Tofu, also known as water tofu, is both the most common soy product in China and the main ingredient in Chinese vegetarian dishes. Tofu is made by first shelling soybeans (which are also made from black beans, peanut beans, mung beans, white beans, peas and other beans), washing them, and soaking them in water for an appropriate amount of time. Add a certain proportion of water and grind it into raw soy milk. Then, the raw soy milk is packed in a special cloth bag, the bag mouth is tightened, squeezed hard, and the soybean milk juice is squeezed out of the cloth bag, which is the so-called "pulp". Under normal circumstances, raw soybean milk can be squeezed twice, that is, after the first "pulp" is over, the bag mouth is opened, water is injected, and after the bag mouth is tightened, it is squeezed again. After the raw soy milk is squeezed, it is poured into the pot and heated and boiled to 90 ~ 100 ° C. When cooking soy milk, it is necessary to cook while skimming off the foam that floats on the surface. After the soy milk is cooked, it is necessary to use salt brine with the main component of magnesium chloride, or use a gypsum whose main component is calcium sulfate to "point halogen". After "point brine", soy milk will condense into tofu flowers containing a lot of water. After about 15 minutes, scoop the tofu flowers into a clothed wooden tray or other container. After filling, wrap the tofu flowers in a wrapping cloth, cover the wooden board, press for 10-20 minutes, and the fresh and tender water tofu is made. Whether the tofu is tender or old depends on the amount of coagulant salt brine and gypsum powder added.
In the long history of tofu consumption, people who are diligent in thinking and developing, using tofu as raw materials, have produced a series of aromatic and well-known delicacies at home and abroad, such as "Mapo Tofu" in Sichuan cuisine, "stuffed tofu" in Hakka cuisine, "Pot Collapse Tofu" in Lu cuisine, "Xishi Tofu" in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, "Stinky Tofu" in Beijing, etc. Among them, "Mapo Tofu" is among the "Top Ten Famous Dishes in China".
Tofu was probably introduced to Japan during the Tang Dynasty, and it is said that in 757 AD, when the monk Jian Zhen traveled to Japan, in addition to the Buddhist scriptures, he also introduced the technology of making tofu to Japan. During the Song Dynasty, tofu was introduced to Korea. In 1665, domingo Fernández de Navarrete introduced for the first time to Europeans to a food commonly consumed in China, from the emperor down to the common people, and the preparation of tofu, although he wrote a "Travels", but it did not arouse the interest and attention of Europeans. It was not until the 19th century that tofu was introduced to Europe, Africa, the Americas and other regions and countries. In the middle and late 20th century, with the frequent and deepening of cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, with the rise of vegetarianism and healthy diet concepts in Europe and the United States, tofu began to sweep the West, and tea, porcelain, silk, and world-renowned. Tofu is also known as the "Four Great Inventions" of Chinese food along with bean paste, soy milk (one says gluten), and bean sprouts. Tofu is even praised by some as one of the "100 great inventions that have influenced human civilization"!
China's "Four Great Inventions" of Food
The tender and delicious gourmet tofu has swept the world at the same time, but also aroused people's deep curiosity: who invented it and when? For more than 2,000 years, there have been many controversies surrounding this issue, which is like a gathering of lawsuits.
<h1 class="ql-align-center" >, registration and granting of "patents" for the invention right of ancient tofu</h1>
At present, the most popular and widely known "tofu" invention "patent" was awarded to Liu An (179 BC - 122 BC), the king of Huainan in the Western Han Dynasty. It is said that Liu An, who was obsessed with alchemy in order to seek immortality, inadvertently dripped brine into soybean milk when he was practicing dan with the alchemists in Bagong Mountain in present-day Huainan City, Anhui Province, and the earliest tofu in human history was born.
Statue of the King of Huainan
For this reason, since 1992, Huainan City has held the "Tofu Culture Festival" on September 15 every year. Tofu has become a well-known tourism and cultural business card in Huainan City and even Anhui Province. Hachikosan also won the laurel title of "Birthplace of Tofu".
However, this well-known statement has been constantly questioned and denied since ancient times. Modern scholars have rigorously examined and proved that this statement is just a "beautiful lie" based on documentary records.
