When you think of autumn, what seasonal foods come to mind? The yellow crab yellow, the shiny crab paste, the cool and moist lotus root, and of course, the aroma of sugar fried chestnuts wafting from the streets. It will tell us earlier than the weather forecast that the autumn equinox is coming.
"September and October are a time to look good and have something to eat. The sky is blue, the clouds are white, the wind is clear, and the moonlight is light, making people happy. Golden oranges, fiery red sticks swaying high at the ends of the branches. The most memorable thing is the taste of chestnuts. ”
There is a human touch in every food, and every food is a memory, and they connect a person's memories of his hometown and the imprint of living in the city. "One Meal, One World" is a book about emotions and memories, writing about the hometown of the taste buds, presenting a different jiangnan food culture and customs, and peeking into life from small foods.
One Meal, One World (Revised Edition)
The book is divided into five series. The first series of hometown records mainly describes the taste of grass, trees, fruits and vegetables in the hometown; the second series of time and yin records that the author feels the passage of time from the delicacies he tastes, as well as the changes in time embodied in the food; the third series of rice books focuses on the life of rice, from rice seedlings to rice flowers to rice and then to rice; the fourth series of travel food mainly writes about the delicacies he encountered when he traveled to the rivers and mountains of the motherland; the fifth series of food Gu Tan puts pen and ink on the interesting talk about the diet of the ancients.
"Whether it is nostalgia on the tip of the tongue or food on the road of life, a meal is hidden inside," the author says in the preface. He is like a homely word between relatives and friends, pushing his heart to describe the taste of home, in "Old Pumpkin and Pumpkin Flower", his mother picked the largest pumpkin flower, blanched it with boiling water, removed the fine hairs on the flowers, put down the pot, added water, and slightly tickled the sweet potato flour to start the pot... Pumpkin flowers make children eat beautifully. So much so that the author recalled, he felt, "Many years later I heard that the romantic women in the city had bubble rose petals to eat." I think it's far less romantic than when we ate pumpkin flowers." This kind of "romance" can compose chai rice oil and salt into poetry.
Chen Xiaoqing, director of "China on the Tip of the Tongue", said: I have always felt that food is the most effective and interesting channel for me to understand the world. A small act of cooking allows me to see the common wisdom of life of people on both ends of the Pacific Ocean. From the perspective of food, there is no single island in the world, and human beings themselves live in the same homeland.
His book "Flavor of the World" is a book of gastronomic culture involving humanities, history, aesthetics and art from a global perspective, and is also an authorized book for the second season of the documentary "Flavor of the World".
"Flavor of the World"
Chen Xiaoqing and the team spent 18,400 hours searching the world's most exotic cuisines, telling 8 types of ingredients and 70 warm stories of food and people, and the words and lines brought readers to read the taste of life.
"The times are ups and downs, fate is flowing, and falling on food is inadvertently broken and warm. The city is written in a mixture of blood, language, religion, and architecture, all of which tell a complex history and identity. Everyone in it was involved in writing the city's recipes. ”
"Flavor of the World" returned to the real "human world" this time, the author chose the accurate content incision, through the "sweet tapestry", "crab rampage", "sauce talk around the world", "miscellaneous counterattack history", "chicken style theory", "granular sky", "sausage Vientiane collection", "rhizome spring and autumn" these eight rich sense of jianghu sense and story themes, through the window of ingredients, panoramic presentation of the relationship between people and food, people and people, people and the world, leading us to understand the differences in food culture of different civilizations around the world.
There are always books that make us hungry. Literati foodie Wang Zengqi's "One Food and One Taste" is a complete collection of Wang Zengqi's series of essays on food, written about the author's home or traveled to the north and south of the river to record the delicious food, so that the population teeth are full of excitement.
"One Food, One Taste"
The first part is a home-cooked wine dish, mainly written about the daily snacks in Wang Zengqi's hometown, potatoes, radishes, broad beans, tofu, chestnuts... These common eating foods, lined up under the author's text, seem to see their colors and smell the taste.
The second part is the Foursquare Eclipse. The places the author has traveled have their own unique flavors, and what makes these flavors continue is the various delicacies everywhere. From Jinhua ham to the fish of Liangshan, from Changsha stinky tofu to Kunming's rice noodles, from Kunming's tea to Guyuan's potatoes, they still emit a seductive taste after years of precipitation.
The third part is food and culture. We always lament the fate of the ancients, but we have never studied the food records of the ancients. "China's last scholar" Wang Zengqi, let us know that "Aoi" is "winter wat vegetables", and what the specific "winter steamed vegetables" look like, there is a detailed description in the book.
Reading "One Food and One Taste", let us truly realize that there are both good food and books on the tip of the tongue. Through the millennium, "Song Feast" is a feast of Song Dynasty culture, full of color and fragrance, taking us to rediscover the charm of traditional culture.
"Song Feast"
Steamed lamb boiled fish, vegetarian imitation dishes, porridge noodle soup, cakes and preserves, from the court feast, the literati tea party, to the civilian meal - seventy dishes, reminiscing about the two Song Dynasties.
It is a recipe, the author according to the "Mountain Family Qing Offering", "ZhongfengLu" and other Song and Yuan classics and documents to restore 75 Song Dynasty cuisine, seasonal arrangement, including court cuisine, literati cuisine and civilian cuisine three levels, involving hot meat, vegetarian dishes, cold cuts, soup, porridge noodles, cakes, drinks, fruits eight categories, and attached with detailed ingredient configuration and preparation steps.
It is an essay, strolling around the city and countryside of the Song Dynasty: what is the famous hall behind each dish, what is new in the vegetable market stalls, what is the cold food heavy nine, what is the bustle of the Spring and Autumn Society, and what good stories and jokes are left by the well-known literati and scholars for "eating"... There are traces of historical customs and objects.
It also shows the aesthetics of the Song people, including Song paintings, calligraphy, Tang and Song dynasty artifacts pictures to restore the situation at that time, enjoying flowers, burning incense, playthings... Stretch out from "eating" and admire a fascinating era of elegance and vulgarity.
Hong Qigong famously said: "There are no feasts in the world, but there are endless dishes." "From ancient times to the present, from our hometown to the world, food has always given us comfort at our fingertips. It is the autumn equinox, the weather is cool, go to a "paper talk" feast, I believe we will all sigh, it is good to be alive.
*The picture in this article comes from the Internet