Produced by | Tiger Sniff Youth Culture Group
Author | Slag County
Caption figure | Visual China
This article was first published on the tiger sniff young content public account "That NG" (ID: huxiu4youth). Here, we present the face, stories and attitudes of today's young people.
When I woke up this morning, I suddenly found one thing: I hadn't eaten a freshly made breakfast in a long time.
Friends around me, either take the pastries bought in the bakery or convenience store, or order the takeaway casually; otherwise, simply do not eat, put breakfast and lunch together, and enjoy the brunch time.
But, in my mind, it didn't seem like that when I was a child.
The breakfast stalls of my childhood, almost like this, just down the street, real street food
In Beijing, for example, although this is what everyone calls a gastronomic desert, a carbon hell built by burning cakes and oil cakes and hemp balls, for those who grew up with this, these are the tastes of hometown.
Before I went to school when I was a child, my parents took me to the street breakfast stall, sat on the plastic matza and looked at the breakfast chef, and the noodles smeared with brown syrup were thrown into the hot oil pot by the master, and turned into a noisy sugar oil cake in the sound of the trumpet, which was the most joyful and relaxing fragment in my memory.
Image source: Station B @ fake food po master
At that age when drinking soy milk and putting 8 spoonfuls of sugar is not too sweet, children are always hungry for all foods with sweetness.
In addition to the sugar oil cake is the evergreen model of childhood breakfast, the bean paste stuffed mochi wrapped in sesame seeds is also the first one sold out of the breakfast stall at school, and the students who get together will always lament the ingenuity of the inventor of the hemp dough, and feel magical for the three-layer taste experience of the hemp ball comprehensive soft, crisp and sweet.
At that time, the breakfast stalls were open in the open air along the street, which was very popular, and some streets were eager to see 3 long queues along the way.
Some of them are state-owned enterprise canteens setting up stalls outside, and some are from other villages who come to Beijing to earn a living for the livelihood of peasants. However, the big guys are not divided, generally eat closely, and over time, they become acquaintances with the boss: there is nothing tofu brain to give you more shaving, and sending you two fritters has become a common thing.
At that time, I always thought it was a preemption, and only later did I learn that the scene consisting of steaming tofu brains, hot oil that made a rattling sound in the pot, and people chatting while eating breakfast was called fireworks.
Image source: Visual China
From the perspective of foreign friends, this kind of breakfast stall along the street is also charming.
In 2002, The Japanese Kikuchi was transferred to China to work, and on the second day after landing in Beijing, he began his own Chinese cuisine adventure.
At Kikuchi's strong request to eat "authentic Chinese street food", the assistant brought him to his doorstep for breakfast, which consisted of "thick-skinned cement" buns, rustic pickles and chicken soup stew.
9 points of noodles, 1 point of minced meat, this is the "thick skin cement filling" bun that everyone has eaten
When I first saw Kikuchi at a street breakfast stall in Beijing, I quickly saw this stall as a model full of Chinese cuisine philosophies:
The steamer basket that is built high is a replica of the scene of "Little Dangjia"; the pickle is an exotic benefit; and the mutant buns issued by those old noodles refresh his understanding of "Hangzhou Xiaolongbao".
During his first two years in Beijing, he particularly liked to go to street stalls to solve breakfast problems, partly because it was delicious, and partly because he saw breakfast trips as a way to integrate into China.
"At that time, I used to eat buns with people, and the street stalls had a very good sense of life, very Chinese. But now, Beijing can't find that form. Ju said, who has lived in Beijing for 19 years.
A Chinese breakfast shop in documentaries from the last century
I have always thought that this kind of street stall is always there, and this determination is not out of people's confidence in the romantic poetry of "fireworks and fireworks", but from a habit.
It wasn't until one day, when I walked out the door and wanted to go to the stall for a fresh breakfast: I found that the delicious breakfast stalls on the street, gone, had disappeared.
This feeling also comes from my colleague Xiao Liu, who even had to cycle around to Guijie Hutong to find it when he went to work in Sanlitun to eat an egg cake.
There are a lot of people online who miss the street breakfast stalls very much
Street stalls began to flourish as a "necessary supplement to the socialist economy" after the reform and opening up, solving the employment problems of many unemployed workers, but in the 1990s, a large number of unlicensed food safety problems, roadside stalls occupying the road, littering and other problems became one of the problems of municipal management.