The ancients, especially those engaged in tofu making in ancient times, denied that Liu An was the inventor of tofu, mainly because Liu An later rebelled and usurped the throne and could not die well. In ancient China, where the concept of loyalty and righteousness prevailed, because plotting to usurp the throne was the first crime of "ten evils and unforgivable", Liu An was naturally not welcomed by the tofu makers and enjoyed the "special honor" of the inventor of tofu. In the context of all walks of life and various industries keen to involve celebrities as the "grandfather" of the industry, the ancient Chinese tofu making industry also found a famous "grandfather" for the industry - Wusheng Guan Yu!
As a result, Guan Yu, a famous general of the Shu Han Dynasty in the Three Kingdoms, was vaguely honored as "Zushiye" by later generations of pawnbrokers, porters, fortune tellers, incense candles, silkworms, silk weaving, pastries, martial gods, salt, shaved heads and other industries, and was inexplicably "given" a laurel crown of "tofu grandmaster". "Guan Yunchang sells tofu - people are hard and not hard" and other playful words after the break, but also spread in society.
In addition, some people also wear the crown of tofu "Grandmaster Master" on the head of the famous Warring States general Le Yi. According to folklore, Le Yi honored his parents and inadvertently used salt brine, and then made white and tender tofu with plaster, named "Jade of Doufu". Later, the "Jade of The Bean House" was falsely rumored to be the "Meat of the Bean House". When someone kept an account for Le Yi, because of negligence, he not only omitted the word "zhi" in "Meat of Doufu", but also mistakenly emphasized the word "Fu" with the word "meat" (ancient vertical writing, due to negligence to reunite the two words into one word, it is also possible), written as the word "rotten". Le Yi then made a mistake and adopted the name "tofu".
Stills of Le Yi
After the death of his parents, Le Yi made all the soybeans in the family into tofu to entertain the villagers who came to help the mourners. This is also the reason why when later generations do funerals, the meal that will be eaten by those who come to help is called "tofu rice". Later, because some people did not contribute to the funeral, but cheekily mixed rice and ate, people contemptuously referred to this act of taking advantage of others as "eating tofu".
Qin Zhiqi introduced another tofu "inventor" who is not well known to the world- Liu Chang, the king of Huainan (Liu An's father), and the commoner-born princess Ou Chun, whose birthplace was in Huayuan Town, Pi County, Sichuan Province. The tofu makers here have long worshipped Liu Chang and Ou Chun as "ancestors".
Ji Hongkun believes that Wang Mang's "boiling of grass and wood for cheese" in the third year of the emperor (22 years) has a direct relationship with the invention of tofu.
<h1 class= "ql-align-center" > ii. Evidence and controversy of the inventor of tofu</h1>
The "ancestors" (inventors) who take Le Yi, Liu Chang (Ou Chun), Guan Yu, etc. as tofu are, after all, just far-fetched nonsense legends, without any "real hammer". It should be a form of expression of the worship of famous saints such as Le Yi and Guan Yu since the Qin and Han Dynasties and the Tang and Song Dynasties. For modern people, for the above several statements, hehe is good, do not have to take it seriously, and do not have to be more true.
However, Liu An's "right to invent" can be described as a "real hammer", which has been recorded in paper documents and evidenced by archaeological discoveries of Han portrait stones, which has attracted many scholars to study in detail and argue endlessly.
Curiously, in the literature of the Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, there is no written record of making or eating tofu. It was not until the early Northern Song Dynasty that a famous name Tao Yu (903-970) appeared, in fact, or in the two-volume notebook genre work "Qing Yilu" written by a person from the Southern Tang Dynasty into the Song Dynasty in the early Northern Song Dynasty, that the name of "tofu" appeared.
Since then, Song Dynasty literature, such as the poems of Su Shi and others, Su Song's "Tujing Materia Medica" (1057), Tang Shenwei's "Evidence Class Materia Medica" (1094), Kou Zongshuang's "Materia Medica Yanyi" (1116) and other pharmacopoeias, and the Southern Song Dynasty Lu You's "Notes on the Old Xue'an", etc., have a large number of records of tofu, reflecting the popularity and popularity of tofu in the Song Dynasty. At that time, the Shudi people called it "Li Qi". The "Dongpo Tofu" created by Su Shi has become a famous vegetarian dish that has been passed down through the ages.
