immerse the meat in soy sauce, turn it every day for eight consecutive days. After fishing out, the shade is dried, and it is sealed in the tank after the spring of the following year, and it is eaten before and after the frost falls. Counting the time, it took almost a year and a half before and after, no wonder the rich heritage.
Yuan Ming wrote about the rotten meat, "First slightly marinate, and then add rice and rotten." ”
There are many dishes with bad dishes, such as white cut rotten meat in Suzhou cuisine, bad button meat in Wuxi cuisine with thick oil and red sauce, and so on. The bad meat written by Yuan Ming is actually a kind of pickling, which is also pickled, and the medium can be lees, wine, plum juice, honey, salt, and ash. Pickled with lees and wine, there are more melon vegetables, such as the "Qi Min Zhi Shu" there are "Making Thorns, Tibetan Lettuce Method Eighty-Eighth", "Tibetan Yue Melon Method: Trough a bucket, three liters of salt, three stays of submerged melons." Out, test it with cloth, and flood it again. Japan also has a similar method of pickled melon vegetables, which use not bad but chaff and call it "rice bran stains."
Preserve the food with the bad and let it ferment, just like Yuan Mei said, "first slightly pickle, then add the rice paste", or in the "Golden Bottle Plum", The Earl ying uses the red rotten to cultivate the anchovy, then stir some sesame oil, place it in a magnetic jar, and when a guest comes, take it out and steam a dish. Including bad eggs, bad crabs, are so "raw bad".
But modern people eat, mostly "cooked", the poultry, fish and shrimp cooked, into the rice or bad brine. For example, Suzhou bad recipe, even if it is not like the Shanghai people's bad dish, the meat is boiled white and immersed in the bad brine, it is still pickled, blanched with soy sauce, rock sugar simmered over low heat, and then used the bad brine to enhance the taste. Although people prefer to eat bad dishes in the summer, there are also many bad dishes in the New Year's dishes, such as cold pots, but the bad ones are rich, chicken, duck, fish and meat door cavity, or hot dishes in the bad steaming.
I've recently been obsessed with stuffing braised striped fish. The sake itself has a sweetness, but also has a bit of a hook effect, making the braised sauce taste more plump, or with dried fish fried and soaked in the brine, you can also eat for a few days. In winter, the East Sea striped fish, commonly known as "oil strip fish", has oil on its body and is more delicious.
The preparation method recorded by Yuan Ming is: "Rub with a little salt and use it within three days." ”
It still sounds a little different from cured meat, in fact, it is slightly marinated with salt, in addition to making the salt taste, it also makes the meat more compact and tender, and the same chicken or fish can also be pickled. And the bacon is probably not enough to marinate for three days, and the salt is best fried first. This is a bit like The Yin Wenduan Gongjia style meat listed by Yuan Ming, "Kill a pig, cut it into eight pieces, fry four dollars for each piece of salt, and rub it carefully to make it meticulous." Then hang high with the wind without the sun. ”
What is the difference between bacon and wind meat? If you have to divide, the bacon belongs to "curing", while the wind meat belongs to the "dry".
Pickling emphasizes the medium, salt, lees, wine, etc., ash is pickled, such as persimmon cake is ash pickling. Drying emphasizes the removal of moisture from food, such as sun, shade drying, air drying, and smoking. As far as wind meat is concerned, whether to rub it with salt before air drying is not the focus of production, but the focus is on "hanging high in the wind and no day" for a year and a half.
Ancient dried meat mainly consists of dried meat and wax, when making dried meat, in addition to adding salt, but also add pepper, cinnamon, ginger and other spices.
For example, in the "Qi Min Zhi Shu", "the seventy-fifth of the breast", it is recorded as "the method of making the white breast of the summer", and the essence of the cow, sheep, musk, and venison is used. Break the pieces, soak in cold water, remove the blood, and the water is clear and stop. Pan the white salt in cold water, stop to clear, minced pepper and soak. Stay out again, dry in the shade. When it is boiling, it is lightly beaten with a wooden stick to make it firm. ”
Although salt is used here, it is not directly salted, but soaked in brine, which shows the difference between salting and salting. Salt is in drying, not the medium for removing moisture, so ham, which was born in the Song Dynasty, is also classified as pickled.
Wax, which seems to be related to fire or smoke. In modern times, bacon sausages in Guangdong, Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan and other places all belong to this category. There is also a saying that bacon is made in the waxing moon, so it is called "bacon".
