Teochew cuisine classic handmade dish "Dragon Wears Tiger Belly".
Courtesy of respondents
Last year, Chaozhou cuisine celebrity chef Sun Wensheng won the Supreme Gold Award at the first Teochew Cuisine International Competition. Courtesy of respondents
One of the characteristics of Teochew cuisine is that it is made with coarse dishes.
The essence of Teochew cuisine is a wide range of ingredients and elegance.
Chaozhou is the hometown of Teochew cuisine in China, and Chaozhou brine is famous at home and abroad.
Photo by Zhuang Jianming
These days, Huang Meiling's team is busy preparing for the final phase of the whole goose feast on October 30, and Teochew chef Fang Shuguang plans to bring flavored goose dumplings, strange fried goose slices and grass mushroom phoenix belt to Ximei Village in Yixi Town. The chefs at the village food stalls have prepared notebooks, and for them, Teochew cuisine is a craft directly related to the income of the family.
"Teochew cuisine is the best Chinese cuisine", this praise for Teochew cuisine, in October, from Teochew spread around the world. Behind the fame is Teochew cuisine and the land under its feet, as well as the direct, lasting and stable interaction of hipsters around the world.
Planner: Da Haijun Written by: Su Shiri Xiao Yanjing
From mountains, lakes and seas
"The horseshoe is as solid as Huiwen, and the bones and eyes are negative. The midges are sticky to the mountains, and one hundred and ten are born separately. The tail of the fish is like a snake, and the mouth and eyes are not compatible. Clams are shrimp toads, with the same name as Shilang. In the first month of 819 AD, the 51-year-old Han Yu was relegated to the History of Chaozhou Thorns eight thousand miles away for his book "The Bones of the Buddha". Arriving in Chaozhou from the northern Central Plains, the center of politics and culture, Han Yu only felt "undeplugable" and "fishy and started" for Chaozhou's raw ingredients. Han Yu, who is not a glutton, failed to feel the unique geographical advantage of the Teochew regional food culture. The natural environment of eastern Guangdong is the basic material condition for a wide range of materials and exquisite selection of materials for Chaozhou cuisine today.
The Tropic of Cancer runs through the tidal lands, and the subtropical monsoon climate brings rainfall and heat adapted to the seasons. Here the Han River enters the sea, forming an alluvial plain with its back to the Lotus Mountains. From common fruits and vegetables, poultry and mountain delicacies, to a variety of wildlife and seafood. The thriving and vigorous guangdong of all things provides the most direct source for the unique flavor of Teochew cuisine. Bitter thorns, thin shells, sage grass, balang fish, bead cockles... The Chaoshan people have the ability to find everything between the mountains and the sea and turn it into flavor.
Such a treasure land with abundant products was a barbaric land before the late Tang Dynasty. However, the provincial tail national football team became a safe place to live in the time of war, and after the Zhong Mingding Food Home in the Central Plains was displaced to eastern Guangdong, it retained the language, lifestyle and folk customs of that time, and blended with the local culture to form an ancient, thick and rich Chaozhou culture. From Chaoyu, Chao opera to Kung Fu tea, you can trace the origin of this vein, and the same is true of Teochew cuisine.
Chen Xiaoqing, the general director of "China on the Tip of the Tongue", believes that Chaoshan is an isolated island of Chinese cuisine, where the food culture of various dynasties has been preserved, "If anyone has not been to Chaoshan, he cannot be called a gourmet." ”
At 9:40 p.m., Wu Dongtao, the owner of Guantang Trout, hung up the cut fish, "The fish is elegant and white, and the night supper arrangement" is the beginning of another feast for teochew diners.
The "脍" in "Food is not tired of essence, and the body is not tired of fine" refers to raw fish. Eating raw fish meat was a common custom in ancient China, "transporting elbows to see the axe, with the knife falling in the snow." The famous diner Su Shi depicted the fish raw master with a sharp knife and the fish raw fish like a snowflake in the poem "Four Poems of the Five People who Share the Rhymes of the Southern Members of the Rafting City" in the poem "Four Poems of the Five People of the Southern Meeting of the Rafting City". Chaoshan is one of the few areas in China where the habit of eating sashimi is preserved. After the Mid-Autumn Festival, the autumn breeze rises, accompanied by a pot of wine, and the ancient eating habits continue here for thousands of years.
