As the year draws to a close, Chinese has begun to prepare for the Lunar New Year. For the people of jingchu land, what is indispensable to the memory of the new year is all kinds of wax goods.
When the streets and alleys are dried with all kinds of bacon and bacon, Bao Brother especially misses the dried bream from 2400 years ago in the Hubei Provincial Museum.
Warring States bream collection of Hubei Provincial Museum
Yes, you heard it right, it was 2400 years ago, it turned out that as long as you lie flat in the Hubei Provincial Museum, you can become a career "bream"!
At the excavation site of the Chu Tomb of the Warring States of Hubei Province, archaeologists found this 2400-year-old dried bream, which was tested to show that the fish had a large amount of salt in its body, which experts speculated was pickled and buried.
Although it has experienced 2400 years, the bream has no signs of corruption except for the surface blackening, and the shape is also intact, who does not want to shout: the model of salted fish of my generation!
About this "millennium salted fish", you may have a lot of doubts, Mo Urgent, Brother Bao picked a few questions that everyone is very concerned about to answer one by one:
Did people pickle fish 2,400 years ago?
People often use "stinky fish rotten shrimp" to describe human nests, because fish are particularly prone to spoilage. In an era when ingredients were not so easy to preserve, people thought of many ways to store food, one of which was pickled.
Chinese the custom of eating wax flavor has long existed, and Jia Sixun, an outstanding Chinese agronomist, recorded in detail the processing techniques of dried and pickled fish in his agronomic book "Qi Min Zhi Shu".
Jia Sixun 《Qi Min Zhi Shu》
The Qi Min Yao Shu (Qi Min Zhi Shu Shu
Pickling salted fish mainly includes two stages of salting and maturation, salting is the use of diffusion and osmosis between salt and water, so that the fish body dehydration and obtain salty taste.
The mature stage refers to a series of biochemical reactions in the fish meat, so that the flavor becomes better and colored, and the salted fish is marinated "at four o'clock", but the summer temperature is high to add more salt, and other times are also salty.
How does the fish survive without rotting?
Experts have not yet given a clear account of how the fish unearthed from the Chu tomb is not decaying, but Brother Bao can speculate from the wax beef unearthed from the Xi'an Warring States Tomb in 2010.
Excavations in the Xi'an Warring States Tomb have unearthed a rusty copper dun, which is an ancient bronze eater, evolved from the Ding, with three short feet, a round abdomen, and two head and ring on the side of the mouth.
Tongdun Hubei Provincial Museum Collection
Archaeologists opened the copper dun and found that it was filled with pieces of carbonized things, and after protein analysis tests, they learned that these carbonized things were yellow beef.
Why these beef can be preserved for more than 2,000 years, experts give an explanation speculating that there may be three factors: one is because the copper dun is tightly sealed, so that the meat products have been carbonized; the second is because the tomb is a pit tomb, isolated from the air; and finally the main reason is that the meat products are treated, may be air-dried or bacon.
In view of this, Brother Bao speculated that the bream excavated from the Hubei Warring States Tomb was probably preserved to this day because it used more salt and was not easy to corrupt.
Isn't the salt of the Warring States very expensive?
Salt is an indispensable seasoning in people's lives, and studies have shown that if the human body does not have the intake of salt, it will seriously affect the function of the body, resulting in muscle weakness and even atrophy and other lesions.
Therefore, in the past, salt, as an important strategic material and the main source of tax revenue, was once a rare resource. Nowadays, we often say that "coarse tea and light rice" and the ancient folk tradition of "people are light food", are all caused by too little salt and too expensive in the past.
Qing Dynasty salt tickets
The cost of obtaining salt is not high, and it is expensive in the poll tax. "Salt has always been divided into official, private, and salt", official salt is the main source of financial revenue, and salt in all dynasties and dynasties has been uniformly operated by the government; the history books record: "The endowment of the world, salt is half profitable." "Because of the huge profits of salt trafficking, the imperial court has also been cracking down on smuggling salt.
Salt symbolizes wealth, and the amount of salt that ordinary people can get is very small, so the owner of this salted fish in the Hubei Provincial Museum is most likely a person with status and status.
Can this salted fish still be eaten?
This last question may be the most concerned problem for the rice cooks.
Since the fish shows no signs of decay, does that mean that the salted fish can still be eaten? We also look for answers from ancient sources.
As mentioned earlier, the method of pickling fish was recorded in the "Qi Min Zhi Shu", in which Jia Sixun relied on his own life experience and careful observation to summarize what kind of fish was made of fish to be cooked.
The flesh is red and red. Wash the salt when eating, cook, steam, and cannon at will, which is more beautiful than ordinary fish. —— "Qi Min Zhi Shu • Seventy-fifth
Jia Sixun's experience told him that the ripening time of spring, summer, autumn and winter has its own length, there is no unified standard, but whether it is mature depends on the color of the fish body, when the fish body muscles are red, it means that it is ripe, as you eat, are "beautiful than the usual fish".
Colored salted fish (image from the Internet)
Modern research shows that although Jia Sixun does not understand the scientific truth contained in the redness of fish meat, his observation is correct, and the coloring of fish is because the nitrite in the pickled preparation has a coloring effect.
Jia Sixun did not tell us what the state of fish blackening like the Hubei Provincial Museum is, but Brother Bao has an irresponsible speculation that it may be a human delicacy that kills all fish in a second. The reason why people eat after it turns red is because they can't resist the temptation of food, and naturally can't wait for it to turn black.
Warring States bream collection of Hubei Provincial Museum
Hubei people around Brother Bao said that bream should be coded with salt, and the meat is tighter when it is cooked. So, the conclusion is that this thousand-year-old salted fish is most likely to be eaten, but it is a bit of a masseter muscle.
The life of the salted fish in the Warring States reflects a truth from the side: if the emperors of the past want the corpse to be incorruptible for thousands of years, cinnabar, mercury, gold and jade clothes are useless. Why bother to seek immortal medicine, take gold, swallow white jade? In ancient times, it would be dusty, so it was better to lie flat and make salted fish.
Salted fish is eternal, a forever, the new year, flag can stand up!