In the late spring and early summer, entering the second half of the silkworm moon, the sound of cuckoo urged farming, Dai Sheng also fell on the mulberry branches in the morning to call the silkworm lady, and the fava beans produced in Shanghai were listed with green skin and green flesh and full body.
The so-called "silkworm weather, tea picking season", the most popular at present, in addition to tea picking, is to eat fava beans, fava beans themselves are a vegetable that Shanghainese like to eat.
In the vegetable market, you can often see aunts and uncles who buy a few pounds and a few pounds, feel that they have bought a particularly fresh broad bean, a satisfied and proud smile on their faces, and think that they will eat it when they fry a pot at night.
The exquisite gourmet believes that the best local beans can only be eaten eighteen meals, and only by peeling and stir-frying can the color be bright green and the skin crispy and sticky.
And exquisite Shanghainese have long figured out ways to keep the delicious, and spiced beans are the best snacks for Shanghai children.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" > past and present lives of spiced beans</h1>
As the overlord of snacks on the beach, the spiced beans were first made by a man named Guo Yingzhou, and there is still an unknown story.
Before 1930, Shanghai already had small green beans made of cinnamon, fennel and other spices, called "fennel beans", which was quite popular with citizens everywhere.
18-year-old Guo Yingzhou left his hometown to make a living in Shanghai, when it was during the War of Resistance Against Japan, the City God Temple was a gathering place for refugees, Guo Yingzhou saw this "business opportunity", and wanted to ask the old Shandong fennel bean stall owner of the City God Temple for the art of cooking.
The stall owner insisted on refusing, so Guo Yingzhou drastically improved the practice of fennel beans and six-spice beans at that time, and invented a new snack, because of its salty and sweet pine glutinous characteristics, named "five-spice beans".
Jiading production of "three white" broad beans, add fennel, tangerine peel, cinnamon, sugar, flavor and other ingredients to burn, so that the broad beans taste soft and hard, salty with sweet.
In terms of ingredients, he also used imported flavors that had not yet been accepted by the Chinese people at that time, which was also the earliest food used in Shanghai to use edible flavors, and he had smelled a light creamy aroma before tasting, and people sent the nickname "creamy spiced beans".
Since then, the Shanghainese dialect has had "don't eat the city god temple spiced beans, which means you haven't been to Shanghai", and also laid the position of the five-spiced beans in the shanghai beach snack industry.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" > Shanghai's top snack</h1>
Lu Xun once wrote an essay on "Snacks", he said: "The residents of Shanghai and snacks cannot be separated from each other. "And he loves snacks himself."
When I was a child, I went to the City God Temple, in addition to walking the Nine-Curved Bridge, I was looking forward to the adults at home to buy spiced beans, and the outermost layer of white frost could be slowly licked, and after licking the spiced beans, there was also a salty fragrance, and the broad beans heart was a little soft, which was the taste of memory.
The current spiced beans are located next to the nine-curved bridge, the most lively of the City God Temple, occupying the best façade on the south side, although there was no queue at 8 o'clock in the morning that year, but the tourists in the store were still in an endless stream.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="17" > non-genetic inheritance of spiced beans</h1>
Now, the five-spice bean making technique has been listed in the intangible cultural heritage of Shanghai, and the inheritor, Teacher Qiu Chenghua, has been learning to make five-spiced beans since entering the factory in 1980.
The raw materials used are specially selected from the local production of broad beans in Shanghai, the selection is extremely strict, yellow beans and insect moth beans can not be used, to use the same color of green beans, washed and boiled with water.
The use of materials is exquisite, the heat is appropriate, is the secret of the longevity of spiced beans, however, the hardest is to cook beans and turn beans, more than 7 hours, to keep the furnace temperature at more than 300 degrees, turning beans all rely on the strength of the body, more than 30 pounds of beans to keep turning.
When turning, you should slowly push down from around the side of the pot with a fence, so that the beans can be evenly flavored, about half an hour, see the salt flowers on the bean skin, you can get up the pot to cool the beans, after drying, it is a spiced bean.
The inheritance of each intangible cultural heritage skill is not easy to come by, and the spiced bean is no exception, so the next time you go to Shanghai, you may wish to pick up a bag of beans, recall the taste of childhood, and taste the taste of intangible cultural heritage.