【Taste Shop】
Author: Sun Xiaoming (Director of China Grain Association and China Grain Economics Association) Sun Chenlong
"From frugality to luxury, from luxury to thrift." This thought-provoking quote that still reads today comes from Sima Guang's "Training and Thrift and Shekang" of the Song Dynasty. On the one hand, the types and output of grain in the Song Dynasty were greatly developed and improved compared with before; On the other hand, the family mottos and maxims of the Song Dynasty advocating thrift and thrift also emerged in large numbers.
Our staple foods are rich and diverse, mainly rice and flour products, including rice, noodles, dumplings, wontons, rice flour, etc., as well as coarse grain products represented by grains such as corn and millet. As a supplement, potatoes have gradually become the third largest staple food in recent years. In fact, the Song Dynasty has formed the prototype of Chinese staple food.
Wen Hui Tu (partial) Zhao Yao
The Song people eat noodles with a origin. There were many types of noodle foods in the Song Dynasty. The "Cake Shop" article in Tokyo Menghualu recorded: "Where there is a cake shop, there is an oil cake shop, and there is a cake shop. If the oil cake shop, it sells steamed cakes, sugar cakes, packing, quotation plates and the like. The cake shop sells door oil, chrysanthemum, wide coke, side thickness, oil top, pith cake, and new hemp. Each case uses three or five people to defend Zhuohua into the furnace. Since the fifth change, the voice of the Zhuo case has been heard from far and near. The Zhangjia in Haizhou in front of the Wucheng King Temple and the Zheng family in front of the Huangjian Courtyard are the most prosperous, and each family has more than fifty furnaces. No wonder "Water Margin" often says, "Come back and beat the cake." "Steamed cake" is cooking cake, "packing" is boxed cake, and "lead plate" is food served on a plate. "Douhua" is to cut the dough into about the same size, and "Zhuohua" is to pinch the noodles out of lace. The meaning of "Zhuohua" is to divide the dough into small agents of similar size, then roll them out separately into cakes, and finally pinch out the pattern.
The habit of eating with chopsticks has also given rise to a variety of pasta. The fourth volume of Tokyo Menghualu, "Food Shop", details the appearance of restaurants in the Song Dynasty, the dishes and the methods of ordering food. There is an interesting record in it: "Each store has its own hall and east corridor, which is called the number of seats. When sitting in a guest, one person holds the paper and asks the guests all over the place. This basically means that each store has its own hall courtyard and east and west corridors to greet and arrange seats for customers. When the guests are seated, one person holds chopsticks and paper flowers and asks them what they want. "Paper flowers" are used to wipe chopsticks. Interestingly, restaurants in the Song Dynasty served chopsticks to diners, but not spoons. It can be seen that most of the staple foods are noodle foods. To eat noodles, it is much more convenient to use chopsticks than with a spoon, this is something that everyone knows, why did you start using chopsticks in the Song Dynasty? The reason for this may have something to do with the shape of the "face". Historically, boiled flour foods were called "soup cakes", but the shape of soup cakes was not elongated at the beginning. Soup cakes first resemble gnocchi, then thin slices, and finally strips. But in the Song Dynasty, there were both dango-shaped, gnocchi-shaped, and flakes or strips. The former can be eaten with a spoon and the latter with chopsticks. Later, there were more strip-shaped "soup cakes", and people commonly used chopsticks to eat.
Eating diagram (partial) Liao Dynasty mural
Noodles are a food made from wheat flour, and the general image is that it is a northern food. But this was not the case in the Song Dynasty. According to the article "Noodle Shop" in volume 16 of the "Mengliang Record", it is recorded: "Open a southern food noodle shop to Bianjing, and divide tea with Sichuan rice to prepare for the Jiangnan trip to Shifu." "It means that in the Northern Song Dynasty, in the capital Bianjing, southerners opened many southern restaurants called southern food, noodle shops, Sichuan rice, and tea distribution, so that they could be visited by taxi doctors from the south of the Jiangsu." The "noodle shop" is a noodle restaurant, which shows that southerners also liked to eat noodles at that time.
Why did wheat become a staple food in the Song Dynasty? Because it is superior to millet in terms of planting, yield, disaster resistance, etc., the staple food status of millet is gradually replaced by it. Wheat is ground into flour and can be made into various types of pasta. Noodle shops in the Northern Song Dynasty created many kinds of noodles that were not available in the Tang Dynasty. The cities of the Southern Song Dynasty also combined the flavors of the north and the south to produce a variety of delicate pasta. The noodles of the Song Dynasty mainly include steamed cakes, steamed buns, wontons, dumplings, soup cakes, etc.
Steamed cakes are pasta cooked in a cage drawer. Although steamed cakes existed before the Tang Dynasty, the steamed cakes made in the Song Dynasty were more elaborate and diverse, and many new varieties such as Su steamed cakes, weighing hammer steamed cakes, and sleeping steamed cakes were only introduced in the Song Dynasty. In the first year of Song Tiansheng, Emperor Renzong of Song ascended the throne. Out of avoidance, people renamed "steamed cake" as "cooking cake". The cooking cake sold by Wu Dalang in "Water Margin" is steamed cake.
Mantou is also a pasta cooked in a steamer. The difference between it and steamed cakes is that the steamed cakes are round and thin in shape, while the steamed buns are high and round; The second is that the steamed cake is not stuffed in content, and the steamed bun is packed with meat filling. Although steamed buns originated in the Three Kingdoms era, it was not until the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty that it became a staple food for people, and the steamed bun market became active from this time. Due to the different fillings, the patterns of steamed buns are also particularly rich, and there are more than ten varieties of sugar meat steamed buns, mutton steamed buns, taixue steamed buns, bamboo meat steamed buns, fish meat steamed buns, crab meat steamed buns and so on recorded in Wu Zimu's "Mengliang Lu" of the Southern Song Dynasty alone, and the reality is far more than that.
