A few days ago, a Nanjing librarian copied the news of food in Yuan Ming's "Suiyuan Food List", setting off another round of food tasting journey in ancient books. Did the gastronomic practices of thousands of years ago conform to the tastes of modern "foodies"? How to present the ancient delicacies with modern ingredients? From food lovers and fans of ancient books to library professionals and documentary filmmakers, more and more "book lovers" believe that there are not only yan ruyu in books, but also food houses in books.
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"Be sure to find out what the taste of the eggplant that Grandma Liu eats" "The almond tea favored by the health master Jia Mu turned out to be so suitable for girls to drink" "Qin Keqing's jujube mud yam cake that was moved when he was seriously ill"... The video account profile on the B station of netizen "Bi Cicada" is "There is food in the book", from August 2020 to now, she has recorded more than 60 videos of "reproduction" of "Dream of the Red Chamber" food, attracting many readers to "chase more". One of the most clicked videos has the theme of "Jia Mu's disgusted crab dumplings, I can eat 10 in one go". This is one of the four dim sums sent by the servants when Jia Mu took Grandma Liu to visit the Grand View Garden. Jamuna would have disliked it for being greasy and didn't eat it. This crab dumpling is fried, only one inch large, 1 inch = 3.33 cm, not yet the length of the thumb. In the video, "Bi Cicada Clothes" uses the way of chopping the crab yellow crab meat into the filling, making exquisite small dumplings, putting them into the pot and frying them into a golden brown, at which time many viewers have left messages: "The index finger has moved."
Li Dan, whose real name is Li Dan, is engaged in scientific research management work in a university. For her, the series of videos reproduced by Dream of the Red Chamber Is just a "side job" of her personal hobby, from camera shooting to post-editing, all of which is done by herself. Because he liked "Dream of the Red Chamber" since he was a child, and later because of his interest, he also came into contact with some ancient food books, so Li Dan planned to copy the food described by Cao Xueqin word by word and taste the taste. In order to make the "stewed tender" egg soup that Yatou Siqi wanted to eat, Li Dan tried four or five times unsuccessfully, and found the answer in a Qing Dynasty health care Traditional Chinese medicine book called "Food Constitution Hong secret", and used broth instead of water to stew, which made a satisfactory egg soup.
In the process of restoring the food of ancient books, the makers are also looking for the flow of food in history. In the video of "There was cream in ancient times", Li Dan reproduced the cream pine roll crisp that Fangguan felt was greasy. She deliberately noted after the video: "Ice cream has always grown up with us, and in the impression cream seems to be an imported product." I checked some information and found that our nomads made cream very early. "Drinking and Eating" contains 'Ma Si Ge Oil': Take the net cow you, and don't stop beating it with Achi (tied to the oil and wood utensils also). The person who took the floating coagulant was Masco oil, and now it is also the white ghee of the clouds."
Not only Li Dan, but now on various online platforms, it is not uncommon for lovers to reproduce ancient books and cuisines, and it also shows a trend of specialization. Han Chao and Shi Xingyu, librarians of the History and Literature Department of Nanjing Library, "translated" the words in the Qing Dynasty literary scholar Yuan Ming's "Suiyuan Food List" into several dishes with vivid colors. "Suiyuan Food List" is a book written by Yuan Ming based on his more than 40 years of gastronomic experience, detailing 326 kinds of northern and southern dishes, divided into 14 aspects, such as the instruction list, the abstinence list, the seafood list, the River fresh list, the special animal list, the miscellaneous animal list, and the feather list, which are widely circulated so far. As the regular army of Nantu, the two began to produce food videos in the summer of 2020, and launched two issues per year with winter and summer vacations.
