When it comes to Suzhou, many people's first reaction is - why is it so sweet?!
A casual search on the Internet can find a lot of question marks that are "overwhelmed by sugar and overwhelmed":
"Why is it sweet to eat a Hunan dish???"
"Why are cold skins and chutneys also sweet?"
"I also recognize the sugar in the squeezed vegetable meat shreds, and it doesn't matter if there is a layer of sugar under the onion oil noodles, but why is the pork chops also sweet?"
There are also some netizens who give soul torture:
"Are the diabetes on your side starving to death?"
In addition to pastries, Suzhou's brine is actually very famous, of course, it is sweet
Of course, tastes are something that inherently varies from person to person. For example, some people feel desperate and don't understand why raw frying can be sweet; others think: "Your meat buns are all in Suzhou, how is it not sweet?!" ”
Suzhou sweets have become a consensus, but why do Suzhou people have to add sugar to everything they eat? Is it true that eating sugar has been integrated into the genes of Suzhou people since ancient times?
Eating sugar is not as simple as you think
How much do Suzhou people love to eat sweet? Let's start with a passage:
"The sweet tooth habit of Suzhou people should not continue, and candy snacks should no longer be advertised, because this is harmful to the health of Suzhou people [1]."
This passage is not from a health science popularization tweet from a WeChat public account, but a letter written by Shen Congwen to his family more than sixty years ago.
Of course, a little modification has been made here, and the original text should be more crepe.
In 1956, Shen Congwen went to Suzhou and wrote a letter to his wife complaining that Suzhou was full of snack bars and candy shops, but Suzhou people were still thin and undereaten, "very strange".
The food of Suzhou Twin Towers Vegetable Market looks like it is extremely sweet
In that era when materials were still far from abundant, Suzhou people loved to eat sweets, which left a deep impression on Shen Congwen.
From Shen Congwen's description, it can also be found that the variety of sweets eaten by Suzhou people has never been as simple as adding sugar.
A kind of sweetness, there are thousands of ways to open in Suzhou.
The jujube mud cake is thick and sweet and soft, fragrant but not greasy; the bean paste green dough is sticky, and the sweetness perfectly neutralizes the bitterness of the green dough.
Youth League
All kinds of sweet smells, if you want to choose the most representative, it may be pickled osmanthus flowers.
Osmanthus is originally an elegant flower. Li Yu once commented in "Casual Love And Occasional Mail":
"The fragrance of autumn flowers is like laurel, the tree is the tree in the moon, and the incense is also the fragrance of heaven."
If the laurel in the poem is a heavenly immortal, then the pickled osmanthus flower is the rich flower on earth
Suzhou was originally one of the main producers of osmanthus flowers. In the early morning, the osmanthus flowers are half-blooming, and there is still dew hanging on them, which is the best to pick at this moment.
In ancient times, there were no refrigeration conditions, and sugar pickling became an important way to preserve the delicious taste of flowers and fruits. The aroma and color are "fixed" with plum brine, placed in a glass bottle, a layer of osmanthus flowers and a layer of sugar, the aroma of heaven and the fireworks of the world blend here, forming a luxurious sweet fragrance.
Osmanthus cake made of osmanthus flowers is sweet and soft, a tenderness that no one can refuse
It can be the protagonist of the pastry, or it can be the finishing touch. Sugar lotus, sugar porridge, sugar taro, sugar taro seedlings, sprinkled with a few drops of pickled osmanthus flowers, the soft glutinous food that comes with the staple food has added different layers.
Osmanthus glutinous rice root, from: China on the tip of the tongue
Paired with chicken head rice, the refreshing breath of aquatic food is embellished with osmanthus flowers, and the fresh sweetness of first love.
Suzhou's specialty, Taihu Lake chicken head rice, has become a traditional Chinese cuisine
No matter how bitter and difficult life is, it can melt in such a gentle sweetness.
Suzhou people, salty and sweet
Suzhou people are not false for sweetness, but to be precise, they should eat sweet and know how to eat sweet.
After all, sweetness is a key aid in many delicious ingredients.
The dish is sweetened to lift the savory flavor and thus increase the aftertaste. Sweet can also be combined with sour and bitter, playing a soothing effect and producing a variety of effects.
A typical example of this practice is the Soviet-style noodles. Braised meat noodles, yellow on both sides, maple town meat in May, three shrimp in June, red soup and white soup, sugar with different ingredients, from sweet to fresh, each taste is different.
In the TV series "All Is Good", Su Daqiang ran away from home and went to the Dongwu Noodle Restaurant to eat bowl noodles / All very good
Take the Ao stove noodles in Kunshan, Suzhou, for example, the sugar is added first to combine salty and sweet to increase the layer, and the other is to remove the bitter taste of fish in the soup raw materials.
The soup base of the Okuza noodles used to be boiled with freshwater fish scraps, not a precious ingredient. Such raw materials, with a little bit of sweetness, will set off a different kind of salty freshness
Hard life should also be exquisite, which may be a Soviet philosophy of life.
Another example is the world-famous crab-eating culture, and the history of sugar is more complicated.
Suzhou is rich in water resources and has had the habit of eating aquatic products since ancient times.
The autumn wind rises, and it is the season when there must be hairy crabs on the table of Suzhou people
Although the crab is good, it is extremely inconvenient to eat, and it is rarely directly served at the banquet. People came up with all sorts of ways, and the ultimate way to eat crab was born—the bowl of delicious bald butter.
