The Song Dynasty ushered in the heyday of Chinese food culture. After the Song Dynasty, China's agricultural center has shifted to Jiangnan, and the intensive cultivation technology of rice cultivation in the south has also entered a mature stage. The development of agriculture has provided rich food resources for the catering industry, the increase of social material wealth, the improvement of people's living standards, and the rapid development of food culture, whether it is cooking technology or cooking theory, it has made great achievements.
The catering industry is well developed
In the Song Dynasty, there were many shops in large and small towns, of which restaurants accounted for a large proportion. Some large stores have been in operation for a long time and have a thriving business. According to the "Tokyo Dream Record" Volume IV "Food Shop", the trattoria of the Song Dynasty can be divided into several categories, such as hotels, restaurants, noodle shops, and meat and vegetarian restaurants. Fenjing Restaurant sells head soup, chalcedony soup, white meat hu cake, tong skin noodles, and sent stove noodle rice. Chuan Hotel operates meat noodles, large noodles, raw and cooked rice, etc., while Nan Restaurant operates fish pockets and fried fish rice. The soup shop mainly deals in shredded meat noodles. The production of dishes and pastries in the Song Dynasty has been divided into divisions of labor, and its cooking skills have reached a very high level.
Tokyo Dream Hualu - Tea Shop
Improved cooking skills
There are many kinds of cooking methods for the professional division of cooking, making full use of condiments, paying attention to color matching, and attaching importance to the shape of dishes.
The division of culinary professions was particularly evident in the court, aristocratic families and large restaurants. The Tokyo Dream Record, Volume IV, "Feasts and False Feasts", says: "Where the folk auspicious feasts are held, the chairs and tables are furnished, the utensils and boxes are carried out to make them, and they have their own tea and wine divisions. Eat and drink, own cooking. So much so that the tray, the invitation to the book, the arrangement of seating, the deacons in front of the deacons sang and persuaded the wine, which is called the white table man. It is generally referred to as the four divisions. If you want to visit the garden pavilion and temple to reward the guests, you will do it with your intentions, and you will also have your own land, contract and preparation, and have your own rules, and you dare not take money too much, although it is 100 percent, the hall is clean, and the host only pays for it, without effort. "Since the division of labor is responsible, it will strive for excellence and promote the progress of skills."
Cooking methods According to the names of dishes mentioned in books such as "Tokyo Dream Hualu" and "Dream LiangLu", there are more than 20 kinds of cooking, steaming, frying, frying, roasting, simmering, boiling and so on, which is the most distinctive technique in Chinese cooking. First of all, closely related to cooking is the exquisite knife craftsmanship, which was already exquisite in the Song and Yuan dynasties. At that time, it was possible to adopt different knife cutting methods according to the texture and performance characteristics of food raw materials. The second is to take different cutting methods according to the characteristics of the heat and seasoning. Dishes such as shrimp and snails are delicious and have a short cooking time, so they should be thinly cut. However, the meat of the shrimp snail is soft and thin, and it is difficult for non-extremely skilled knife workers to thinly cut them into batches and slices, which reflects the superb knife skills of the chefs of the Yuan Dynasty.
Tokyo Dream Hualu - Great Song Cuisine
The cooking of the Song and Yuan dynasties made full use of condiments to achieve the harmony of the five flavors and form a delicious and colorful taste. At that time, the condiments were mainly wine, salt, and sauce. Vinegar, sugar and various spices. Among them, wine is the most widely used, and almost all animal foods are prepared with wine. Vinegar and sauce are also more used condiments, and the Qing Yilu says that "sauce, eight treasures of the master, vinegar, food manager also." "To make the dishes more palatable, it's usually a mixture of spices.
Paying attention to color matching is a major feature of Song and Yuan cooking techniques. The method of collocation is also diverse, and there are natural colors that use the raw materials themselves, such as the "Qing Yilu" recorded: "Guangling Fa Cao Song Gui made 'wisps of silk', and its method uses crucian carp meat, carp roe, and bi bamboo shoot chrysanthemum seedlings as fetal bones." "With turquoise bamboo shoots and chrysanthemums to set off the white fish flesh and golden caviar, the color effect is natural and harmonious and beautiful. There is the use of food coloring toning. For example, in the Song Dynasty, there was a dish "Sand Eel Milk Tao", and the Yuan Dynasty writings stated that its cooking method was: "Cut the noodles thinly, cook them in water, sprinkle the color water with gluten and bean flour to search for peace, roll out the cakes thinly, blanch them, such as eel color, add milk and sauce and cook them." ”
The cooking techniques of the Song and Yuan dynasties also attached great importance to the shape of dishes. The art of gastronomic plastic arts has appeared at least during the Southern Dynasty, the Book of Northern Qi. The Biography of Yuan Xiaoyou says: "Now the rich are more luxurious, and the same prison is set up, which is worse than the sacrifice of grasshoppers." Tired fish into mountains, mountains have trees, above the trees, luans and phoenixes exist. In vain, it will be abandoned. "This tradition was inherited and developed during the Song Dynasty.
Three fresh lotus crisps
It can be seen from the above that the color, aroma, taste and shape pursued by Chinese cooking skills have matured in the Song and Yuan dynasties, laying a solid foundation for the highly developed Chinese culinary arts after this, and have an extremely important position in the history of Chinese cooking.
There are many kinds of main and sideline foods
As the economic center of the generation has shifted to Jiangnan, an agricultural economy centered on rice has been formed. Therefore, its staple food is mainly rice. For example, the staple food of people in the Jiangnan area is mainly rice and rice porridge. Rice is steamed, usually cooked with a single grain. For example, "Purple rice has a kind of huge victory, cooking a liter, getting a bucket of rice." "Porridge is boiled in water.
At the same time, the dim sum made from rice is also very developed. After the rice is soaked in water and ground into a pulp and dried, it can also be made into various snacks like dough, which was called flour food at that time, according to the "Wulin Past" volume VI records that there are only 19 varieties of cakes: sugar cake, honey cake, chestnut cake, millet cake, wheat cake, bean cake, flower cake, fin cake, ice cream koshiki cake, steamed sugar cake, raw sugar cake, bee sugar cake line cake idle cooking cake, dry cake milk cake, she cake, Chongyang cake and so on. The rich and colorful varieties of dim sum in the Song Dynasty also reflect the development of food culture at that time from one side.