The four major cuisines wrote about Beijing's Lu cuisine some time ago, I see that many people in the message said that Sichuan cuisine is the first, plus Sichuan restaurants in Beijing have been written before, let's talk about Sichuan cuisine.
In addition to the Lu cuisine, the other three prototypes of the four major Chinese cuisines were formed in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, and gradually developed and expanded from the middle of the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, but there was no concept of "cuisine" at that time, and there were actually only two cuisines, official cuisine and people's cuisine.
The names of the "four major cuisines" (Sichuan, Lu, Cantonese, and Huaiyang) that modern Chinese are familiar with are the products of liberation, and the concept of "eight major cuisines" (Sichuan, Lu, Guangdong, Suzhou, Fujian, Zhejiang, Hunan and Hui) appeared after the reform and opening up.
Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, with the development of transportation and the increase of exchanges around the world, different local flavor restaurants have begun to appear in big cities, and the concept of "gangkou" has appeared in the catering industry, so there is a name of "a certain gang dish". At that time, there were famous Su bang cuisine, Yang bang cuisine (Huaiyang cuisine), Beijing gang cuisine, Hangzhou gang cuisine, etc., and the Sichuan-style cuisine was divided into three factions: Shanghe Gang, Xiaohe Gang and Xiahe Gang.
Now when people talk about the characteristics of Sichuan cuisine, the first impression is "spicy" and "oily", and some people even say that "spicy is a taste stimulation, not a taste". In fact, traditional Sichuan cuisine and spicy food have little to do with it.
The development of Sichuan cuisine can be divided into two periods, with the Qing Dynasty as the demarcation point.
Before the Qing Dynasty, because of the humid climate, the dishes in Sichuan paid attention to "still taste and good spicy" (Eastern Jin Dynasty Chang Xuan," Huayang Guozhi. Shu Zhi"), because of the geographical environment of Sichuan, the dishes in the early Sichuan region had less communication with the outside world, and the style was relatively unique. In Sima Qian's "History of Southwest Yilie", it is mentioned that the Han envoy Tang Meng ate the Special Wolfberry Sauce of Shudi in Panyu, South Vietnam, which tasted spicy.
The war in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties led to a sharp decline in the population of Shudi, and began to fill Sichuan with lakes, so Sichuan began to have more exchanges with other regions, but even in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, there was no pepper in sichuan's diet, because chili peppers originated in South America, and at the end of the Ming Dynasty, they spread to the coast of China, which was called "pepper" at that time, and there were only preliminary records of pepper cultivation until the middle and late Qing Dynasty. It was introduced to Sichuan after the Opium War, and it was precisely because it came from overseas that Sichuan people would call it "sea pepper". In the early years, the traditional Spicy Foods in China were mainly peppercorns, ginger and zhuan.
During the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, the Sichuanese Li Tiaoyuan's "Awakening Garden Record" was praised by posterity as "the first recipe of Sichuan cuisine", but the Sichuan cuisine recorded in the book is closer to today's Jiangsu and Zhejiang tastes, and the book carefully records the practices of plum dried vegetables, drunken shrimp, rotten fish, fried eel shreds, etc., as well as many northern or Manchu dishes, such as sauce meat, roasted pig's head, hawthorn cake, Manchurian dumplings, roasted deer tail, bear paw, deer tendon.
After the Sino-Japanese War at the end of the Qing Dynasty, Chongqing first opened its port, and resources outside Sichuan began to pour in, especially from the warlords in the early years of the Republic of China to the establishment of the rear area of the War of Resistance Against Japan, the relatively calm Sichuan attracted a large number of personnel and funds, in order to meet the stomachs of people from all over sichuan, a large number of top chefs at home and abroad also came to Sichuan. Their arrival and integration began to lay the foundation and pattern of modern Sichuan cuisine.
At that time, Sichuan cuisine was divided into three factions: the Upper River Gang, the Xiaohe Gang, and the Lower River Gang. According to the practice and function, it is divided into swallow steaming gang, rice food gang, pasta gang and pickling brine gang.
Among them, Shanghe Gang is a cuisine centered on Chengdu and Meishan in western Sichuan, taking a high-end route, originating from the official cuisine of the Governor of Sichuan and the General Yamen, and is known for its fine ingredients and mild taste.
