Five tastes
Text | Wang Zengqi
Shanxi people can really be jealous! A few Shanxi people went to a restaurant in Beijing, and after sitting down, they did not order food, so they first brought the vinegar bottle over, and each person drank three spices of vinegar. The guests in the neighboring seats stared straight at each other. One year I went to Taiyuan, and it was almost the Spring Festival. Other places spent the Spring Festival, all served a little good wine, but the oil and salt shops in Taiyuan all posted a note: "Supply old vinegar, one pound per household." "This is a big deal for the people of Shanxi.
Shanxi people also love to eat sauerkraut, and Yanbei is particularly victorious. Everything is sour, except for radish cabbage, but also poplar leaves, elm money. Someone came to say kiss to the girl, when the mother asked first, there were a few sauerkraut jars in the family. There are many sauerkraut tanks, indicating that the bottom of the house is thick.
Liaoning people love to eat sauerkraut white meat hot pot.
Beijingers eat mutton sauerkraut soup under the mixed noodles.
Fujian people and Guangxi people love to eat sour shoots. Jia Pingwa and I are in Nanning, we don't like to eat in the guest house, and we go outside to eat blindly. As soon as Ping Concave entered the door, he shouted, "Old friend noodles!" "Old friend noodles", sour bamboo shoots meat shredded soup below also, do not know why it is called "old friend".
The Dai people also love to eat sour. Chicken stew with sour shoots is a famous dish.
Yanqing Mountain loves sour rice in summer. After souring the good rice, I used the well to draw cold water and went down three bowls.
It is said that Suzhou cuisine is sweet, in fact, Suzhou cuisine is only light, and the real sweetness is Wuxi. Wuxi fried eel paste put so much sugar! The meat filling of the bun also contains a lot of sugar, and I can't eat it!
Sichuan sandwich sand meat with a large piece of fat pork sandwich washed sand steaming, Guangxi taro button meat with a large piece of fat pork sandwich taro puree steaming, are extremely sweet, Kun is very delicious, but I can only eat two pieces at most.
Cantonese people love to eat sweets. There is a dessert shop opened by Cantonese people on Jinbi Road in Kunming, selling sesame paste and mung bean paste, and Guangdong students flock to it. "Sweet potato sugar water" is a soup that is boiled with white potatoes cut into pieces, what is there to drink? The Guangdong classmate said, "Good wild! ”
It's not that northerners don't like to eat sweet, it's just that sugar was rare in the past. My family used to have an old nanny, a countryman from Zhengding, who was in his sixties. She also has a mother-in-law, in her eighties. Once she wanted to go back to her hometown to visit her relatives, she weighed two pounds of sugar before leaving, saying that her mother-in-law loved to drink sugar water.
Beijingers are very conservative, in the past they did not know what bitter melon was, but in recent years some people have learned to eat it. Vegetable farmers also have plants. There are very good bitter melons for sale in the farmers' market, which belongs to the "small vegetables" and the price is quite high.
In the past, Beijingers did not eat cabbage [Editor's Note: 蕹 [wèng] dish, alias hollow cabbage], did not eat fungus vegetables, in recent years, some people also like to eat.
Beijingers are open in taste!
Beijingers used to know how to eat Chinese cabbage. It can be seen that Cabbageism can be overthrown.
Northerners eat lettuce vegetables in early spring. Lettuce is divided into sweet lettuce, bitter lettuce, and bitter lettuce is quite bitter.
There was a young actress from Guizhou who went to our troupe to study drama, and her mother sent her a bag of things from afar, which was "Ergen", or "Zeergen", that is, Houttuynia cordata. She made me taste a few. What is this? Bitter, it doesn't matter, it has a strong raw fishy smell, it really can't stand it!
The troupe has a cadre who writes subtitles and sometimes manages chores. This man is an expert in spicy eating. Every day, he did not eat vegetables at lunch and ate chili peppers. All over the country, ethnic minorities, all kinds of peppers, he tried his best to get them to eat. The troupe went to Shanghai to perform, he helped to make food, which is good, there will be no shortage of peppers to eat. Originally thought that Shanghai peppers were not easy to buy, he got off the bus the next day and found a shop specializing in various kinds of peppers. Some Shanghainese can eat spicy.
