Splendid poetry can also create a feast

Author: Xu Qingyuan

"The people take food as the sky" and "eating" is an incomparably solemn thing, it is Xia Lingzun's "Seven Things to Open the Door", it is Li Zhimo's "The World's Next Eating Field", It is Zhang Yi'an's "Looking for Delicious Food to Discern Taste", it is Liang Shiqiu's "Talking about Delicious Taste to Send Pleasure", it is Cai Lan's "Shallow Taste" to "Ultimate", it is Chen Xiaoqing's "China on the Tip of the Tongue"... Today, let us travel through time and space to have a journey of ancient style and elegance, follow the great literary heroes of "delicious", and taste the ancient poems of "delicious".

"Good Bamboo Lian Shan Jue Bamboo Shoots: Ancient Poetry Seeking Food" (hereinafter referred to as "Good Bamboo Lian Shan Jue Bamboo Shoots") is a prose note that vividly presents the food taste and mood of successive generations of gourmets, and is also a feast of splendid poetry: taking the famous poems as the guide, elegant and rhymed; talking about ancient and modern vegetables and fruits, rigorous and interesting; talking about the anecdotes of the past dynasties, popular and informative.

The whole book is divided into six categories: vegetable food first, umami beauty, grain abundance, flowers and fruits, four seasons of food customs, diet miscellaneous notes, selecting 37 ancient poems as the entry point, quoting from the side, the origin of food, traditional customs, the customs of the years, the palm of the past dynasty, the interpretation of the past; each article is preceded by elegant and exquisite ink illustrations, the ancient rhyme is long and innovative, making people shine.

Famous artists write delicious, ancient "foodie" stories, let us taste a little bit from the editor's note of "Good Bamboo and Mountain Bamboo Shoots".

From "The Wardrobe of History" to "The Feast of Poetry"

Before the meal, let's start with an appetizer, introduce the "ingredients" and "chef", and talk about the creative process of the book's topic selection.

The author of this book, Liu Fei, is a "post-80s" young poet and gourmet, and in recent years, he has become more and more interested in food culture and history, especially when reading the table stories of ancient poets, he is eager to travel back to taste food and poetry with them. It is her original intention to peek into the food style of the ancients, explore the cultural heritage of food, and inherit the aesthetic ideals of food.

The author's relationship with the publishing house is also related to "food, clothing, housing and transportation". In 2017, Beijing Daily Publishing House launched "The Wardrobe of History: Ancient Chinese Costumes and Embroidery", and with "clothes", of course, there must be "food". Liu Fei's "Historical Foodies" series, infected with Ding Gongzi Song, incomparable mouths of Fu Lang, Bieliang Night Market practice stalls, food blogger Lu You, quanchen old food Cai Jing, although there are not many articles, but the integration of diet and history, like the achievements of different ingredients after the combination of different ingredients, suddenly aroused the delicious taste that amazed diners.

In the subsequent creation of the article, the author communicated with the editor many times, and finally decided to take an ancient poem as the starting point, just like the appearance poems in the Yuanqu miscellaneous drama, establishing the theme of each article, and fully realizing the author's creative concept of integrating historical knowledge, food culture, and poetry masterpieces in one furnace - poetic and delicious! As a result, the readership of this work is positioned as a history buff, a food enthusiast, and a lover of classical poetry.

For this book, if the accumulation of poetry works, classic historical materials, and the author's plain plain is the ingredient, the author is a chef, and the editor of the book is a bit like quality control, doing the complicated and trivial preparations before the feast with the author - starting with the tasting dish.