"Bald" in Suzhou dialect is "unique" meaning, "bald butter", that is, only boiled with crab yellow crab paste, not crab meat.
Disassemble the crab yellow crab paste, and then add a little sake, salt, sugar and other seasoning. The thick oil seals the delicious taste of crab yellow and crab paste, and when you take a bite, the essence of crab is extremely mellow, stimulating the taste buds without restraint.
From: Flavor of the World
The luxury of the whole autumn and winter is at this moment of the tip of the tongue, and the looming sweetness is the finishing touch.
Interestingly, in the beginning, Suzhou people were not known for their sweets, but for eating salt.
Eating crabs and adding sugar is the first hand of northerners. The Northern Sui Emperor was very fond of eating crabs, not only loving to eat them, but also adding sugar.
The Song Dynasty's "Mengxi Pen Talk" also records that southerners like to eat salty, and northerners like to eat sweet, "fish and crabs plus molasses", which is probably the habit of the north [7].
Suzhou famous dish squirrel mandarin fish, the last step is to pour sweet and sour sauce
At that time, eating crab with sugar may be because there were no long-term refrigeration conditions in ancient times. Crabs in the south have to go to the north, so they have to be sugar pickled and preserved.
So, when did Suzhou people themselves start putting sugar in their dishes?
There is a view that during the Song and Yuan dynasties, Suzhou people still ate salty. For example, in the recipes written by Suzhou people at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, nearly 70% of the dishes explicitly mentioned the use of salt, but only less than 15% of the sugar was used; the amount of salt used was far greater than that of sugar [3].
Begonia cake or plum blossom cake, named because the cake resembles begonia or plum blossom, is a common delicacy in Shanghai and Suzhou
Therefore, it is speculated that during the Song and Yuan dynasties, a large number of northern residents moved south to the Central Plains, which made the taste of Jiangsu and Zhejiang turn from salty to sweet. However, this claim is difficult to concretely verify.[8]
In any case, Suzhou people are known for their sweet taste, and they have never given up on salty taste.
Fresh meat fried, fresh meat mooncakes, fresh meat dumplings, and even bean blossoms are all salty and fresh tastes – although they are indeed indispensable to the embellishment of sugar.
There are raw fried bun shops everywhere in Suzhou
In fact, the pursuit of sweetness is almost a common humanity.
The American historian Westminster has pointed out: "Once people are fortunate enough to taste the sweetness of sugar, they must begin to yearn for sugar[9]. "Sweet, always automatically reminds people of happy, healthy, pleasant atmosphere and things.
In this way, perhaps Suzhou people are just luckier to be able to eat sugar earlier and more conveniently, and it is difficult to quit this eating.
No matter how difficult life is, you must also eat sugar
Sweets entered the homes of ordinary people in Suzhou on a large scale, probably in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Since the end of the Ming Dynasty, sugar making technology and sugarcane cultivation technology have gradually been popularized in the folk, and sugar has become a common product [4].
However, Suzhou people have sugar to eat and love to eat sugar, the main reason is not the local sugar, but its commercial and trade center status.
At that time, the main sugar production bases were in Fujian and Guangdong, but most of the sugar produced was shipped to Jiangnan.
The Jiangnan area was one of the largest sugar commodity distribution centers in the country at that time, and Suzhou, as the country's leading commercial city, was also the main consumption base of Cantonese sugar and Fujian sugar.
During the Qianlong period, Ling of Chaoyang County, Guangdong Province, wrote a poem that recorded:
"Sell winter clothes to Suzhou, there will be a hundred ships of rock sugar." [4]
The city's rivers and lakes brought prosperity to water transport
Suzhou people are not only accustomed to eating sugar, but also eat more and more delicately. The "Qing Barnyard Banknotes" records:
"Suzhou is known for its emphasis on food, and all the people above the middle class, the meals and snacks are all exquisite."
Today's Suzhou people's habit of "adding some sugar to any dish" is, in a sense, also a legacy of the glorious history of the past.
For modern people, added sugars (such as white sugar, cotton sugar, brown sugar, etc.) have been proven to be pure energy foods and contain no other nutrients.
But whether it is now or in the past, Suzhou people have not been able to resist the temptation of sweetness.
According to historian Peng Mulan's estimates, from the 17th to the early 20th century, in the major sugar-consuming areas such as Lingnan, the southeast coast and the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, per capita sugar consumption may have reached more than 8 catties. Even if this data is high, the sugar consumption of Jiangnan residents in the 1930s will not be less than 3 catties [11].
It should be known that until 1952, the domestic sugar production per capita was less than 1 kg, and such consumption was already very large [12].
Today's dazzling array of sweets was once a luxury
The writer Zhou Zuoren once traveled from Beijing to Suzhou to "eat cakes and snacks to the mouth". In his view, desserts and pastries are also a reflection of life:
I often think that the history and culture of a country have been passed down for a long time, and there will always be a trace in life, either gorgeous or light, but it is all refined, which does not want to boast anything, but it is the performance of nature. [...] Things don't have to be precious, but they are also very refined, which is enough to make me satisfied and admire, that is, it also shows one of the spots of Suzhou's living culture.
He then packed a lot of snacks and brought them back, all of which he had "never met in Beijing".
Even in the war-torn years of the Republic of China, it did not prevent the people of Suzhou from insisting on enjoying this sweetness. Probably because no matter how difficult life is, you need some comfort.