Ten days to talk about | poetic lettuce soup

Lettuce is so poetic, but picking lettuce is very hard. Drink a bowl of lettuce soup, preferably not a drop left.

　　When friends from the north come to the south, they must invite them to eat and drink, and they must choose the right place. The mountains and rivers in the north have seen a lot, and you give him a little bit of a little bit of affection. Sitting by the lake, willows, rockeries flowing water, white ladies fluttering, this feels right. Of course the wine has to be served. But to go to baijiu is to go astray. Must be rice wine. Ningbo Shaoxing dialect is called old wine - "eat two cups of old wine", so that friends in the north are very happy. Wait until the old wine comes up, a taste, sweet squinting and drinking, yes, this is the temperament of Jiangnan. However, Jiangnan's temperament is to smile slightly, making you unconsciously intoxicated.

　　The cuisine of the south is really different from that of the north. Small bowls and small plates, eyebrows are clear, and the taste is also light. Some dishes, such as Longjing shrimp in Hangzhou cuisine, young buds of Longjing tea, fresh and crystalline shrimp, simple raw materials, shrimp and green tea have nothing else, which can be described as simple to the extreme. Not only does this dish not have a strong taste, but it's almost like forgetting to put salt. All its umami taste and aroma, the fleshy and elasticity of the shrimp, are only slowly released between the teeth and cheeks after chewing and swallowing, and even you have to close your eyes to better appreciate the tasteless taste.

　　Let's take another example of West Lake lettuce soup. Lettuce is horseshoe grass, a type of water lily, which is found between April and May and August and September. The leaves in this kind of water must be the tip of a small bud that has just grown. Next, the leaves were rolled up, about two or three centimeters. Again, it was four or five centimeters in size, stretching out the copper coin leaflets. The smaller and more tender the buds, the more mucus or gum they carry. West Lake lettuce soup, is to use that small leaf, rolled up, water lily buds, to make a bowl of sticky and slippery soup.

　　Speaking of which, this stuff is nothing to eat. Longjing shrimp, at least there are shrimp to chew. This bowl of lettuce soup, transparent to the bottom, seems to be nothing, only a leaf boat smeared with light ink on the lake. This turquoise lettuce itself does not have any special taste, and even a bowl of soup is light to tasteless, but, slowly, you drink slowly, taste carefully, see what taste?

　　Oh, it's poetic. This bowl of lettuce soup is full of the poetry of Chinese culture. In other words, when you close your eyes and eat lettuce soup, you actually eat not lettuce, but eat culture. In the Book of Verses, there is the shadow of lettuce. "Si Le Pan Water, Thin Harvest of Its Herbs", Lettuce is lettuce. Later, in the Jin Dynasty, there was a man named Zhang Han, who was an official in Luoyang, and when the autumn wind blew, he missed the lettuce soup and sea bass beauty in his hometown in the south. This thought twisted and turned in his heart, making Zhang Han feel very uncomfortable, so he simply did not do it and went home. In this way, he also contributed an idiom to Chinese culture, "The Thought of the Perch".

　　In this way, where is a bowl of light and tasteless lettuce soup, which is a bowl of quiet night thoughts that make people soaked in nostalgia.

　　Lettuce soup is a dish that very typically represents Jiangnan cuisine, especially a feature of Hangzhou cuisine, that is, literati cuisine. Literati cuisine is a kind of materialized expression of the ideal life of Jiangnan literati, it is a medium of elegance, and it is a bridge between literati to seek each other. If you taste a lettuce soup, just like facing a picture of Huang Gongwang's "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map", whether you can taste some of the other tastes depends on everyone's creation and understanding.

　　After eating a lot of lettuce soup by the West Lake, I wanted to go to the lake to find lettuce. It turned out that the lettuce was not in the West Lake. "Lettuce in the West Lake wins over Dongwu, and in March the spring waves are full of green lakes." Most of the lettuce in Hangzhou is produced from Tongjianhu Village in Shuangpu Town, a suburb. The lettuce sprouts here are thick and thick, producing hundreds of tons a year. In the 1990s, the area of lettuce cultivation in Shuangpu once exceeded 2,000 mu, but now the area has been sharply reduced to less than 100 mu.

　　Lettuce is so poetic, but picking lettuce is very hard. The boat used to pick lettuce is similar to a narrow canoe, the hull is about two meters long, not more than thirty centimeters deep, and an oil canopy is supported for shade, and two cement bricks are pressed on the boat as ballast stones, and people lie on the bow of such a boat, with their hands in the water, leaf by leaf, carefully picking the small, slippery, hidden under the water. Each leaf of lettuce sprouts is wrapped in a slippery gelatinous mass.

　　Drink a bowl of lettuce soup, preferably not a drop left. (Zhou Huacheng)