Tangshan specialties, chess pieces baked cake

Chess piece baked cake is another delicacy in addition to Tangshan hemp candy, named because of its resemblance to chess pieces.

origin

This kind of baked cake originated from Chengguan in Fengrun County. Fengrun is located at the key point of the Jingdong Dayu Road (the imperial road where the emperor goes out), and the people of Guanwai and Jingdong pass through Fengrun Castle when entering Kyoto. It is well connected in all directions and there are many merchants coming and going. In particular, merchants who travel long distances or people who enter Beijing generally stop in Fengrun, so the guest houses and restaurants here are gathered, and the business is very prosperous. Legend has it that during the Guangxu years, there was a hotel called Shuangsheng on the West Street of Fengrun Chengguan, and next to this inn was a restaurant called Yushengxuan. Merchants who live in Shuangsheng every day generally eat at Yushengxuan nearby.

At that time, the distance between the market towns was very far, and the merchants who came from the south to the north had to bring some dry food on the road to fill their hunger before leaving. At first, the spare dry food of Yu Sheng Xuan Hotel was mostly steamed buns, flatbread and pot roast cakes. The longer these dry foods lasted, the drier and harder they became, and they were dry and tasteless to eat on the road. Once, when a student who had entered Beijing to take the exam was staying at Shuangsheng, and the next day when he was preparing to leave for dry food, the owner of the Yushengxuan Hotel was playing against someone. The student took a few pots of oven baked cakes, and helplessly said to the boss who was playing chess: "If you add some bean paste stuffing to your burnt cakes, how good it should be like this chess piece!" The boss held up a chess piece and asked, "What's the advantage of doing that?" The student replied: "Add some bean paste filling, eat it will taste, small size, easy to carry!" The boss listened to the student's words and felt that it was very reasonable, so he said: "Let's try it, when the guest officer was in high school, I congratulated you with a small baked cake!"

Afterwards, the owner of the Yushengxuan Hotel consulted the customer's opinion with the chef. They felt that there was no problem in making the pot stove baked cake the size of a chess piece, and there was no problem with adding bean paste filling inside, but they did not stop there, but in order to prevent the baked cake from drying on the road, after several experiments, they finally found a way to use chicken fat and noodles to make a chess piece baked cake with bean paste filling. This kind of baked cake is still baked in a vat oven, because the use of chicken fat and noodles, coupled with the aroma of sesame seeds, it appears to be burnt on the outside and tender on the inside, soft and sweet, very popular with passers-by.

effect

In the late 20th century, with the development of mining, Tangshan became an industrial town, and commerce also prospered. There is a very famous restaurant in Benyi Street in Tangshan called Jiumeizhai . The restaurant owner, Zhao Dongfu, is an open-minded operator. The reason why his hotel is called "Jiu mei zhai" is that he first hired nine young women as waitresses to attract customers. When Boss Zhao heard that fengruncheng's chess piece baked cake was very popular with customers, he sent a chef to steal the art in the name of the customer. After the chef understood the reason, he suggested using fine noodles, the filling is not limited to bean paste, but also a kind of pork filling, and the proportion and standard of ingredients are experimentally determined. Generally, it is a pound of fine noodles, with four or two chicken fat, half a pound of pork belly, and a layer of sesame seeds. The chess pieces baked cake produced in this way are like chess pieces, golden in color, tender on the outside, crispy in layers, and full of meat, and soon smell near and far, becoming a unique flavor of Tangshan. It is said that in the 1960s, when Premier Zhou visited Poland, he also sent people to Tangshan to buy chess pieces and burnt cakes as a state gift to foreign guests.

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