Wontons are small stuffed pasta dishes with a relatively long history. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, wontons were known as "the world's food". By the Song Dynasty, people loved wontons even more. There are many kinds of wontons made in people's homes, and wontons are indispensable for celebrations, festivals, banquets and other occasions.
Another change in the Song Dynasty was the separation of dumplings from wontons, called "jiaozi" or "jiao'er". Along with wontons, it has become a staple food on the people's table.
Soup cakes were also a common noodle dish in the Song Dynasty. Roll out the noodles into thin slices, cut them with a knife into long strips wider than the noodles, and cook them with water. Soup cakes are similar to modern noodles. The pork and sheep noodles, silky chicken noodles, three fresh noodles, Yutong skin noodles, salted fried noodles, bamboo shoot meat noodles, fried chicken noodles, big old noodles, puppy soft lamb noodles, Tongpi noodles, meat noodles, and dried shrimp noodles poured with seed ingredients sold in Hangzhou noodle shops belong to the category of soup cakes.
Song dynasty rice products did not lose wheat. The smell of rice wafts from every house. The south of the Song Dynasty was rich in rice, and the southern grain was transported to the north, coupled with the increase in rice production in the north, so the Song people in the north and south often ate the staple food of rice porridge. Lu You wrote "The First Return to the Miscellaneous Song", which has a sentence "soft cooking fragrant peach blossom rice, light drink clear bamboo zun leaf sauce". I don't know if peach blossoms are added to this rice, and poetry jumps on the paper.
The southern part of the mainland has high temperatures and abundant rainfall, which is suitable for rice growth. Therefore, rice cultivation is more common, and rice has naturally become the staple food of southerners. In their long-term agricultural work, the Song people have cultivated many new varieties of rice with good color, aroma and taste, such as Guangdong's silk seedling rice and qimei rice, which are very valuable varieties. The rice grains are white and crystalline, rich in oil, and the cooked rice is rich in aroma, soft and delicious; The fragrant grass of Shaanxi and the mountain fragrance of Fujian are fragrant when they bloom, and the rice cooked into rice is fragrant everywhere, and has always had the reputation of "one family cooks ten fragrant, one mu of rice is cooked and ten li fragrant"; And the fragrant rice in Changsha, Hunan Province, is even more famous, and the Song Dynasty writer Zhou Mi said in "Old Stories of Wulin" that this rice "smells from the wind, smells fragrant in five miles; The room is full of incense."
In addition to cooking, the Song people also often ground glutinous rice (sticky rice) into rice flour to make sticky foods, such as sticky cakes, balls, etc., of which balls were the most popular in the Song Dynasty. This kind of round seed, also known as dango and yuanzi, has many varieties. The meatballs sold in Hangzhou City recorded in the "Mengli Lu" include yam balls, real pearl balls, kumquat water balls, flour water balls, bean balls, hemp balls, and rice balls. Song Dynasty female lyricist Zhu Shuzhen praised in the poem "Yuanzi": "Light round is superior to chicken head meat, smooth and suitable for crab eye soup." Even if there is nowhere to say, he has lost the soup cake to try He Lang. ”
The Song Dynasty people consumed millet, mainly using it to cook rice. When he was a teenager, the Northern Song Dynasty writer Fan Zhongyan borrowed a monastery and studied hard, "rowing and eating". This "food and food" is to cut the condensed millet porridge into several pieces after cooking, and take a piece to eat when hungry. People with well-to-do families eat more dried millet or steamed rice. Dry rice is washed with rice, added to water, and simmered over slow heat. Steamed rice is first boiled in water, and then the rice is fished out with a fence and steamed in a cage.
"Three meals a day" is a common thing for people today, and in fact, it was gradually popularized in the Song Dynasty. Originally, it was a two-meal system, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The Song people are very particular about food, "where the diet is delicate, the new rice, the odd vegetables, there is no shortage of products." The expansion of the market and the exquisite pursuit of food led to the birth of a variety of cuisines in the Song Dynasty. "Tokyo Menghualu" "Food Fruit" article, "Mengli Lu" "Tea Hotel" article, "Noodle Shop" article, "meat vegetarian restaurant" article, "Martial Arts Past" "City Food" article, all list of long lists of food, snacks, and dim sum, you can't count.
In the Song Dynasty, agricultural productivity was revolutionized, especially the introduction of early varieties of rice and the promotion of recultivation technology, so that the same area of land could feed more people, so that more surplus population and agricultural products could be precipitated from the land and flowed into the city and industry and commerce. In response to some wasteful phenomena in society at that time, the literati of the Song Dynasty mostly advocated thrift and opposed luxury from the perspective of "thrift to cultivate morality". Luo Dajing proposed that "the benefits of thrift do not stop at one end", and thrift has benefits such as "cultivating morality", "nourishing life", "nourishing the spirit" and "nourishing qi". Fan Zuyu, a famous minister of the Northern Song Dynasty, believed that "the ancient saint emperor Ming Wang did not regard thrift as a virtue and luxury as a great evil." The literary scholar Zeng Gong believed that "if it is used sparingly, although the world is poor, its wealth is easy to achieve."
Source: Guangming Network - Guangming Daily