We practiced eating spicy in Kunming, and we used to use green peppers on the fire with a few Guizhou classmates and dip them in salt and drink under water. There are many peppers eaten in ordinary life, such as chaotian peppers and wild mountain peppers. The hottest chili I've ever eaten is in Vietnam. In 1947, he was diverted from Vietnam to Shanghai and ate beef noodles on the streets of Haiphong. Beef is extremely tender, soup is extremely fresh, chili peppers are extremely spicy, a bowl of soup powder, put three or four streaks of chili peppers is not spicy. The color of this pepper is orange yellow. In northern Sichuan, I heard that there is a kind of pepper itself that cannot be eaten, hanging on the stove with a thread, the soup is made, and the pepper is shabu-shabu in the soup, and it is very spicy. The Wa people of Yunnan have a kind of chili pepper called "shabu shabu spicy", which is probably indistinguishable from the chili pepper hanging on the stove in northern Sichuan.
Sichuan can not be said to be the most spicy province, Sichuan cuisine is characterized by spicy and hemp ,—— put a lot of peppercorns. The walls of the small noodle restaurant in Sichuan are painted with three words: spicy and hot. Mapo tofu, dried shredded beef, stick chicken; no peppercorns. The peppercorns have to be Sichuan peppers, mashed, the dish is ready, and finally put away.
Zhou Zuoren said that his hometown has eaten extremely salty pickles and salty fish all year round. The people of eastern Zhejiang are indeed very salty. A classmate, a Taizhou native, went to the shop to eat buns, broke the buns and poured soy sauce into them. The saltiness of the taste is related to the region, and Beijingers say that the south is sweet, the north is salty, the east is spicy and the west is sour, which is generally good. Hebei and northeast China have heavy populations, and Fujian cuisine is very light. But this is also related to the personality habits of individuals. Hubei cuisine is not salty, but Mr. Wen Yiduo feels that the dishes of Yunnan Mengzi are too light.
Chinese used to pay attention to eating salt, peach blossom salt, crystal salt, "Wu salt shengxue", and now the whole country eats refined salt. Only Sichuan people still insist on using well salt produced in Zigong.
I don't know what other country in the world people love to eat stinky.
In the past, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hankou all sold fried stinky dried tofu. The stinky tofu of the Changsha Fire Palace is famous for being often eaten by a big man when he is young. The big man later went to eat and said a sentence: "The stinky tofu of the Fire Palace is still delicious." In the "Cultural Revolution", two lines of large characters appeared on the shadow wall of the Fire Palace:
Highest instructions:
The stinky tofu of the Fire Palace is still delicious.
One of our comrades went to Nanjing on a business trip, and his lover was from Nanjing, and he was instructed to bring back a little dried stinky tofu. He did everything he could to do it. Brought to the train, it provoked an outcry from the people in one carriage.
In addition to dried tofu, gluten and blinds (thousand sheets) are all smelly. Lettuce, winter melon and cowpeas in vegetables are all smelly. The old roots of the winter shoots could not be bitten, cut off and thrown into the stinky jar. ——Many of us have a stinky jar there, a jar of "stinky brine", and the juice squeezed out of the pickled mustard is left for a few days to become a "stinky brine". The most special of the stinky things is the stinky amaranth stalk, the amaranth is old, the main stem can be as thick as a thumb, three or four feet high, cut into two inches of small pieces, into the smelly altar. After the stink is cooked, the outer skin is hard and the core inside is jelly-shaped. Choke one head, suck it in, and the core meat is in the mouth. This is the supreme delicacy of porridge. We call it "Amaranth Straw" there, and Hunan people call it "Amaranth Gollum" because it sucks up the sound of "grunting".
When Beijingers say stinky tofu, they mean stinky tofu milk. In the past, hawkers hawked along the street:
"Stinky tofu, soy sauce tofu, Wang Zhihe's stinky tofu." Stinky tofu paste cakes, boil a pot of shrimp and rice skin cabbage soup, good rice! Now Wang Zhihe's stinky tofu is packed in a large glass square bottle, which is very inconvenient, a bottle of a hundred pieces, it takes a long time to eat, and it is sold very expensive, becoming a luxury. I would love to see an improvement in this packaging, five pieces in one piece is enough.
I have eaten the stinkiest "gas death" (cheese) in the United States, and foreigners smell it to cover their noses, and there is really nothing to me, far worse than stinky tofu.
Even so, Chinese tastes are mixed, and I dare to say that it is the crown of the world.
Source/Selected from "Five Tastes of the World", People's Literature Publishing House Edition
Producer/Zhang Yiyong Editor-in-Chief/Wang Yue Review/Yan Weiqi
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Source: Economic Daily