For the older generation of Shanghainese, salad is equivalent to potato salad, and the reason for this is a long history full of sweetness and bitterness. In the 1840s, the British established a concession along the Bund on nanjing east road in today's Shanghai under the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing. Before the Shanghai Concession, Guangzhou also had a foreigner's settlement, and unlike the hostile Guangzhou magistrates, the Shanghai magistrates adopted a more pragmatic attitude. The British found it easier for Shanghai officials, gentry, and people to deal with, and gradually shifted the focus of development here, and the Shanghai Concession soon surpassed the Guangzhou Concession in scale, and in just a few decades developed into the most prosperous commercial city in the Far East. The prosperity of commerce has also brought about close exchanges of food culture, and the first Western restaurant in Shanghai was opened on Fuzhou Road, called "Yipin Xiangfan Restaurant". Although eating Western food was a very fashionable way of life at that time, the traditional Western cooking methods still made Shanghainese feel overwhelmed.
As a result, Shanghai chefs who have learned western food skills have transformed classic Western dishes according to the eating habits of locals, which is the predecessor of Haipai Western food. The same story also takes place in the Hong Kong area of Guangzhou, where a unique Hong Kong-style Western food has been formed after more than a hundred years of development. After the "October Revolution" in 1917, many rich Russian classes fled to Shanghai, and some people opened Western restaurants on Huaihai Road, and in its heyday, there were more than 40 Russian restaurants on a short Huaihai Middle Road, which also made most of the dishes of Haipai Western food flow with strong Russian style. After 1950, some foreigners left China one after another, and the remaining Western restaurants experienced a shrinking scale of operations after public-private partnerships, and the subsequent era of material shortages was even worse. However, even under such harsh conditions, Shanghainese who love life still find ways to maintain their traditions, go to restaurants with economic strength, and do it themselves with ingenuity. The three musketeers in Haipai Western cuisine, pork chops, potato salad and borscht, established their position as the lord of the jianghu in this era.
Potato salad, or rather, the production of Shanghai salad, is the most inflexible manifestation of the wisdom and hands-on ability of Shanghainese in the Three Musketeers: salad dressing is nowhere to be bought? It doesn't matter, just do it yourself, isn't it just egg yolks and salad oil! The skillful housewives and cooks talk about the experience of playing salad dressings in a set, and outsiders only sound awe-inspiring. The original potato salad was paired with Western ham (unlike Chinese ham such as Jinhua ham, the taste is not so salty, the taste is more tender), the ham can not be bought, so it retreated to the second place, using the so-called "square leg". The main ingredient of the square leg is the crushed ham and some filling, and then pressed into a boxy look, and then even the "square leg" disappeared from the market, everyone used red sausage instead, so that later the red sausage became one of the most prominent features of Shanghai salad.
Shanghai salad dressing is actually the standard French mernaut sauce, the main ingredients are egg yolks and salad oil. Salad oil is a refined vegetable oil that removes odors and does not coagulate easily at low temperatures. The production of minazi sauce is not complicated, put 2 egg yolks into a large bowl, add a little salt and white pepper, vinegar or lemon juice, use an egg fork to quickly whip (the traditional Shanghai method is to beat in one direction, in fact, there is no need, when you can change the direction at will, there is no impact on the final effect), the color of the yolk gradually becomes lighter, and finally it will become a very light beige, and then add 300 ml of salad oil to add a drop, stir quickly while adding. The biggest risk of making your own salad dressings is that egg yolks are susceptible to salmonella contamination, which is not the case with commercially available bottled mernauz sauces.
Selected from the book "Foreign Fast Food Handbook", all rights reserved.