The representative work of the Upper River Gang is the famous "boiling water cabbage". The so-called "boiling water", in fact, refers to the clear chicken soup, the method is very rich, you need to use the old hen, the old hen duck, ham, ribs, dried scallops and other ingredients to add cooking wine, green onions and garlic and other condiments to simmer for more than 4 hours, and then the chicken breast is chopped until the meat is poured into a pulp with fresh soup, and poured into the pot to absorb impurities. After two or three times of repeated adsorption, the chicken soup in the pot is as thorough and clear as boiling water, the aroma is strong and thick, and it is not greasy or greasy. This dish is said to have been originally a famous dish in the Imperial Dining Room of the Qing Palace, but was brought back to the Governor's Palace by a Sichuan chef.
In addition to boiling water cabbage, the well-known dishes of the Shanghe Gang include chrysanthemum tofu, orange cordyceps duck, kung pao chicken, ant on the tree, white fruit stewed chicken, garlic white meat, fish fragrant meat shredded, pot meat slices, sweet roast white and so on. It can be noted that there is almost nothing spicy in these special dishes.
The restaurant that represented the Shanghe Gang cuisine system has survived to the present day in Chengdu's Rong Paradise, and the owner of the Rong Paradise is a generation of Sichuan cuisine grandmaster Blu-ray Jian. At that time, he was known for being good at being a Sichuan sect full of Han. Nowadays, it is said that the best heir to its mantle is the "Song yunze" restaurant in Chengdu, which is more than 1,000 yuan per capita.
The Xiaohe gang is composed of Zigong Salt Gang Cuisine, Neijiang Sugar Gang Cuisine, Luzhou River Fresh Vegetables, and Yibin Sanjiang Cuisine, and the main source is Yan Gang Cuisine. The so-called Zigong salt gang dish, because Zigong is the production area of Sichuan well salt, a large number of salt merchants gather here. Like Huaiyang cuisine, which also originated from salt merchants, in ancient times, salt sellers sold monopolies, a million profits, but merchants could not study and become officials, and they were idle and rich and could only dig out their minds on eating, wearing, and women. Therefore, the characteristics of Xiaohe Gang's dishes are rare and extravagant, and the techniques are strange. There is a saying that "a plate of vegetables for salt merchants, half a year's grain for salt workers".
For example, a salt dish called "pig blood bubbles" is very perverted: the four hooves of the live fat pig are tied and put down, the boiled glutinous rice porridge is pried open the pig's mouth and hard-fed, and then the pig is killed to remove the blood bubbles that are scalded in the pig's mouth, esophagus, and stomach, and then cooked with condiments.
Xiahe Bangchuan cuisine is centered on Chongqing, also known as "Chongqing Jianghu Cuisine", which is centered on chaotianmen wharf and serves the crew and merchants who run the wharf. Compared with the Shanghe Gang Yangchun White Snow, the dishes are more close to the people, the main ingredients are more conventional, the use of pickled pepper and sauerkraut seasoning, the most famous is the JiugongGe Chongqing Mao belly hot pot. Now when people talk about Sichuan hot pot is jiugong grid, in fact, Sichuan hot pot has other types of soup pot varieties, such as pot soup, pork rib soup, clear oil hot pot, fish hot pot and so on.
In the early 80s, the best period of Sino-Japanese relations, a Japanese publishing house sent a reporter with the support of the Chinese government to visit major well-known restaurants and celebrity chefs across the country, and produced a set of recipes called "Chinese Famous Cuisine Collection", which is divided into nine volumes, of which two volumes in Sichuan, three volumes in Beijing, two volumes each in Guangdong and Shanghai, three volumes in Beijing are mainly recorded high-end Lu cuisine and Huimin specialties of the Beijing school; the two volumes in Shanghai are mainly Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Huaiyang cuisine Sichuan and Guangdong are Sichuan and Cantonese cuisine
The final edition of "Collection of Famous Chinese Dishes" was beautifully pictured and well-documented, and sold for 128,000 yen a set in Japan that year. Many of the classic dishes recorded in it have now been lost, and in this collection it can be found that the characteristics of Sichuan cuisine are not the well-known spicy, but emphasize the combination of flavors, paying attention to the use of spices and ingredients to mix new flavors, such as the most common fish flavor and Miyobara flavor (Sichuan locally called paste spicy, high-end point called small lychee mouth).
In addition, after the liberation, because many leaders came from Sichuan or worked in Sichuan for a long time, they also promoted the popularity of Sichuan cuisine in the country; in 1983, the first national cooking competition, the Sichuan representative team won five awards, Sichuan cuisine began to sweep the country, according to the records of the industrial and commercial system, there are more than 4 million Chinese restaurants in the country, of which more than 35% are Sichuan restaurants, accounting for the first place, so although Sichuan cuisine is the latest to form among the four major cuisines, it is the most popular and popular cuisine.