For Shanghainese, the word "Cantonese" should be added before the sausage, indicating that the sausages they usually eat are from Guangzhou. But as I went to more and more places, I found that this food was really all over the land of Shenzhou, such as Sichuan. One winter, I went to Langzhong and walked into the restaurant at random, and I could see that the top of the door was full of bacon sausages, and the first thing to be served at dinner must be a plate of sausages, eating dry, not as oily as Cantonese sausages, but fragrant.
But in fact, in ancient times, the difference between breast and wax was not so clear, and the "Zhou Li Tianguan" "Wax Man" Zheng Xuan commented on "dried meat" and said: "Thin analysis of the breast." 棰之而施江桂曰 forging 脩 (xiū). Wax, small things are all dry. That is to say, the same is dried meat, the large animals are decomposed into strips called "breast", the small animals are called "wax", and the spicy ingredients such as ginger and cinnamon are added and gently pounded to make the dried and solid is called "forging".
Replaced by fish and aquatic products, there are also pickled and dried, the former called "fish" and the latter called "fish". In the Eastern Han Dynasty Liu Xi's "Interpretation of names", it is explained that "the fish, the salt, and the rice are stuffed with salt, and the cooked and eaten are also eaten." ”
Pineapple, or "obstruction", is made into a pickle by fermenting the fish with salt and rice. In the Song Dynasty, sea fishing and breeding developed, pickled seafood suddenly increased, in addition to all kinds of fish, there are snails, oysters, clams, shrimp, Wangchao (small octopus) and so on. And "carp" has also developed rapidly, in addition to all kinds of fish, such as jellyfish, bamboo shoots, white and so on can also be made into "fish", of course, there is Cai Jing's favorite "yellow finch".
In the Song Dynasty, the carp was developed, the fish was also developed, and the fish and fish were the food of the masses. In the "Record of Dream Liang", it is recorded that there are one or two hundred fish shops selling fish and fish in Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, all from "Wen, Tai, Siming and other counties". Fish is salted and dried, the production method is not much different from now, but in the Song Dynasty, there were also fish fish that were not salted and dried, called "light fish".
Later, after the development of cooking technology, "fish" and "fish" are actually quite difficult to distinguish, such as the eggplant in "Dream of the Red Chamber", the fresh eggplant is peeled and seeded, and the net meat is cut into strips and dried, which should look like "fish".
However, some people questioned that "eggplant" should be called "eggplant", because the eggplant should be steamed in chicken soup, then dried, nine steamed and nine dried after being placed in a magnetic jar, sealed tightly, this is "eggplant" ("胙" through "鲊").
Fish is naturally also an indispensable New Year dish for jiangsu and Zhejiang people's new year, after all, the color head of "more than one year" is always inseparable from "fish", and the fish on Chinese New Year's Eve rice is always necessary.
Of course, the ingredients are mostly adapted to local conditions, such as fresh water abundance, and blue fish will be prepared to make fried fish, or salted and dried and steamed. This kind of blue fish, the best is "snail green", that is, eat snail lion grown blue fish, compared to grass carp, the meat is more delicious, but also less earthy.
In October 2020, fishermen and the first batch of dried snail blue fish in Zeshuipai Village, Shaoxing City, Zhejiang Province, Visual China Map
The "Suiyuan Food List" also records a Suzhou way to eat a green fish, "live green fish to the head and tail, chop small squares, salted thoroughly, air dried, into the pot of oil frying; add ingredients to collect brine, and then fry sesame seeds to stir up the pot." "It seems to be more troublesome, now the catering has become convenient and rich, eating fish is not as prudent as before, so dried blue fish does not have to be used as a dish, can be steamed and cut into small pieces, as a snack to eat." Many snack brands have launched similar products.
Of course, the sea fish is also, small yellow fish, eels, etc., the previous dish on the plate, can now be processed into snacks, want to eat, convenient and easy to get, even if it is a dish, with a treasure can also be bought.
However, even so, it is really close to the New Year, and I still miss the taste of the past. For example, some dishes I ate during the New Year when I was a child, such as the delicious cooking made by my mother, although I can't talk about how luxurious and exquisite, but I just think in my heart and read, this may be nostalgia, or maybe it is the meaning of the New Year for modern people.
Just like me, a few days ago, I suddenly missed the taste of eels and fish, so I said to my friend in Zhoushan: "Eels and squids are really delicious, but unfortunately the takeaway is not good." The friend quickly replied, "Yes, make your own handmade." "My friend once stayed in school, always talking with English words, I really don't know if she had eels in her suitcase when she went abroad, I don't know if customs will be frightened when she opens the box." I was thinking wildly, and she added: "My mother said she was going to do it, do you want it?" How much do you want? ”
Editor-in-Charge: Ying Xu
Proofreader: Liu Wei