The so-called "snacks" are a type of food with a specific local style. It is characterized by local materials, highlighting the local material culture and social life style.
Snacks are an indispensable feature of a region and are the main object of wanderers' longing for their hometown. There are a variety of flavored snacks all over the world, which vary according to local customs, with distinctive characteristics and unique flavors.
Snacks have been around since ancient times. The twelfth time in the "Mirror Flower Edge" writes about snacks: "After the wine has passed one or two rounds, it is on a small plate and a small bowl, and its name is 'snack' in the south and 'hot stir-fry' in the north." ”
Qing Li Dou's "Yangzhou Painting Record, Xiao Qinhuai Record" records: "There are many restaurants in Xiaodongmen Street, and there are cooked lamb shops... First, the lamb is eaten with mutton offal, called a snack, and then the lamb soup rice is served. ”
The seventeenth introduction of the "Outer History of RuLin": "Jing Lanjiang ordered a miscellaneous food that sold one dollar and two cents of silver, and two plates of snacks. That snack is the same as the fried meat skin, the same is the soybean sprouts. ”
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Xu Ke compiled the "Qing Barnyard Banknotes", which recorded the first four major snacks in China: the Nanjing Confucius Temple Qinhuai Snacks that began in the Ming Hongwu Period, the Shanghai City God Temple Snacks that began in the Ming Yongle Years, the Suzhou Xuanmiaoguan Snacks that began in the Ming Hongzhi Period, and the Hunan Changsha Fire Palace Snacks that began in the sixth year of the Qing Dynasty, known as the Four Great Snacks of China. These snack groups bring together snacks from all over the country, and at the same time have their own characteristics. More than 600 years later, these snack groups still exist and are still thriving.
Snacks, eating is rich and varied. "Awakening To the World Hengyan Qian Xiucai Mistakenly Occupied the Phoenix" described it like this: "Three soups and ten dishes, adding a case snack, in an instant, the table is full." "There are five guests and hosts, drunk and drunk, after dinner, straight to the red sun." Five people eat more than a dozen small dishes, which shows a variety of tricks.
Nanjing Confucius Temple Snack Group is located on the banks of the prosperous Qinhuai River, and is famous for its long history and variety. Fried dried, tofu brain, turtle seeds, shortbread, buns, ramen, pressed noodles, pancakes, spring rolls, roasted cakes, vegetable buns, shallot oil cakes, tofu waterlogging, beef soup, soup dumplings, crab yellow noodles, long fish noodles, butter roast cakes, sweet bean sand buns, dried chicken noodles, small dumpling dumplings, mille-feuille oil cakes, beef pot stickers, five-spiced dried brine, five-spiced tea eggs, sugar porridge root, a variety of soup noodles with toppings, and shishi dim sum with the basket. Coming to the snack city, it is dazzling, dizzying, and I don't know what to eat.
Suzhou snacks are also colorful. Spiced pork ribs from Liao pork ribs, chicken and duck blood soup from Sheng Mei Zhai, small lotus flour dumplings and fried crispy bean sugar porridge, various Su-style noodles from Guan Zhenxing Noodle Restaurant, pure vegetarian buns and so on. There are also salt and golden cauliflower for people to eat after tea and wine, pickled yellow head, peeled oil fruit jade, oil soy beans, oil stinky tofu, oil dumpling rice cake, oil, sauce snail, baked potato, etc., all of which are snacks with a strong Jiangnan flavor, as exquisite as suzhou gardens.
Snacks, eating local specialties. In the 1980s, from the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, I watched Zhu Shimao and Chen Lao'er perform the skit "Xinjiang Lamb Kebabs", and I drooled. Later, when I arrived in Xinjiang, the first thing I did was to eat lamb kebabs. Pieces of cut lamb, the size is stunned, like an "abacus beads", charcoal fire, sprinkled with cumin and pepper noodles, fragrant and tender, really worthy of the name. Guizhou sauerkraut fish, do not put vinegar, still sour. When you get to Guiyang, you must go to eat a meal, and you must go to the "Kaili Old Shop". When you arrive in Xi'an, Shaanxi, you naturally have to eat "Old Yang Family Lamb Steamed Buns", which is a must in the world, and there is a "dumpling feast", which is fifty kinds of one. Chengdu's spicy hot, Chongqing's spring water chicken, Hangzhou's West Lake vinegar fish, Jinan's nine-turn large intestine, Lanzhou's ramen, Yangzhou's lion's head, Harbin's cauldron, Taiyuan's northwest noodles, Hohhot's sauce big bone, are all distinctive, as long as you eat once, you can't forget it for a lifetime.
