（IC photo / 图）
Kaiseki cuisine, synonymous with high-end cuisine, was actually very simple at the beginning of its invention, and it was also related to Su Dongpo.
Japan's original udon noodles and soba noodles did come from China, and the national cuisine ramen was indeed invented by some Chinese chefs in Japan.
Today, let's talk about the traditional Japanese food and Japanese paintings that originated from China.
Who was the inventor of ramen? This is a question with no answer.
First of all, we can confirm that the noodles did indeed spread from China to Japan. Ramen was indeed invented by some Chinese chefs in Japan.
One source of noodles is The Wontons and Bread of the Tang Dynasty. Wontons are understood in Japan as dumplings made with glutinous rice and stuffed with fillings, somewhat similar to our tangyuan. The soba is a bit like a fried bun, and the Japanese also call it wheat rope, which is a noodle made of wheat like a rope. It is said that the source of Japan's original udon noodles and soba noodles did come from China, so what about the source of ramen?
In 1884, in Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan, there was a Western restaurant called Yanghexuan, which invented a noodle called "Nanjing soba noodles". It's just that this "Nanjing", synonymous with China, is Chinese soba noodles.
In Nagasaki in 1887, a master named Chen Pingshun came from Fujian, and he opened a Chinese restaurant in Nagasaki called "Sihai Lou", which had a dish called "Signature Assorted Noodles", which was also popular at that time.
In 1911, also in Hokkaido, the bamboo canteen in Sapporo City invited a Chinese master named Wang Wencai, who invented "Chi Na Soba Noodles", which is actually Chinese soba noodles. He added lye water and a little soda to the noodles, so it was very muscular and chewy. And Chef Wang's noodle soup contains chicken soup, vegetables and salted bones.
Master Wang's soup, this Chinese soba noodles and ramen, immediately conquered the people of Sapporo at that time.
Around the same time, in 1910, Asakusa in Tokyo, Japan, also opened a shop called "Lai Lai Xuan", which was sold for Chinese noodles, wontons and yakitori, but the owner was Japanese. This signature shop" was open until 1943. The food is full of nutritious Chinese food, and the noodles and dim sum are only 7 cents, which is 7 cents.
Later, in 1925, a traveler from Zhejiang Province named Pan Yixing came to the small town of Kitakata to open a noodle restaurant called "Genraixuan", which was obviously a tribute to the Lailaixuan in Tokyo.
Kitakata is in a sense considered one of the cities where ramen originated. There are now 80 ramen shops in such a small town, which is the city with the largest number of ramen shops in all japanese people.
Ukiyo-e is now the most Japanese painting in Japan, but the influence of Chinese painting on Japanese painting, from the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties to before the Meiji Restoration, is an influence that japanese art circles and scholars will not deny. For example, the Zen monk Muxi of the Southern Song Dynasty, he has a group of "Eight Views of Xiaoxiang", which is designated as a national treasure in Japan.
Let's talk about ukiyo-e.
What is ukiyo-e? Ukiyo-e was a popular painting with a civic spirit that arose during the Japanese shogunate period (Edo period).
The symbolic ancestor of ukiyo-e is ukiyo-e and bingwei, but the person who is really identified as the ancestor of ukiyo-e is called Lingchuan Shixuan, who was the first folk painter to sign his name on the picture book, but his signature album painted a group of men, called "A Hundred Samurai", which painted 100 poets from samurai background, each with a poem and a painting, but in fact, the most famous and important painting in ukiyo-e is the beauty figure, and the beauty picture of ukiyo-e is different from the beauty picture of Yamato.
Yamato-e-beauty drawings are some of the noble women painted by imperial painters or court painters, such as the representative work "The Tale of Genji", and you want to paint the noble ladies of the Genji family. However, there are two main types of beauty figures in ukiyo-e paintings, one is the famous actors of Kabukicho, and the other is the prostitutes of the brothel.
Who is the best and most well-known ukiyo-e painter of beauty? Lu Xun said about Japanese ukiyo-e, when I was young, I liked Hokusai, that is, Katsushika Hokusai, and now it is, Hiroshige, Utagawa Hiroshige. The second is the figure painting of Kakuma, who is Kitagawa Kaoru.