In particular, the problem of food safety is the most serious. At that time, the Beijing Evening News reporter secretly visited the breakfast stall on the side of the Princess Tomb Street, and found that the stall owner piled up the bowls used by the diners, soaked them in water and then used them, and when they were questioned that this was unhygienic, people tilted their heads: "The human mouth is not a pig's mouth, there is something dirty." ”
At that time, there were many laid-off workers who went out to set up stalls for trademarks under the post card, which was a scene of the times.
In the face of various problems, the local government struck a blow at the guerrillas who set up stalls along the streets: breakfast stalls began to leave the streets and had to pay high rents to enter the street stores to operate.
In Beijing's Chaoyang District, for example, a shop of about 4 square meters rents more than 10,000 yuan. For breakfast practitioners who are already extremely low-profit and hard-working, it is equivalent to raising the entry threshold and dissuading a group of people; at the same time, it also reduces the visibility of breakfast stalls.
While retiring street breakfast stalls, in order not to affect the breakfast of citizens, many places have launched "breakfast projects". In 2002, Beijing also set up breakfast carts and breakfast kiosks in the city's most crowded places to sell assured breakfasts.
The project to promote breakfast carts originated in the 1970s. At that time, it was very difficult to eat breakfast in many cities, people had to wait for half an hour to eat breakfast, and some people could not wait, so they had to go to work hungry.
To this end, in September 1978, Tianjin decided to alleviate the problem of breakfast difficulties by establishing breakfast carts and breakfast kiosks, and people's daily also reported on this matter on September 3 of that year:
"Tianjin's way to improve early supply is to increase mobile trucks on the streets and increase sales stalls."
People's Daily, September 3, 1978, front page
Breakfast sold in a breakfast cart, although convenient, is not a real breakfast in the eyes of 21st century breakfast fundamentalists, which can only be regarded as a crude energy package.
They can't accept the tofu brain in plastic cups, they also hate the soulless frozen buns and industrial sausages, and they think that pancakes lack the soul of street stalls and are too confused.
On the other hand, the low profit of breakfast (gross profit is about 20%-30%), and the high amount of labor investment, also make the breakfast car project not so smooth, that year, the 5 companies that bid for the success of the Beijing breakfast project, one company announced its withdrawal in the first year.
Therefore, if you carefully observe life on the way to work, you will find a lot of paint-stained breakfast carts on the street.
Once a stronghold for urban commuters to replenish their energy, and as strongholds that would become map hotspots whenever the sun rose, they have long since become the canvas of graffiti doodlers, a kind of urban relic.
Today, the breakfast carts that are still insisting on it have not been what they expected.
Although they no longer occupy the road, the mottled traces of oil still raise concerns about food safety.
Where to go for breakfast is very important in the hearts of senior tourists, because only breakfast, and only breakfast, is the most condensed taste symbol of a city:
Sugar and oil cakes in Beijing, flour in Changsha, hot dry noodles in Wuhan, rice in Shanghai, mushy soup in Xi'an and peppery soup in Henan, beef noodles in Lanzhou, oil towers in Urumqi, porridge and intestine powder in Guangzhou, tiger bite pig in Taiwan, oil tea in Chongqing... Two or three words are one side of the water and the soil and the other side of the people, reflecting the soul of a city's philosophy of life.
Ball soup and oil tower is one of the golden collocations of Xinjiang breakfast, oil tower is made of butter and flour, not only pay attention to the more noodles the better, but also must be picked up the "top of the tower" can bring the whole authentic enough.
But unfortunately, for busy office workers from Beijing to New York, the former is a luxury compared to sitting down to eat breakfast and sleeping for five minutes, the former is just needed.
Therefore, the ordering APP and chain convenience stores have become the general operation of people eating in the early morning, people no longer care about its temperature, and no longer mind its provenance, whether it is fresh handmade or freshly heated frozen food, can make it up, fill the stomach on the line.
Maybe in a few decades, a new generation of urban kids won't remember a pyrotechnic breakfast: a cup of hot coffee with a koan, the best breakfast they can imagine.
It sounds sad, but there's nothing to be sad about, and it feels like it's just another metabolism of the city.
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