There are also shes in Teochew culture that should not be ignored, who have influenced Teochew culture to some extent, and in food culture, they are embodied as offerings to various sacrificial activities related to rice production in rice culture - various kueh products made of rice.
The ingredients of Teochew cuisine come from mountains, rivers, lakes and seas. The Minnan people of the Chao people belonged, and their ancestors, the remnants of the Central Plains, also crossed the rivers to come to eastern Guangdong, looked at each other with the natives of Minyue, and precipitated the Chaozhou culture in the thousand-year history, condensing into the background of exquisite and primitive food culture.
Settle down at a restaurant feast
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chaozhou became the economic, cultural and political center of eastern Guangdong comparable to Guangzhou, and the economy of the Han River Basin rose. The prosperity of the consumer market is closely related to the development of food culture, and the "Hanjiang Fengyue Liupeng Boat" attracts "celebrity inscriptions, riotous guests and flowers, and heels are connected" with exquisite diet and high-level pleasures.
In the late Qing Dynasty, the Chaozhou Shang Gang rose and became one of the four major Shang Gangs, "practicing the storm, going up to su song jin gate, down to Lei Qiong in Guangfu, and the Nanyang countries." "Teochew merchants set up guild halls in various places, and restaurants that serve as scenes of hipster business talks naturally prefer the Teochew flavor of their hometown. As a result, Teochew cuisine ushered in a key node from local daily food to restaurant cuisine, and Teochew cuisine began to take root in Tongdu Dayi.
In 1895, Pan Naiguang described what he saw when he passed through Singapore in a poem "Overseas Bamboo Branches": "Buying drunk and inviting him to a restaurant, the Tang people do not go with the old Fan. The opening hall orders must be slaughtered, half Chaozhou and half Guangzhou. "After the opening of Shantou, the economic activities in the modern Chaoshan region reached a peak, the business flourished, domestic and foreign trade were frequent, the catering industry entered a prosperous period, Shantou and Chaozhou rose a number of large-scale high-end restaurants, and overseas Chaozhou restaurants gradually became famous. Li Jiancheng, associate professor of the Department of Geographical Sciences of Hansan Normal University, mentioned in the "Geographical Explanation of "Chaozhou Cuisine and Cuisine"" that according to the estimates of the Chaozhou Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, there were about 200 restaurants and tea rooms opened by The Chaozhou people in Hong Kong in 1951.
Li Jiancheng believes that the key node in the spread and development of Teochew cuisine is Hong Kong. "As an international free port, Hong Kong is both a high-end consumption platform and a melting pot of Eastern and Western cultures. The rise of Chaozhou merchants in Hong Kong, the need for commercial activities and the pursuit of food after their prosperity have promoted the innovation, integration, high-end and refinement of Teochew cuisine, and thus introduced to the international market. ”
Noble seafood such as sea cucumber, abalone, lobster, etc. have become dry-roasted sea cucumbers, baked abalone, steamed lobsters, etc. by virtue of the preferences of Chaozhou consumers and the craftsmanship of Teochew chefs. In 1978, the Puning Thai chaebol Huang Ziming family opened the "Golden Island Bird's Nest Chaozhou Restaurant" in Kowloon, Hong Kong, which became an important symbol of the successful gentrification of Teochew cuisine.
After the reform and opening up, Guangdong, as the vanguard, was the first to accept the Hong Kong pop culture in the golden period, and people imitated the fashionable food, clothing, housing, and lifestyle on the other side. Chaozhou will not be missed, and the high-end Teochew cuisine will open up the market with the dual boost of Hong Kong's tide merchants and economic activity.