As for Huizhou snacks, because Huangshan is at the junction of two climates, there is more rainfall, the climate is humid, and the products are particularly rich. Mountain treasures and game game constitute the uniqueness of the main ingredients of Hui cuisine. Stinky mandarin fish, edamame tofu, Huangshan river snail, pickled fresh mandarin fish, Huangshan stewed pigeon, Tunxi drunken crab, ham stewed turtle, Hongtan tofu milk, etc., no less than hundreds of species. To the ancient capital of the Eight Dynasties, Kaifeng, Henan, the most famous from ancient times to the present is the "first floor bun", the skin is thin and fresh, smooth and delicate, with old vinegar, it is a fresh.
Snacks, eating is a special culture. Modern people eat snacks, in addition to being able to relieve hunger, it is important to understand the local customs. Shanghai is The earliest and most economically developed city in China, and Shanghai's famous snacks have distinct Jiangnan and urban characteristics. Nanxiang Xiaolong of Nanxiang Mantou Shop, BaiguoJiu Stuffed Dumplings, Eight Treasure Rice and Sweet Wine Brewed in The Spring of the Garden, Heavy Oil Shortbread in Lakeside Dim Sum Shop, Jujube Clay Shortbread and Three Silk Eyebrow Crisps in LuboLang Restaurant. There are also raw fried steamed buns, tender curry meat skewers, three fresh small wontons, crab shell yellow, gluten blinds, soup buns, white chopped three yellow chicken. The characteristics are: fresh and fierce, fresh as the feature, light summer, strong winter and spring fragrance, especially fine, three meals a day with soup, the sea of hundreds of rivers, gathered throughout the country, with its own existence to witness the vicissitudes of the sea.
Beijing snacks, which continue to this day, have been circulating for nearly a thousand years. Fried liver, bean juice, scorched circle, fried belly, tea soup, donkey rolling, pea yellow, Ai Wo Wo, fried enema, it is like honey, Sachima, a pint of crispy pancakes, white water sheep's head, dry pot duck head... The basic business of snacks is a family single transmission, each with a unique flavor, and the name is also the naming method of food and surname, such as popcorn Feng, sheep's head horse, rice cake Yang, cheese Wei and so on.
When you arrive in Xi'an, Shaanxi, the meat sandwich steamed buns, biangbiang noodles, lamb steamed buns, Shaanxi liangpi, meatballs and peppery soup, soup buns, mille-feuille oil shortbread, golden thread oil tower, buckwheat dumplings, pot helmets, cheek noodles, bubble oil cakes and Xi'an mirror cakes are naturally full of the taste of loess high slopes and northwest wind.
Snacks, eaten in a special atmosphere. In the 1980s, I went to the beach in Beijing to eat snacks, and when night fell, the lights first went up, a street, thousands of people, rubbing shoulders and heels, and the voices of people were boiling. Eat at a roadside stall with a bowl. After eating a stall, wiping your mouth, turning around to find a stall to eat again, eating three stalls in a row, it is really enjoyable. There are stall owners who can shout "smash it" in their voices! It was a big bowl of brine "pig down". In my hometown of Shouguang, Shandong, this "miscellaneous" is a curse word, and it feels particularly kind to hear such shouts at the feet of this Heavenly Son.
If you come to Qingdao in the summer, the snack at night must be "drink beer, eat clams", and the beer must be produced on the same day, packed in plastic bags, and held in two hands. The clams must be from Red Island, fat and big. You can wear slippers, bare shoulders, loud noises, no one laughing. In a word, eating snacks is like visiting a farmer's market in leisure time, without suits and shoes, without "hanging ink lines to talk", you can be unrestrained and dashing.
Snacks, eating is affordable. Because most of the snacks are made of local materials, the house decoration is simple, and there is no private room, the cost is naturally low, so the snacks are generally cheap. In Weifang, Shandong In the 1980s, a meat fire burned for two cents, a roll of single cake dumb peppers for a dime, a bowl of meatball noodles or chicken and duck and le for one dollar. In the 1990s, Heze's Single County Mutton Soup, small bowl five yuan, large bowl ten yuan, a pound of Xu family mutton fifteen yuan. It is today's Jinan, and snacks are still cheap. Three or five people, fried three or five dishes, a dish cheap ten yuan eight yuan, expensive that is twenty or thirty yuan, a meal down, an average of twenty or thirty yuan per person, ordinary people can also afford to consume.