From "Golden Dragon" to "Zhi Kitchen Mountain"

Poetry and song, historical notes, from the emperor's general to the peddler's pawn, from the imperial court meal to the night market snack, this book interspersed with many stories on the tip of the tongue: from the Sui Emperor's lamentation of "golden jade, southeast taste" to Song Renzong's tossing and turning and sleeping and thinking of the "burning sheep", from the Tang Dynasty's "crispy oil and fragrant newly baked" flax cakes to the Song Dynasty's "Tokyo Dream Hualu" KaifengFu pattern renovation of all kinds of cakes, from the "Fifth Line of the World" "Leek Flower Theory" hidden in the "Private Treasures" to the "Butterfly" legendary knife worker in "Youyang Miscellaneous Tricks", From Lin Hong's "Mountain Family Offering" in the Southern Song Dynasty to Yuan Ming's "Food Menu with the Garden" in the Qing Dynasty, Han Zongru, who used Dongpo's letter to exchange mutton, Pi Rixiu, who was addicted to alcohol at night and "smelled the sound of clams sold on the wall"...

The editor is the first reader of this book, extensive reading, reading through, intensive reading, from single revision to classification discussion, and then to the whole book style, with pictures and binding, the editor deals with "fine work", but also the correction and improvement of the work and meticulous polishing.

For the literature and history books that cite more ancient books, the word-by-word verification of the original text of the ancient books is the top priority, and the authoritative version of the professional society is of course one of the references, but the editor still reviews the photocopies of the ancient books that can be found one by one, and some of the differences in words and sentences caused by different versions or quotations from previous dynasties have been compared many times to direct quotations and indirect quotations in different dynastic documents, and the final review has been carried out to ensure that the writing is rigorous and the words are well-founded.

The editor strives to work with the author to accurately restore every "good taste" mentioned in the poem, such as the "golden jade" mentioned many times in the book, that is, today's sea bass sashimi with a unique sauce. Du Bao of the Tang Dynasty recorded the practice of "jade" in the "Records of the Great Cause", but how was the "golden dragon" modulated? At the beginning, the author directly gave the Northern Wei Jia Sixun's method of making it in the Qi Min Zhi Shu, but after the editor checked it, he found that it should actually be explained here. Because the main text of the "Qi Min Zhi Shu" does not mention "golden feathers", only "eight and the dragon", the reason why it is called "eight and" is because it uses eight ingredients such as orange peel, white plum, cooked chestnut yellow, and japonica rice. And the small print annotation, because of the golden and sweet taste of the cooked chestnut yellow, the proverb calls this sauce "golden"... These are all minutiae, the feast is already very sumptuous, and all the editors have done is to strive for excellence and add to the icing on the cake.

The history of food culture, the blank space of the history books, the famous food list, the nostalgic old taste, so the paper pile hides the meaning of traditional Chinese food, and the words overflow the strange fragrance of local characteristics.

The most beautiful fresh vegetable "Bamboo Meng" (bamboo shoots) above the meat, the "water essence dish" (cabbage) that makes the poet's first surprise, the steamed beard cake that makes the Tang Dynasty Prime Minister Liu Yan "beautiful" on the road early in the morning; the wild vegetable feast held by the rural woodcutter for the Tang monks and apprentices in "Journey to the West", the "Yi Mei" in the medicinal honey in "Golden Bottle Plum", the "spicy red and white fish soup" that Song Jiang remembers after drinking... The ancients' raw flowers and magic brushes make home-cooked ingredients add a bit of color, making people salivate and addicted.

The ancients wrote down their dietary preferences in poetry, which was both elegant and permeated with a strong atmosphere of life: "Song Yu, the Chu Guoshi doctor who cooked the rice of the carved Hu and the soup of the cooking dew sunflower", the poet monk Hanshan who "steamed the porpoise and pickled the garlic sauce, the hot duck and the pepper salt", the poet Saint Du Fu who "cut the spring leek in the night rain, the yellow sorghum in the new cooking room", the Bai Juyi who "has a row stove at the bow of the boat, and the red carp cooked with rice cooking"... Celebrity diners are as sharp as their taste buds, and in a word, they are now the essence of a water review post.

By the way, there is actually a "dim sum" master behind the scenes...

From "Living Colors" to "Returning to Basics"

Food pays attention to color and fragrance, the color aesthetic of "red shrimp and crucian carp purple celery crisp" makes people more appetizing, and the theme illustrations in this book also make the writing interesting and vivid. Illustrator Mu Junnan is a young artist, animation director, and cartoonist who is passionate about exploring the application of experimental ink to new art media.

