As a child who grew up in Niujie, the aroma of halal food in Niujie is always in the air: whether it is in the street or into the hutongs and godson hutongs, from morning to night, the air is always filled with the aroma of various eating. In the early morning, buy a few yellow and clear oil cakes, scorched rings and roasted cakes with the aroma of sesame sauce to go home with a small bamboo basket, it is best to eat a bowl of piping hot haggis to eat special flavor; turpan restaurant snow white tofu brain, Liu Sheng's beef buns, the smell of roasted lamb full of belly is still endlessly evocative. At noon and evening, diners from restaurants such as Da shun tang, Tiankelai, Hongshun Xuan, and Turpan were in full swing, and the "gourmets" who went to Jubaoyuan Restaurant to eat shabu-shabu and buy meat slices were lined up in a snake-like long line.
The variety of cattle street snacks is staggering, with about 280 species recorded. Some experts have researched that the birthplace of many Beijing snacks is in Niujie, not some "court". In spring, the fragrant hot and soft spiced peas and the blue and turquoise salted beans are all on the market. In summer, a variety of cold snacks are dizzying, as smooth as cream cheese, sweet and soft sticky Aiwowo, golden pea yellow, as well as steak cakes, cold powder, sour plum soup, roast lamb... Everything. The autumn wind is coming, the streets and alleys are wafting with the aroma of grilled meat, fresh old corn is also on the market, as well as offal soup, kidney bean cake, popcorn, hawthorn cake, paste cake... It serves a variety of delicacies for people. In winter, the street can gradually smell the sweet and seductive smell of roasted sweet potatoes, beef bone marrow oil fried noodles, noodle tea, barley porridge, fried bean bubbles, shabu lamb, eat warm and melting. There are also some snacks that are served all year round, sweet, salty, fried, roasted, thin, dry... Niu Street can be described as a "snack street".
The worship temple at the heart of this street is thousands of years old, and some Muslims from Arabia who came to China to do business in the early days lived in the temple. Many Niujie people make a living from doing business, and Teacher Dahuizhong, who has lived in Niujie for many years, wrote: "The cattle and mutton slaughtering houses, camel shops, vegetable shops and other industries they run have dragon tickets. For example, Caishikou, which is famous for its vegetable trading market in Nancheng, was the largest vegetable trading market in Beijing that year, and the wholesale business was monopolized by niujie people. In Niu Street, it is called the fruit shop operated by the Guozi Jia family, the name is Yongsheng No., there is a unique monopoly on red fruits and their processed products (that is, hawthorn, after processing, there are fried red fruits or called olives, candied fruit, etc.), it is said that from the beginning of the Qing Dynasty until liberation, it has always monopolized the right to operate red fruits in Beijing. ”
My eighty-four-year-old father talked about his childhood: the old uncles and mothers who walked the streets and sold beef tendons, five-spiced noodles, broad beans, cloud beans, and peas carried a waist-shaped wooden box on their shoulders, and the one used to sprinkle pepper salt was a cow horn, and the cowhide with holes in the cross head was especially popular with children.
Now there is a wholesale market for beef and mutton in the input hutong of Niu Street (formerly known as cooked meat hutong), where hundreds of traders gather. Since the early hours of the morning, fresh meat from Hebei, Shanxi and Inner Mongolia has been coming here continuously, and Muslim restaurants and traders in Beijing's 49 cities have wholesaled fresh beef and mutton here. The vendors' wide meat cases were washed and bleached, and the large brass weigh plates and meat hooks shone brightly. The bright beef and mutton were slaughtered in the morning, and they sang loudly: "One hundred pounds of you!" A large number of fresh beef and mutton are draped in morning light from here to thousands of households in Beijing.
The authentic tradition of Cow Street halal snacks is memorable. Whether it is a shop with a façade, or a stall on the street or a cart to pick up a burden, there are eye-catching Arabic "Jingdu'a" and "Western Huihui" and "Halal Ancient Religion" signs. The Hui are a people who advocate cleanliness. The traders in snow-white prayer hats were clean inside and out, from their bodies to their clothes. So halal food makes people look clean and eat with confidence.
"Junwang" baked cake and burnt circle "Junwang" is a famous artist who made baked cakes and burnt circles in old Beijing, starting from the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty. Because the first generation of people grew tall, white and fat, handsome in appearance, and surnamed Wang, people gave them the nickname "Junwang". By Wang Shihua's generation, King Jun was already the fifth generation. For more than 100 years, the Wang family has relied on these two small foods in the burnt cake scorch circle to gain a firm foothold in the southern city of Beijing.
The main ingredient of Junwang's baked cake is raw noodles, which are only served with a small amount of noodles, and the noodles are also made with sesame sauce, pepper salt, cumin and other ingredients. After the baked cake of "Junwang" is baked, there is nothing outstanding about the appearance, but there are more than a dozen layers inside when you bite it, and the outside is scorched and tender, and the aroma is fragrant.
"Rice Cake Money" and "Cut Cake Lee" Qian Decai ancestral home Guang'anmen Niu Street, Qian Lao himself from the age of twelve with his second brother to sell cut cakes, after independent trading is nothing more than rice cakes, donkey rolling, etc., in the Qianmen Street, Tianqiao area. In the 1980s, retired Qian Lao opened the first "Rice Cake Money" storefront in Niu Street, becoming the first person to sell rice cakes by a self-employed person in Niu Street. Now Niu Jie mentioned that the Qian family did not know. "Rice cake sticky, bean paste sweet" was the evaluation given by the masses at that time, it was really a bit old-fashioned, gave Qian Lao a lot of encouragement and confidence, and the business was very prosperous. It is said that many old predecessors who sold rice cakes saw the inadequacy and dedicated themselves to teaching by example, so that the energetic Qian Lao opened up many new varieties and formed a Series of Beijing snacks: pea yellow, kidney bean roll, yam roll, yellow rice noodle fried cake, tea dish, sugar roll fruit, chestnut cake and so on, the supply exceeded demand. At the snack festival in Tongxian County, Vice Premier Ueda Noryun personally wrote an inscription "Rice Cake Family", which made Elder Qian realize how difficult it was to obtain such recognition and honor for the craftsmanship handed down from his ancestors for more than a hundred years.