After several years of development, special snacks have become an indispensable part of gastronomic culture, and almost every city has snack groups. Many of the emerging snacks formed after the reform and opening up have surpassed the original snacks in popularity. Such as Jinli snacks in Chengdu, Shaxian snacks in Fujian, Wangfujing snacks in Beijing, etc., together with the original snacks, have achieved today's Chinese food culture. How to make this culture develop healthily has become a matter worthy of attention.
Snacks are expensive in small, can not blindly make big. Husband and wife, rent a house, open a small shop, three or five tables, small but exquisite, earn hundreds of yuan a day, can not delay the care of the elderly, pick up children to school, happy and harmonious. Small, in itself, is the advantage, is the characteristics, there is no need to make people bigger and stronger.
In fact, to do business, big is not necessarily strong, small is not necessarily less money. The key is to have a product, to have a market, to insist on several years, the signboard does not fall. Just like winemaking, you can do big business, big brand, and sell tens of billions of dollars a year. I make a small winery and make hundreds of tons of wine a year. Do not spend huge amounts of money to advertise, do not hold press conferences, rely on old customers, rely on word of mouth, rely on stable product quality, rely on relatively fixed surrounding markets, product fame and per capita taxes, profits, wages of employees are not much at all.
In recent years, some well-known enterprises have suddenly had problems, and even bankruptcy liquidation, because of blind expansion, the debt ratio is too high, and a sum of money cannot be repaid when it is due, making it disheveled, and the government cannot save it. These lessons are worth learning from the "snacks".
This is true of a store, and it is true of a brand. Whether or not the whole country can go, whether the counties and counties can have stores, it is up to the market to decide, and it is up to the people who open stores to decide. China's vast sky and vast land, humanistic customs have their own advantages, and nothing can be done in one way or one size fits all. Officials think about political achievements and sensational effects, and the people naturally think about how to make money. Managing more is not necessarily developing faster, and it doesn't matter if it is likely to develop well.
Snacks are expensive in the old, can not blindly innovate. Customers come all the way, come to see, drink your pot of old soup, eat your traditional taste, you have changed, it will definitely make people disappointed.
There is a company in Germany that specializes in making a rice cooker, which has been done for a hundred years and has become a world-famous brand. There is a noodle restaurant in Tokyo, Japan, which has been passed down for generations, and on this bowl of family noodles, the raw materials are unchanged, the craftsmanship is unchanged, the taste is unchanged, and these bowls are fixed in one day, and it is not late, and the foreign president is also like this. No advance reservation, sorry, please come back tomorrow.
Snacks are expensive and cannot be blindly unified. The government came forward to invite large companies to join, establish a "central kitchen" in the central city, unified procurement, unified standards, unified processing, and uniform distribution of raw materials or semi-finished products for tens of millions of scattered snack bars, with the purpose of ensuring quality and reducing costs. The original intention is respectable, but the effect needs to be tested by the market. Snacks are expensive in local materials, expensive in having their own unique tastes, should be unified, but also divided, fully respect the wishes of the shopkeeper, can not pull Lang match. The function of government is to create an environment and not to pay too much attention to the internal affairs of the enterprise. Believe in the wisdom of the masses, whose message is the most spiritual. Adhere to reform and opening up, the Chinese people will certainly create innovation and greater glory.
Snacks are expensive and cannot be blindly improved. Cheap and good, small profits and high sales, is the life of snacks, only in this way, can there be competitiveness. A few days ago, CCTV reported that a peasant brother in Linyi, Shandong Province, monopolized "three yuan and one bowl of noodles" and insisted on not raising prices for ten years, causing a sensation in the country. The "Sanjiangyuan Ramen" near the author's residential area has always been a bowl for 8 yuan, and customers are endless every day. On the other hand, some snacks, once famous, immediately raised the price, a few years later, the price doubled several times, snacks became "big eating", straight to the point of discouragement, "cucumber gong a hammer deal", smashed their own signboard.
I hope that all snacks will become more and more popular and enduring. I wish all snack bar owners hard work and prosperity and a safe year!
(April 2, 2021)