Source: Fu Tao nine points full
If you ask an ordinary person, what is the difference between a bowl chicken and a stick chicken?
I'm sure the answer from the vast majority of people is, "There's no difference." Aren't they all from Sichuan? Aren't they all soaked in red oil with bunches of ingredients? I eat often. ”
▲Nowadays, you can buy lollipop chickens and bowl chickens in the mall
© pinlue.com
But if you ask a Sichuanese or someone who likes to study and eat, they will answer: "The difference is big!" Do you confuse skewers with hot pot? ”
So what is the difference between a bowl chicken and a stick chicken? What does bowl mean? What does lollipop mean?
▲Is the lollipop chicken because this chicken is particularly good?
© m.sohu.com
With these questions, I searched through the information of the whole network and consulted several teachers, until later I found out: everyone's views are right, but they are not right. The bowl chicken and the stick chicken actually have a story of twin sister flowers.
In Sichuan, bowl chicken is completely different from stick chicken.
For the bowl chicken, the most important feature is the "bowl bowl".
"Bowl bowl", the meaning of the Sichuan dialect crock pot, refers to those clay pots containing red oil: each household's own red oil seasoning, poured into the soup base made with chicken bones, and finally poured with sesame seeds soaked in oil, a pot of red oil bowl is completed.
▲ Bowl chicken is mainly that pot of red oil bowl bowl
© dy.163.com
In the modern version of the bowl of chicken, the red oil bowl is the soul: the chicken soup gives the red oil a skeleton, plus the coat of sesame seeds, which is actually not spicy to eat, but presents a layered aroma.
With this bowl, the ingredients are not important, there are all kinds of things, and anything can be put in.
These include:
Chicken series of chicken nuggets, chicken feet, chicken skin, chicken gizzards, chicken liver, chicken crown, chicken intestines, palm treasure, etc.;
Skewer ingredient series of hairy belly, duck intestine, yellow throat, county liver, duck tongue, sausage, pig paradise, etc.;
Vegetarian vegetable series of bamboo shoots, dried beans, konjac, bean skin, lotus chips, lettuce, yellow cauliflower, broccoli and so on.
▲ Chicken crown, county liver, chicken feet, chicken liver, chicken gizzard, cucumber...
These ingredients will all be cooked and decomposed, strung with bamboo skewers, arranged into a variety of freezer, what you want to eat, go to the freezer to pick up, soak in the store's special "bowl". These ingredients have almost no taste, what is important is the texture, and when you eat them, you pick up bamboo skewers and wrap them in red oil, chicken broth and sesame seeds and send them to your mouth.
▲Soak all the skewers you just made in red oil
The delicious taste of that mouthful like an explosion is almost all given by the bottom of the pot.
Therefore, many people call the bowl chicken another name: cold skewers.
Unlike the bowl chicken, the most important feature for the stick chicken is the chicken.
And the lollipop is the washing stick that everyone used to knock on clothes when they washed clothes by the river.
▲ Lollipop chicken mainly eats chicken
In the northwest corner of Leshan, 150 kilometers away from Yingjing County, Ya'an City, you can see various shop signs with the words "X Chicken" everywhere, and they all sell the same food: Xingjing Lollipop Chicken.
7-9 pounds of large rooster, surrounded by yellow skin, thrown on a nearly 1 meter diameter wooden cutting board, first decompose the chicken, and then two people jointly operate, one holding a wide kitchen knife to chop the chicken, one holding a stick, "da da da da" knocking on the back of the knife, pieces of chicken with bones are cut thin and large, you can choose to eat half or 1/4, you can also choose to eat 1 whole.
▲ Double speed double force operation of the lollipop chicken
So, the reason why "lollipop chicken" got its name is not because this chicken is particularly good, but because in the process of making this chicken, you really need to use a lollipop!
At this time, the chicken is laid out, and then layer by layer, it is mixed with special spices such as red oil spicy seeds, chicken broth, Sichuan salt, soy sauce, sugar, pepper noodles, sesame seeds, etc., and finally sprinkled with peanuts, and a lollipop chicken is finished.