Translating the words from ancient books into vivid dishes is not as easy as seen in the video, and sometimes it "flips over". The dish "Pork in the Pig" is recorded in the "Suiyuan Menu" very simply, that is, the pork slices are cut very thinly and then simmered in shrimp soup. But in the actual operation process, Han Chao and Shi Xingyu found: After cooking the soup, where did the shrimp go? They learned that there was a place in Zhejiang where hammer meat was made, that is, meat and shrimp were mixed together, and it was delicious and sweet, so they spent a long time mixing shrimp and meat and dipping it in starch, but the results were still not ideal.
Therefore, Han Chao and Shi Xingyu chose to start with more common ingredients to make a home-cooked version of "Suiyuan Food List". Yuan Mei loves to eat tofu, and there are dishes such as "Jiang Shilang Tofu", "Yang Zhongcheng Tofu", "Zhang Kai Tofu", "Wang Taishou Eight Treasure Tofu" and so on in the "Suiyuan Food List", each of which is very exquisite. In the video they present, the two cook "Wang Taishou Eight Treasure Tofu" online while talking about the allusions behind it. According to the Suiyuan Food List, "Meng Ting Tai Shou Yun: 'This holy ancestor gave Xu Jian'an Shang Shu FangYe.' When Shangshu took the fang, the imperial meal room fee was one thousand taels. Mr. Taishou's ancestral loucun was a protégé of Shangshu, so he got it. In other words, Kangxi gave the recipe for this dish to Xu Jian'an, who was "blackmailed" by the imperial dining room for a thousand taels of silver when he took the recipe, which showed how delicious it was.
This kind of food video is not broadcast for a long time, but the time cost paid by the producer is not low, consulting ancient books, repeated trials, and may not be successful every time, but why are more and more video producers obsessed with this? On the B station, a video that "took 3 months to restore the beautiful Chinese food that came out of the landscape painting" had 1.8 million hits, and the UP master "Eclipse" wrote that this video took a whole summer, and it took a lot of effort just to check the ancient books and scenery. "Of course there are reasons why I insist on doing this. For example, when I read the golden jade in the "Qi Min Zhi Shu", I was shocked to realize that 'sushi' had a similar existence in ancient China. Chinese food is not only oil smoke and braised fried, but also not only synonymous with low-to-medium food in the eyes of foreigners. ”
It is based on this concept that more professional video content producers have also joined this replica feast. The documentary "Ancient Books Through Time and Space" presents the story of how contemporary researchers and artists have made ancient books "come alive", and the first episode of "Feast in Ancient Books" has opened the eyes and appetite of many viewers. Writer Lu Ran and the team spent 5 years to reproduce more than 300 Song Dynasty delicacies, and in the documentary he demonstrated the practice of Song Dynasty cuisine such as "crab stuffed orange", and also popularized many Song people eating crabs. For example, the Song Dynasty entered the first climax of Chinese crab eating, every autumn, no crab can climb out of the Kitchen of the Song People; Su Dongpo likes to eat bad crabs, and Song Gaozong's favorite food is hand washing crabs; the best companion of Song Dynasty crabs is oranges, so there is a verse cloud "Orange crabs are fat and fat". The documentary also popularized a lot of "cold knowledge", such as the most eaten meat in the Song Dynasty was mutton, when mutton was defined as a noble ingredient, and even as part of the official Feng Lu. According to the "Song Hui Zhi Manuscript", Song Shenzong ate a total of 430,000 kilograms of mutton in a certain year, and the pork was only more than 4,000 kilograms.
Li Dan was invited by CCTV to do the Qing Dynasty food "fake crab" in "Kai Le", and she hopes to let everyone realize the unique side of Chinese cuisine, "If someone is attracted by the food that appears in the book, and then open the book to read carefully, it is also a pleasure for me." "The taste of thousands of years ago, with the current ingredients, through the hands of today's people, has been restored, presented, and allowed more people to see." As eclipses, a video maker who loves ancient food, said, in the past five thousand years, we have had countless picturesque eight precious jade foods. Such a splendid culture should not only be recorded in the ancient books of the library. Time may be long and speechless, but we still have a lot of tacit understanding with time.
Source: Qilu Evening News