One of zhu xi's "Yong Vegetarian Poems" of the Southern Song Dynasty is "the seed of beans and beans is thin, and the exhaustion has rotted." Knowing the Huainan technique early, sitting in the spring cloth", he noted himself: "The tofu of the world is originally the Huainan King's Technique." This is perhaps the earliest explicit reference in the currently existing literature to the relationship between Liu An, the king of Huainan, and tofu. Zhu Xi did not know where his claim came from. Some people speculate that the "technique" that Zhu Xi refers to is not a miscellaneous number technique, a fang technique, and the "Wanbi Shu" written by Liu An? Today, this book is gone, and there are still scattered anecdotes, and there is no record of tofu. Therefore, Zhu Xi's words are difficult to become a "real hammer".
With the beginning of the twentieth century, the theory of "double evidence method" proposed by Mr. Wang Guowei to corroborate each other with excavated cultural relics and heirloom documents has become more and more widely applied to historical research, and many scholars have tried to explore the origin of tofu with archaeological discoveries. In 1991, Chen Huawen, based on a 1959 archaeological discovery in the mural inside the tomb of Dahuting Han in Mixian County, Henan Province, believed that there were images of making tofu.
Sun Ji believes that this portrait stone depicts the scene of making wine and preparing wine for drinking and feasting, rather than an image of making tofu. Since then, Dong Xiaojuan, Chen Huawen, Jia E, and others have written articles, either agreeing or refuting, and there is still no conclusion. Although Huang Xingzong believes that the Eastern Han murals of Dahuting are not made of wine, but images of making tofu. But at the same time, he proposed that the tofu invented in the Han Dynasty, because it did not heat soy milk, so its solidity and taste were not as good as modern tofu, so it failed to enter the mainstream of cooking, was not valued by the people at the time, and the literature was rare.
<h1 class="ql-align-center" > Wen Shijun said</h1>
When exactly was tofu invented and by whom? At present, although there is no "real hammer", but because it is tender and delicious, rich in nutrition, it has been popular in the Song Dynasty since its appearance in the Tang Dynasty, and then spread to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States, and other places, and became popular. Because of its low cost and simple production, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, even the lower-class ordinary people may be able to eat it regularly. Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, formulated a system of "persuading honest banquets" to encourage the masses of subjects to be honest and serve the public. The main course of this feast is three dishes and one soup: radish, leek, green vegetable and tofu soup, which takes the meaning of "one clear and two white". Tang Bin, the inspector of Jiangning in the Qing Dynasty, was honest and honest as an official, and was content to be poor, and three meals a day were served with tofu soup, so he was awarded the reputation of "Inspector of Three Soups".
In the mid-twentieth century, Chinese mainland economic difficulties, tofu became an infrequent "luxury". It is said that the "sweet potato" in the Yu opera "Seven Pin Sesame Officials" in the popular joke "When the official is not the master of the people, it is better to go home and sell sweet potatoes", the original "tofu". Niu Decao, the actor of "Tang Cheng", changed "tofu" to "sweet potato" in view of the "expensive" tofu at that time.
Since the reform and opening up, tofu has entered thousands of households and become a common dish on the table of Chinese, and Chinese famous dishes such as "Mapo tofu" are also well-known overseas. In today's increasing emphasis on food safety, health and nutrition, tofu is more and more favored by Chinese and foreign people because of its low pollution and high nutrition.
< h1 class="ql-align-center" > resources</h1>
1. Chen Wenhua: When did tofu originate? Agricultural Archaeology, No. 1, 1991.
2. Qin Zhiqi, "The Inventor of Tofu and the Birthplace Examination", Journal of Chengdu University (Social Science Edition), No. 2, 1993.
3. Ji Hongkun, "Wang Mang's Scientific Experiments and the Invention of Tofu", Journal of Culinary Science of Yangzhou University, No. 1, 1994.
4. Sun Ji: "The Tofu Problem", Agricultural Archaeology, No. 3, 1998.
5. Dong Xiaojuan and Wen Wu, "The Unusual Tofu Problem", Agricultural Archaeology, No. 3, 1998.
6. Jia E, "On the Problem of Tofu", Agricultural Archaeology, No. 3, 1998.
(Author: Haoran Wenshi Contributor Gao Sheng)
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