In Tokyo during the shogunate era, of course, it was called Edo at that time, and there were two famous evil places-
One evil place is Kabukicho, which has three theaters, NakamuraZa, Ichimuraza, and Moritaza, and the other is called Yoshihara, which is a government-approved red light district. Ukiyo-e paintings with kabuki as the subject of kabuki are called servant paintings, and in Japanese, service refers to the actors who play the role called servants, and ukiyo-e paintings that show the theme of song and dance dramas are called servicemen paintings.
However, due to the restrictions of the shogunate, the actors on the stage are all men, and the men playing women are called women, so the servants paint the paintings of men.
Then the beauty figure refers to the prostitutes of Yoshihara, who are called wandering girls in Japanese. The highest rank among the wandering girls is called Hua Kui, also known as Taifu. You must not only be good-looking, but also have a high level of cultural attainment, because their main service is those nobles and high-ranking samurai.
Kitagawa has a classic ukiyo-e painting titled "Three Beauties at that Time", which depicts the three most famous beauties in the jianghu at that time. One is toyohimoto, the flower queen of Yoshihara Tamaharuya, and the other is takashima tea house's signature girl named Aku. There is also a tea house inside The Senso Kannon-ji Temple, Abei of Nambaya. Abei was extremely popular and was the most popular beauty in Edo at that time, and Kitagawa Kasumi painted 15 beautiful paintings based on her.
The core sentence is that ukiyo-e's beauty pictures are people, but they show customs, scenes of customs and things in Japan's time. There's a lot of social content in it. Spring painting is also a big one in ukiyo-e, and spring painting is called "laughing painting" in Japan, which is something that is painted with a funny meaning.
When it comes to kaiseki cuisine, we have to talk about one person, Su Dongpo. Su Dongpo really has a relationship with Japanese kaiseki cuisine.
The origin of the word "kaiseki" is generally said to be in Japanese temples, these monks will be hungry after a long time of practice, preaching, and reading, so they will embrace a warm stone to feed their stomachs, which is of course one of the origins of kaiseki.
There is also a history, according to Mr. Masakatsu Miyazaki, it is related to Su Dongpo's offering to the Buddha's great monk. When Dongpo was exiled to Huangzhou, he collected 298 stones on the yangtze river, and he gave these stones as an offering to his friend, the great monk Buddha seal in Lushan, and wrote an instruction manual called "Strange Stone Offering".
He said that from here on, if he could not provide for the monk, he could use stones instead of offerings ("So that from now on, the mountain monks and savages, who want to provide for the Zen master, but who are unable to make clothes, food, and bedding, can be purified with water and stone as offerings, and the cover begins with Su Zi zhan.") ”）。 That kaiseki cuisine means this.
At the beginning of the invention of kaiseki cuisine, it was a relatively simple dish, because it was used in conjunction with the tea ceremony.
At that time, the tea room was only the size of four and a half tatami mats, so the meal must have been very simple. Usually it is one soup and two dishes, or one soup and three dishes, but later, Kaiseki cuisine has become a high-end cuisine like Jingjin cuisine and Daming cuisine, which is aristocratic cuisine.
Nowadays, if you want to eat kaiseki cuisine in Japan, you have to go to the kiosk and go to those high-end Japanese restaurants. Tell us about two five-star restaurants in Tokyo.
A family called "Kai Eso dojo", food food. However, the chef of this restaurant has a saying that kaiseki's intention, this stone is the stone of stone, kaiseki's heart and the warm embrace of his mother, so that diners can taste dishes with both temperaments with peace of mind, which is his pursuit.
There is also a restaurant name, which is also very interesting, called "Chi Away Peck". People in this shop travel from place to place to collect ingredients for their meals. The words "peck" are interesting. Pecking refers to the chicks, that is, the bird pecks the shell from the inside out from the inside out, and the parents of the chicks knock the eggshell from the outside of the shell to the inside, and together, there is such a meaning of "the machine cannot be lost, the loss will not come again", and it also alludes to a phrase often said by the Japanese, called "one period and one meeting". Maybe there are some wonderful opportunities, and you only have one in your life.
Sunny