In 1986, after Li Yonghe retired, the street office took the initiative to find him with ancestral cake cutting skills and invited him to go out of the mountains to resume his ancestral business. Because the century-old Li family rice cake is done authentically, there are many people who buy it every day, there are long queues, and li Yonghe has also brought the title of "cut cake Lee", and my old neighbor has been real (deceased) for many years.
Mr. Jin Xun, who has lived in Niu Street for a long time, recalled: In the past, there was a kind of food in old Beijing called koshi cake, and only one piece of cake came out of a pot. An old man, pushing a small cart. There is a fire under the car, and there is a closed snow iron steamer on it. In the center is a thin iron pipe more than a foot high, and at the top is a small steamer the size of a palm. The old man pours a spoonful of mixed powder into a small pot and covers it. The cauldron below is boiling, and the hot air is directly filled with small steamers through thin iron pipes. After a few minutes, the lid of the small pot popped and jumped out of the basket with a piece of koshiki cake. Needless to say, the most attractive thing is the home and process of making cakes, not so much as making cakes, but rather an artistic performance, chic and interesting, and there are many adults watching. This scene is only seen in Cow Street, and has never been seen again after leaving Cow Street.
Stir-fried paste is a dish made using the unique cooking method of "bursting" in the traditional Style of Beijing, which is a specialty of many halal restaurants in Beijing and was once lost. It is said that this dish was created in the 1920s by Zhou Xiaoting, a niujie street owner of the halal restaurant "Pie Week", who sold pot fried lamb. Legend has it that Liu Baoquan, the king of drum books, will come to this stall every day after the end of the show ("Pie Week" in Coal Market Street), And Mr. Liu often chats with the neighboring shopkeepers who have to spread the fried lamb on the side of the pot, and the slight fire is slightly fried for food, and the result is better. Every time Liu Baoquan ate like this, the owner carefully summed up the experience and finally made a burst paste. This dish is called pop paste is actually burnt, the color is brown and red, the texture is crisp and tender, the taste is rich, slightly braised, the food is not greasy and is appreciated by the majority of customers, and finally formed a halal flavor dish.
When I was in elementary school (during the Cultural Revolution), there was a Muslim canteen at the north exit of Niujie Street, and there were only simple foods to eat early: oil cakes, fried cakes, soybean milk, sugar fire, screw turning, dumplings and buns. Especially in winter, the cold wind whistled, opened the heavy quilt curtain, the fire was booming, the steam was filled inside, and the case of selling buns was on the right side of the door, steaming and selling, and people lined up in a long line. At that time, I had less oil and water in my stomach, and eating a few buns or two in the morning was a big meal to relieve my hunger! Lamb shallots or lamb leeks, the tender lamb filling is mixed with yellow sauce. The buns steamed hot on the plate, and the aroma went straight into the nose and eyes. The master of steaming buns is in his forties and is a famous pastor, and the buns he has made for many years have always been so fragrant and the taste has not changed.
The Niujie Muslim canteen is state-run, and the waiters are all taut with iron plates like faces, very cattle! At that time, there were very few canteens, business was hot, cups and plates on the table were in disarray, and I was holding plates in one hand and cleaning up the large places with the other hand, and I was eating happily. Although this canteen is not famous, but the chef hides the dragon Crouching Tiger, the disciple of the halal cuisine generation grandmaster in the Beijing halal diet line, the famous halal cuisine master - Jin Shiguang once held the spoon there, the old man does not rub sand in the eyes of the craftsmanship, the heat, the use of materials, the procedure is not ambiguous at all, even the home-cooked dish "onion fried lamb" is also authentic, racing through some of today's famous "special restaurants". Jin Shiguang has a very stubborn personality, and I remember when I was just a reporter, I went to the "Muslim Canteen" to interview. The leader called Mr. Jin to the office, and when he saw my microphone, he rolled my eyes: "What are you doing?" Not allowing me to answer, he threw down a sentence: "I didn't say it!" "Turned around and went back to the kitchen. Later, the demolition and renovation canteen was demolished. I, the so-called "diner", have traveled all over the four or nine cities of Beijing and have never eaten such delicious buns and fried lamb with green onions.
During the annual Erdai festival and Eid al-Adha, muslim families in Cow Street, men, women and children, are immersed in great festive joy, and almost every family will fry incense and give it to each other. On Eid al-Adha or the day of the death of the dead, people with conditions will slaughter cattle and sheep, cut fresh meat into meat, put it into bamboo baskets and send it to relatives and friends.
In Cow Street, tea occupies an important place in the lives of the elderly, and the first thing the old people do in the morning is to brew a bowl of tea, and the greeting to meet is also: "Have you drunk it?" "The heaviest gifts for relatives and friends to visit each other are not ginseng and bird's nest but fine jasmine tea, and food has become a bridge of communication between people and a conventional etiquette."
I love my hometown, NiuJie: I love its neighbors who are hot in the ancient road, I love its quiet alleys in the shade of the locust, and I love its strong smell thousands of miles away.