Text | Lin Wenying
Invited by a friend, I recently went to a water house on Hong Kong Island as a guest to experience the fishermen's food and drink at zero distance.
Dining with fishermen and, of course, seafood. But this is not a seafood meal in a restaurant, but a special fisherman's flavor. For example, when a plate of dried fish is served first, almost no one in the city can call all the names of "miscellaneous", such as dried tart sand, dried moray eel, dried whitebait, dried small fish, and dried urine shrimp. There are also some "little-known" small fish.
Fried squid (cuttlefish), of course, everyone has eaten it. Commonly known as "blowing pipe", it is fished up from the sea early in the morning, and all the condiments are damaged by the original taste, so the host uses it to steam, and the bite is full of ink. A table of people looked at each other, all with black lips and teeth, very funny. Brother Hao said that when he was a child, he went to school to write brush characters, and the children of the people on the water even saved ink, because the bile of cuttlefish can really be used to write.
Of course, Hong Kong people have eaten conch, mainly sun-dried conch, which is a good ingredient for soup. But this is the first time I have tasted the Tsing Yi snail, the shell is covered with moss-like algae organisms, and the snail meat is extremely delicious.
I learned that they were the leaders of the three major ethnic groups in early Hong Kong, and their ancestral home was Bao'an. Like the Hakka and Cantonese people, the Han family is also a Han ethnic group, and since ancient times, the coastal areas of Hong Kong, Macao, Guangdong and Fujian have lived along the rivers, using boats as their home. Among them, Sanya and Leizhou Peninsula on Hainan Island are the largest settlements of the Yan family.
The host introduced, "Grandpa's generation has already fished in Aberdeen." Aberdeen was the first of the four major fishing villages in the old days, with about 50,000 fishermen gathering at its peak. As late as the sixties, fishermen made boats their home. Most of the boats are dilapidated fishing boats that can no longer go to sea, and there are thousands of such domestic boats moored at peak times. After the seventies, the area around Chung Mei (now opposite the Harbour House) was densely packed with shacks, all of which were extremely simple houses, similar to the early squatter housing area of Kowloon.
The most amazing "one-night stand" Mayou fish during the banquet is to smear salt and dry it to make salted fish after fishing, but let the sea breeze blow until the next day, which is called "one-night stand", so that the preparation is both fresh and delicious, similar to the "pork bowl" of the Hakka people in the New Territories, and also see the wisdom of these two ethnic groups in Hong Kong "relying on mountains and mountains, relying on water and water".
Many fishermen present here are tanned, and the wrinkles on their foreheads are extremely deep, witnessing the years of the long sky and the blue sea. There are many similarities between the Hakka and the Gangjia in Hong Kong. The Hakka people call home all over the world, love to migrate, and have settled in Hong Kong for at least three hundred years. Before the fifties, Hakka was the main language in Hong Kong. As for the Gang family, before the opening of Hong Kong's port, it already lived on the water, and its source is difficult to audit.
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