Mu Junnan, who claimed to have an "emperor's tongue", read each text carefully during the creative process, and added her own understanding and aesthetics: the warmth and sincerity of "cutting leeks in the rain and pottery pottery", the free and wide-ranging "Juliu Autumn Crab Claw Fat", the legendary color of "Flying Gold Plate White Snow High", the Tang Dynasty Fengyun of "The World's Rare Fruits Are More Precious", the Lotus Pond Night Color of "Dew for flavor and moon", the sound sweet dream of "The Taste of Youth is Like Honey Sweet"...

Take one of them as an example: Yang Wanli, a flower lover, is a vulgar person, who chews plum blossoms with white sugar at night, "a flower can swallow a cup, chews a few glasses of wine with cold flowers", and thinks that eating plum blossoms even has no fireworks in the poem. Mu Junnan's portrayal of this stubborn and lovely poet who "the old man wants to chew plum blossoms" is particularly impressive, carrying a plum on his shoulder, who loves who in the snow, and looking at the world with a little arrogance!

There is taste in the poem, there is intention in the painting, these Chinese feng shui ink paintings, not simply decorated with pictures, but play the meaning of the finishing touch - elegant and simple and meaningful, with traditional background and no lack of modern novelty, fully make up for the food mood and aesthetic interest that the text has not been able to express wholeheartedly.

Mu Junnan said that in the process of creation, Yang Wanli, who chewed plum blossoms, Lu You, who baked taro, and Liu Yan, who hid hu cake, came to mind from time to time... She strives to fade the swagger in her painting skills, and uses the essence of ink painting to present the wonderful meaning of the author's words between the lines. That's what she had in mind— the smell of ink in the food, that is, the original taste that faded away from the prosperity and returned to the original.

From "Good Bamboo Mountain" to "Three Aftertaste"

After three rounds of wine and five flavors of dishes, let us change from thick to indifferent in the ink paintings that return to the basics, slowly digest the aftertaste, and precipitate it.

In the third year (1080) of the Northern Song Dynasty Emperor Yuanfeng, Su Dongpo was relegated to Huangzhou because of the "Wutai Poetry Case" and wrote a poem "First to Huangzhou", two of which "The Yangtze River goes around Guo Zhiyumei, and the good bamboo and mountains feel the fragrance of bamboo shoots" can be called the highest realm of "foodies": the official field is frustrated, but outside of things, seeing the rolling Yangtze River of "waves exhausting heroes" only knows "fish beauty", and sees the "Festival Jun" that roams the mountains but only feels "bamboo shoots". The elegance and the great customs, the few numbers, the poetry of history and the fireworks of the world, come to the face.

When choosing the title of the book, the publisher deliberated and finally decided to use the name of this verse, because Su Dongpo's gastronomic taste is the ultimate intention of the book.

On February 19, 1095, in the second year of Song Zhezong Shaosheng(1095), Dongpo took liquor and sea bass to a friend's place to eat a bowl of "locust leaf cold tao". At this time, the loquat is ripe, the wine is newly formed, the fresh teeth are cold in the snow, this great literary hero and gourmet "temporarily borrowed the weeping lotus ten cups, poured an empty stomach five cars of books", and sincerely sighed: "This life has a taste in the three more!" ”

The so-called "three surpluses" are the famous words of Dong Yu, a famous scholar of the Three Kingdoms: "Those who are winter, the years are over; those who are at night, the days are over; those who are rainy, the time is also over." "Borrowing from Dongpo's meaning: the fun of eating is not in the luxury of food, not in the desire of the mouth, but in the appropriateness of getting together, the true taste of the ingredients and the leisure of tasting."

The ancient poems reveal the heritage of traditional Chinese culture, and the fun of feasting and the way of taste contain Chinese attitude to life. Three more flavors, a drink and a peck, let us follow the ancients' pen and ink, wander in the long river of time and space, read famous works, appreciate the beauty of the four hours, taste the feast of poetry, the poetry of history, and find some points of life and good food.

Source: Liberation Daily