Sun Wensheng, a famous chef of Chaozhou cuisine and president of the Chaozhou Chefs Association, who won the supreme gold medal of the first Chaozhou Cuisine International Competition, was born into a family of Chaozhou cuisine, and his father worked as a chef at the Chaozhou Restaurant at Shawan Pass in Shenzhen at that time. Sun Wensheng worked there as a cook when he was 15 years old, witnessing the heyday of Teochew cuisine, "when business was booming, you can see a lot of big bosses from Hong Kong coming over." ”
Attributed to the city
Chen Junsheng, a full-time teacher in the Department of Cooking and Nutrition of Hanshan Normal University, believes that Teochew cuisine is characterized by a wide range of ingredients, exquisite selection of materials, fine coarse dishes, scientific seasoning, light and elegant, and emphasis on health. Li Jiancheng believes that the essence of Teochew cuisine is a wide range of ingredients, elegance and customs; transcendent skills, great refinement and great clumsiness; the pursuit of taste, great truth and great beauty; the unity of heaven and man, the great harmony of the great, the inclusive, the great new and the great.
"The best Chinese cuisine." This description is not the arrogance of Teochew cuisine over other cuisines. Teochew cuisine is famous for its delicacy and style, but behind the dishes, the Chinese concept of life represented by the food culture of the Chaoshan region is the outstanding feature of Chinese food culture - making fun in suffering, eating according to the times, openness and inclusiveness.
Zhang Xinmin, chairman of the Shantou Gastronomy Society and president of the Chaozhou Cuisine Research Association, also thought about why Teochew cuisine is famous in the world. In his book "The World of Chao cai", he wrote, "Food culture has a broader meaning than flavor dishes, if the food culture of Chaoshan is likened to the ocean, then chao cai is just a tip of the iceberg floating on it." ”
Food culture is a series of behaviors and norms produced by people around diet under the interaction of a specific natural environment and a historical humanistic environment. In the Chaoshan region, food is dynamically and positively associated with people and seasons.
"Drinking lotus leaf water in the summer can cool off the heat, and drinking sand ginseng jade bamboo water in the autumn." Sun Wensheng believes that a good cook should also be a good doctor. Huang Wuying, director of the Department of Cooking and Nutrition at the School of Cooking and Hotel Management at Hansan Normal University, also mentioned, "Lu Xinguo, a professor at Yangzhou University, once commented that Teochew cuisine naturally integrates diet and health care, and can enter thousands of households. ”
For the Spring Festival, you have to prepare red peach kway, rat shell kway, Qingming to make park citrus kway, Mid-Autumn Festival to eat taro... People in the Chaoshan region commemorate the days agreed upon between man and nature in large and small seasons, and also provide the most timely offerings to the gods and ancestors, and realize the communication between the virtual and the real through food.
The synthesis of local cuisine reflects the relationship between people and places in a place: the product and the way it is processed, and ultimately the unique flavor of a place. Teochew culture itself is an open system of multicultural layers and layers of fusion. In the context of globalization, logistics and cold chain, the Internet and transportation are weakening regional restrictions on ingredients, but also let Teochew cuisine have a richer flavor level and a broader inheritance space. From Oceania to the Indian Ocean, ingredients from around the world are entering Teochew cuisine, from Hong Kong to Southeast Asia to the rest of the world, and Teochew cuisine is also taking root outside the Chaoshan region.
Li Jiancheng believes that although Chaozhou cuisine is also listed as an intangible cultural heritage, it is actually not like other intangible cultural heritage projects that need to be saved and have difficulties in inheritance. "From the perspective of inheritance, the particularity of Chao cuisine is manifested in the extensiveness of the folk and the cultivation of specialized talents. Teochew cuisine is more in line with the times and has been developing, but with the development of the economy, there are better development opportunities. ”
Late at night on the streets of Chaozhou, white porridge shops began to light up. Pickles are juxtaposed with seafood, and workers and bosses share the table.
Whether it is a giant crocodile or a storm figure, it is necessary to eat after all, and Teochew cuisine has become synonymous with "high-end" and "fine" under the influence of its own advantages and historical fate. But when the meal is over and the feast is dispersed, a bowl of white porridge, what the Teochew people call "chyme", the water and rice are harmonious, soft and creamy, and the stomach is nourished. As long as someone is still eating a bowl of millet, the story of Teochew cuisine will continue forever.
