There is a widely circulated saying on the Internet: where there is a flood of edible organisms, as long as 100,000 Chinese are airborne, it is guaranteed that the flood will be eaten into extinction. This is not an exaggeration, the crayfish and bullfrogs that came to China under the name of "invasive species" did not dominate the waters in the end, but dominated the supper table of Chinese. Historically, Chinese's foodie attributes have also been leveraged.
In the Song Dynasty, the value of force was relatively low, but the lives of emperors, courtiers, and ordinary people were still exquisite. If you want to find a Song Dynasty food spokesperson, it should be Su Shi Su Dongpo. Su Shi left a famous dish "Dongpo meat" and also wrote a "Pork Ode": "Huangzhou good pork, the price is as cheap as dirt." The nobles refuse to eat, and the poor do not cook. In fact, the invention of Dongpo meat was only Su Shi's retreat.
Because ancient food was also expensive, pork belonged to the poor people at that time to eat meat; Su Shi was relegated to Huangzhou, in order to find pleasure from a simple life, he invented a new way of eating pork. During the Song Dynasty, the most popular meat was not pork, nor beef (killing cattle at will violates the law); nor horse meat (horses were needed for war), but mutton.
Compared with pork, which is "as cheap as dirt", mutton belonged to the petty bourgeoisie in the Song Dynasty. In the Song Dynasty, Elder Meng wrote a "Tokyo Dream Hualu" to record the customs and customs of Kaifeng at that time, and the book mentioned the milk cooking sheep, the false juice hanging silk sheep head, the sheep's horn waist, the soft sheep noodles, the sheep's head sign into the furnace, the milk cooking sheep, the sheep hall... The enthusiasm of the Song Dynasty people for eating sheep can be seen.
According to historical records, when Zhao Kuangyin, the grandfather of the Song Dynasty, invited King Wuyue to eat boiled lamb at a banquet, he was invited to eat boiled lamb; later, in the imperial palace ingredients, "the diet is not expensive and smelly, and the imperial kitchen stops using mutton." "During the Song Shenzong period, the imperial palace ate nearly 450,000 pounds of mutton a year; during the Song Zhenzong period, the number of sheep slaughtered by the imperial palace reached 350 a year; and the emperor who loved to eat mutton the most was probably Song Renzong.
Song Renzong was frugal and benevolent by nature, and although he loved to eat, he was still able to restrain himself. The "Records of Dongxuan" records that Song Renzong was sleepless one night, hungry, and very much wanted to eat roasted sheep, and the next day he told his close minister about it, and the close minister asked, why did His Majesty not order the imperial dining room to prepare to burn sheep? Song Renzong said solemnly, "If you ask for it at will, it will form a routine, so that the imperial chef will prepare night and night." ”
Poetry prevailed in the Tang Dynasty, poetry prevailed in the Song Dynasty, and there were many detailed records of eating mutton in the pens of song dynasty literati - "gold plates piled up with mustach mutton", "six thousand pounds of mutton in the day" and so on. But it is worth mentioning that although the Song Dynasty people loved to eat sheep, mutton was not something that small people could afford to eat casually at that time, such as Su Shi, who could often eat mutton when he was opened, and could only secretly buy sheep backbones after being degraded.
In the Song Dynasty, Shi Huaishen wrote "Quasi-Hanshan Temple": "Life is slightly richer, and it is important to pay attention to the mouth and belly." Buy fish for mandarin fish, buy meat for lamb. That is to say, the Song Dynasty people lived a little richer, pursuing higher appetite, and the first choice for meat must be lamb; at that time, "rich families cooked sheep and poor fish", rich families could often eat mutton as a status symbol, and poor families could eat some fish and meat.
It is precisely because of the formation of the custom of "small luxury" that mutton will be highly sought after in the Song Dynasty, which has triggered a wild meal, but some places in the Song Dynasty were occupied by Liao, Western Xia and other countries, and the good environment for raising sheep was greatly reduced, and the supply was in short supply, how could it not be eaten rarely? It was not until the Ming and Qing dynasties that pork became popular that sheep escaped the fate of being eaten by focus, and now, both mutton and pork can be called daily meat.