▲ Neatly arranged chicken with sticks
Compared with the bowl chicken, the chicken of the stick chicken is a large chicken of more than 7 kilograms, which has a tough taste but a strong chicken flavor;
Red oil is more domineering, and the spicy taste is more obvious;
▲ Layer by layer of lollipop chicken with red oil
© m.dianping.com
The ingredients are mainly chicken, you can also choose a chicken offal, but these chicken offal is basically a by-product of chicken, not skewered separately with bamboo skewers, but directly sprinkled directly into the red oil, chicken gizzard, chicken heart, chicken liver, and even chicken white seeds (chicken testicles) can be bought.
▲ The offal of the lollipop chicken is significantly larger
The rich chicken flavor is set off by the red oil even more fiercely, especially the chicken white, which is completely the taste of the bursting pulp.
▲ Burst chicken
So in a nutshell, the bowl chicken is like a skewer, and the stick chicken is more like a spit chicken.
"In this way, the bowl chicken and the stick chicken are completely different things, so what does the twin sister flower mean?"
This brings us to explore the origin of these two:
Hanyang Town, Qingshen County, Meishan City, used to be called "Hanyang Dam" and once belonged to Leshan. In the past, it was a necessary road from Chengdu to Leshan, Yibin, Luzhou, and even Chongqing and the waterway out of the river, so it was a rich and lively place since ancient times, coming from the south to the north, gathering merchants.
▲ The former Hanyang Dam water terminal is very lively
© meipian.com
On the other hand, because the terrain here is a sandbar by the river, it is rich in grain and peanuts, and even the small insects in the field are more than in other places, feeding the local chickens one by one fat and strong, the meat is fragrant and fresh, very delicious, well-known in Sichuan.
The flow is large, the chicken is famous, and the people are relatively rich. The three conditions were combined, so more than 100 years ago, a snack similar to a red oil chicken nugget was born in Hanyang:
▲Chicken in red oil
© btime.com
Some vendors chop up chicken meat, put it in a bowl and mix it with red oil, then sell it along the street by block, counting each piece of chicken the owner counts with a small copper coin and finally settles the bill.
Because of the need to add pepper noodles to the red oil, the name of this dish at the beginning of its birth was "pepper and ma chicken".
▲ Nowadays, the traces of pepper and ma chicken can also be found in Tianquan County in Ya'an
At the same time, a whole chicken is not cheap, and one person can't eat so much, so it is often encountered that merchants from the south to the north share a pot. This leads to a problem: the price of each piece of chicken is the same, everyone must pick more meat to eat, and the last pot of chicken nuggets with less meat cannot be sold.
The clever shopkeeper came up with a way to break the chicken into large pieces, then beat the chicken around the body with a stick, and finally use a kitchen knife to chop the pieces, so that you can solve two problems at once.
First, in the past, everyone ate native chicken, and some chicken meat such as chicken legs inevitably tightened;
Second, after the meat is knocked loose and flattened, it is more convenient to decompose into the same size.
▲ Lollipop chicken filmed in the 1985 Japanese documentary "Chinese Food Culture"
Later, some shops named this snack "Bowl Chicken" with the "Bowl Bowl" of chicken;
In addition, some shops name this snack "lollipop chicken" after the "stick" that strikes the chicken.
We all know that Sichuan people like to use "overlapping words", these two names are simple and easy to remember, and they have spread.
▲The enema fried in lard is now a famous chicken shop in Ya'an Leshan
Then, with the completion of the road from Chengdu to Leshan, including years of war and chaos, the decline of the Hanyang water wharf, many chefs set off from Hanyang and came to Leshan, Chengdu, Ya'an, and even Chongqing with their skills... This dish took root in sichuan and Chongqing at the beginning of the last century.
If we look through the recipes, we will find that both Chongqing and Chengdu people first called the lollipop chicken "Jiazhou lollipop chicken", Jiazhou, the old name of Leshan, Hanyang Town, which used to belong to Leshan.
