The most famous recipe in "Dream of the Red Chamber" is probably the forty-first "Jia Baoyu Pin Tea Chestnut Cui'an, Liu Grandma Drunk Lying in the Red Courtyard", Wang Xifeng said to Liu Grandma about the eggplant.
A bite of eggplant, paired with dozens of chickens, is complex and expensive.
The ingredients themselves are not amazing (chicken, eggplant), but this is obviously not within the scope of daily consumption of poor families like Grandma Liu.
Interestingly, it is said that a chef made this dish according to the method Wang Xifeng said, but the taste is very difficult to describe.
So, is it the author, Mr. Cao Xueqin, who does not know how to cook without cooking, and mistakenly wrote a "senior chef god"?
Or was he originally going to write about a young grandmother of Jia Fu who "talked about cooking to be the head of the Tao, but in fact did not do it right at all"?
Does Wang Xifeng really know how to cook? Or use this battle to scare the poor Liu Grandma?
The wives and ladies present here are all noble female relatives with ten fingers that do not touch the spring water of the sun.
Whether it is Jia Mu or Wang Xifeng, the number of times she has really cooked in this life should be countless, or even zero at all.
At that time, the cultivation of the female housekeeper ability, social skills, etiquette and skills of the rich family did not include the item of "cooking and cooking".
According to common sense, Wang Xifeng's own cooking ability should be about equal to zero.
But this does not mean that her ability to appreciate food and "the ability to move her mouth to speak" is also not good.
What do you talk about at the dinner party of the aristocratic family?
Taking Jia Baoyu as an example, the scene is just whose cook stick and whose mane is good-looking.
The content of the female relatives' chat will naturally be different, but one of the common and common ones should be inseparable from eating.
Of course, the conversation that really has a deep friendship or in-law relationship is another matter at a deeper level, but it is normal to socialize and talk about weather and diet on the scene.
With the living standards of the noble female relatives of Jia Fu and the degree of "seeing the world", it is inevitable that they have eaten many mountain treasures and seafood.
Even if you don't deliberately delve into food, you should have basic tasting ability for food.
The so-called "never seen a pig run, but eaten all kinds of rare pork", Wang Xifeng, such a clever and exquisite person, even if he can't cook, but when it comes to eating, he is bound to be able to take the lead.
What's more, the point here is not to seriously study the recipe in front of everyone, and none of the people here are really interested in the recipe.
The focus here is to highlight that "Grandma Liu is different from the people in our Jia Province", and then create laughter and lively atmosphere through this difference to please the old lady.
Wang Xifeng arranged for Grandma Liu to perform a pre-dinner talk show "Old Liu Lao Liu eats as much as an ox", and let her use special chopsticks to clip quail eggs and so on, all of which are the same idea.
Therefore, here to talk about food practices, Wang Xifeng can only say that it is rare despite the complexity and the expensive.
It will provoke Grandma Liu to give her expected reaction.
Rather than saying that Wang Xifeng is talking about practical recipes, it is better to say that she is performing the superiority of "Jia Fu even eats eggplant is different".
And Grandma Liu is a smart person, and the heart will cooperate with her performance, in exchange for her own "performance settlement fee".