■ Overseas stories
Teochew flavor, unforgettable hometown flavor
At 4:00 a.m., Dafeng Garden in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, most of the people are still sleeping, Liu Jinfa, a guy from Yakun Pure Western Knife Fish Ball Shop, has opened the gate, and the day's bustle is about to start again. From 6:30 a.m. until late at night, people of different origins come here to taste a fresh and sweet broth, eat a fish ball, and accompany the Teochew people's favorite ingredients, winter vegetables, coriander, and fish sauce. Teochew flavors flow between the lips and teeth, while hometown flavors remain in the hearts of hipsters.
The owner, Chen Weiqun, is originally from Chaozhou Caitang. In the 1950s and 1960s, my father went to Work in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, selling Teochew fish balls. Born in Johor Bahru in 1961, Chen Weiqun grew up in the scent of fish balls and hard work. Chen Weiqun remembers that after elementary school, he had to help his family make fish balls. At that time, the fish balls were still all handmade, pounding, pinching, scraping... Red, swollen and sore fingers are commonplace. Later, there was a machine for making fish balls.
When Chen Weiqun was 26 years old, he upgraded his father's trolley fish ball stall and opened the first Yakun pure western knife fish ball. Combined with saury and yellowtail, Teochew fish balls have an exotic flavor and have more fans in Malaysia.
Love to fight to win. Chen Weiqun took the fighting strength of the Teochew people and broke out of the world with the taste of Chaozhou. From the original store with 5 tables, there are more than 10 branches in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur, and the dishes have developed from a single Teochew fish ball kon to more than 10 kinds of noodles to choose from and more than 30 kinds of dishes to match. Chen Weiqun built a central kitchen production factory that supplies 1 ton of fish balls a day.
Chen Weiqun's shop has been open for more than 30 years, and many regular customers in Malaysia and Singapore can't forget the hometown taste here. Many people have followed their parents to eat fish balls since they were young, and after going abroad for further study, as soon as they return to Malaysia, they come to his shop to get a bowl of fish balls.
Fish balls are just one of the popular Teochew flavors in the local area, and in Chen Weiqun's view, Teochew cuisine is popular in Malaysia and Singapore, "red peach kway teow, glutinous rice cake, bamboo shoot kway ... People of all origins love to eat. "Teochew people love to eat taro puree here, plus white fruit, golden melon, but also drizzled with coconut milk, with the taste of Southeast Asia; white porridge with mixed salt; kway teow juice, brine duck, brine goose, brine pork," to Johor Bahru do not eat kway teow juice is not counted in Johor Bahru. "Five spices want orange oil, brine need garlic vinegar..." Chen Weiqun is a family treasure for the taste of his hometown.
And Chen Weiqun's hometown flavor is in Chaozhou. Teochew cuisine is his concept of maintaining his hometown. Every time he returns to Chaozhou to eat Teochew cuisine, he will feel that the Teochew cuisine in Johor Bahru is still far behind, the taste of his hometown is more authentic, there are more tricks, and even ingredients such as garlic vinegar are very different.
Three years ago, when my cousin was looking for relatives in Caitang, Chaozhou, an old photograph brought Chen Weiqun and his hometown closer together — it was his father and uncle. After returning to Caitang to recognize his ancestors and return to the sect, he found that the original national cultural relics protection unit Cong Xi Gong Ancestral Hall was 5 minutes away from his hometown. Chen Xunian, who built the Cong Xi Ancestral Hall, is famous in Johor Bahru, and there is also a Chen Xunian Street in the local area.
When relatives return to their hometowns, it is inevitable that they will set up a feast. Chen Weiqun came to Chaozhou with a friend from Meizhou who praised the delicious taste of authentic Teochew cuisine. He said to Chen Weiqun: "The Teochew cuisine that you eat in your hometown is very special, although it is cooked at home, the dishes are very good and very evocative." ”
With the chaozhou flavor of his hometown and the memories of the xiangzi bridge light show at night, Chen Weiqun returned to Johor Bahru. He was expecting his relatives from Caitang to come and walk around Johor Bahru and ask him to invite his hometown with the Teochew flavor of Johor Bahru. From day to night, his fish balls became the hometown flavor of more people.