So, at the moment of birth, and even in the next few decades, the bowl chicken and the stick chicken are basically the same thing, or rather, like a pair of twin sister flowers.
So what made the bowl chicken and the stick chicken drift apart?
To put it in general, it is the change of the times; to elaborate, it is another piece of history.
The prototype of the modern version of the bowl chicken originated from the 80s of the last century.
Leshan bowl chicken was originally only a red oil chicken nugget sold by roadside stalls, but after the improvement of people's living standards and the blossoming of hot pot skewers everywhere, the choice of ingredients for bowl chicken began to shift from simple chicken and chicken offal to a variety of varieties.
▲A large number of bamboo sticks
At the same time, because Leshan is also the birthplace of spicy and hot, the way of selling bowl chicken has also shifted to the way of stringing all the ingredients with bamboo sticks and self-selecting.
Later, Leshan became the "happy planet of Sichuan people", receiving a large number of tourists who came to eat, drink and have fun every day.
▲The various cuisines of Leshan need to be written separately
Because of the change in customer tastes and the increasing demand, the chicken meat of the bowl chicken began to shift from the big chicken to the small rooster: the chicken was no longer the focus, and the pot of red oil in the bowl was getting more and more, deeper and deeper.
It was not until the last twenty years that the modern form of the bowl chicken was fully shaped, one mainly attacked the "bowl bowl" and the other attacked the "chicken", and the bowl chicken and the stick chicken have since become two things.
At this time, let us turn our attention to the Ya'an Xingjing, which is located in the "frontier" where the Central Plains Han culture and the Tibetan Qiang-Yi culture collide, but just like the overseas Chinese can preserve many Chinese cultural traditions, the most traditional lollipop chicken has been preserved.
▲ Ya'an's various cuisines are also worth writing about separately
Here, the lollipop chicken still has to use the running mountain chicken, still use the lollipop, still use the red oil layer by layer to soak the chicken... And Ya'an Tianquan, which is not far from the Xingjing, is still popular with "pepper and ma chicken" - the method is exactly the same as the pepper and ma chicken in Hanyang Dam more than a hundred years ago.
▲ Xingjing running pheasant, relatively large, tight meat, chicken taste heavy
Twin sister flowers, one is facing the modernization transformation, and the other is still hidden in the southwest, adhering to the tradition of waiting for the word.
So another interesting story happened:
In the 1990s, there was an ordinary family named Liao in Sichuan, and when the three brothers were young, they inadvertently tasted the local lollipop chicken through the Xingjing, and they were amazed at the moment - this snack that had been spread throughout Sichuan was very rare at that time, and looking all over Sichuan, there was no such traditional lollipop chicken.
The three of them learned their skills here, and in 1993, they began to sell stick chicken in a small cart at the Farmers' Market on Xiangnongsi Street in Chengdu, which was later Liao Ji stick chicken. After more than 20 years of blossoming and scattering, not only has it achieved a wealth story, but now in all parts of the country, we can see major chain brands such as Liao Ji Stick Chicken and Stick Chicken Legend.
Later, in order to cater to the market and increase the richness, these lollipop chicken brands that opened into the street of the mall, in addition to selling chicken, also added a variety of ingredients to skewer small skewers, when eating, with a disposable paper cup, poured into red oil, which is inserted with small skewers, and as the main part of the lollipop chicken, but there are very few people who eat.
▲ Today's Liao Ji stick chicken, chicken is no longer the protagonist
© 9717.org
After a few decades, the lollipop chicken began to resemble a bowl chicken again.
Lollipop chicken and bowl chicken, born because of the prosperity of the town;
Branches and leaves because of the decline of waterways;
Later, because of the different geographical, economic and development levels of various places, different forms evolved;
Nowadays, because of urbanization, marketization and chaining, they have become similar, and the relationship is cut like a pair of twin sister flowers.
The story of this dish is actually the story of the flow and struggle of people;
Behind the century-old history of this dish is actually the century-old life history of our Chinese.