■ The inheritor said
Teochew cuisine heritage
Behind the reputation of "fine" is a mixture of old and new
Choose the best section of meat in the middle of the eel cut into pieces, mix well with the ingredients, fry first and then stew, the soup of the pot material is made of southern ginger, shrimp, coriander, stewed eel and meat and mushrooms mixed into the large intestine, first cooked and then fried, and finally put into the soup to cut into pieces. This is the Teochew dish dragon wearing tiger belly that the gourmand Cai Lan has in mind, he found Singapore from Hong Kong and finally tasted it at Teochew master Fang Shuguang.
"Because it takes a lot of effort to make this dish, but the materials used are not expensive, it cannot be sold for too high a price." In this way, everyone is reluctant to do it, and slowly it will naturally be lost. Cai Lan is full of regret for this coarse and delicate Teochew dish in "Cai Lan Sigh Famous Dishes", and also unveils the dilemma behind the "fine" and "high-end" Teochew cuisine.
"Teochew restaurants rely heavily on traditional banquets, and now there are fewer and fewer traditional banquets." Huang Wuying, director of the Department of Cooking and Nutrition at Hansan Normal University, believes that Teochew cuisine needs to make new adjustments to young people, "There are many teochew cuisine masters, and there are many good products, and what is lacking now is to be able to transform the treasure of Teochew cuisine into a brand that can adapt to young people." Per capita consumption should not be so high, closer to the mid-end, the price adapts to the market, and the taste can be satisfied, so that more people accept Teochew cuisine. ”
Fang Shuguang, 67 years old, has been cooking since he was 15 years old, learning a craft from his father, and his apprentice has reached the age of working as a chef in a restaurant, and now he has entered the campus to teach practical classes for students majoring in cooking at Hansan Normal College. From family inheritance to master-apprentice inheritance to teacher-student inheritance, Fang Shuguang has experienced these inheritance methods in different roles, and he believes that the core of cooking is still people, "Now young chefs are afraid of trouble. Until now, Fang Shuguang still studies dishes in his free time and goes to the countryside to find fresh ingredients.
Chen Junsheng, a full-time teacher in the Department of Cooking and Nutrition at Hansan Normal University, is also an old-school Teochew chef who has a family tradition, and also believes that the key to inheritance depends on the inheritors, "The key is whether you have the heart to expand your own things in this field and whether you are willing to devote yourself to this industry." Chefs want to produce very well, very good in all aspects, at least ten years. ”
Moving the vision from the kitchen to the bookstore, from the perspective of food culture, Li Jiancheng believes that Teochew cuisine is still in the development period, whether it is theoretical research or folk reading, the quantity and quality are far from enough. She went to the cultural space Fangsuo in Guangzhou and saw that there were books in the food culture zone that introduced cuisine from all over the world, from coffee and tea to Cantonese cuisine, but after half a day of searching, she only found a book that introduced Teochew cuisine, "That one is still relatively old." ”
Born in 1995, Huang Meiling has been obsessively trying to enter the catering industry since high school, and in 2015, she studied culinary and nutrition education at Hansan Normal University. After four years in Chaozhou, Huang Meiling founded Hanchuang Culture and Education Service Co., Ltd. to spread Teochew food culture with new media, and her former teacher Fang Shuguang was her best protagonist. On Douyin, the account of "Chaozhou Cuisine Fang Master" has published hundreds of videos of Chaozhou cuisine, and the cumulative playback of the collection of "Fang Shuguang Chaozhou Cuisine Tutorial" has reached 3.95 million. During the epidemic period, the "Chaozhou cuisine master" conducted live teaching of Teochew cuisine, and after the live broadcast, people constantly asked about the practice and definition of Teochew cuisine. Huang Meiling has set up two or three Teochew cuisine exchange groups, and now more than 1,000 people have joined the group, including chefs from other places.
Li Jiancheng herself is a food lover, from time to time to cook by herself, she believes that from TV stations, radio, self-media, social platforms, Teochew cuisine inheritance channels are more abundant. "The scenes and ways of teochew cuisine are changing, in fact, it is easier to learn as long as you want to learn."