Weinan Daily reporter Liu Xueni intern reporter Ren Xiaotong
"Boss, here are two queen cakes, a bowl of oil tea!" "Okay, I'll come right away!" "You have to eat like this, gently loosen the cake with your hand, knead it, pinch it, look, the browned cake in front of you becomes very clear, taste it, how about it?" "Softly, crisply, crisply, in one word— fragrant"... The communication between the boss and the diners is endless.
In Fuping, the queen cake is a traditional breakfast known to all ages, especially in the cold and windy winter, two queen cakes, a bowl of porridge or oil tea, and then a small dish to make people feel comfortable.
There are many theories about the origin of the Empress Dowager Cake, but only the beginning of the Han Dynasty is the most reliable. Legend has it that in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, before Liu Bang ascended the throne, he once married a daughter of the Bo clan. After Liu Bang became emperor, he was given the title of Ji. Later, Bo Ji had a son, liu heng, the later Emperor Wen of Han. When Liu Heng was swaddled, Empress Bo's milk was not good, and he often waited to be fed, which made his mother anxious. One day, Empress Bo went into the imperial kitchen to find a way, saw the snow white and moist pork plate oil on the kitchen case, so she mixed the pork plate oil into the steamed bun noodles, adjusted it into a noodle with a rolling pin that was two or three inches thick, and grilled it with fire into a soft and fragrant fire cake. Liu Heng tasted it, the taste was particularly good, very fond of eating, this kind of fire cake not only solved the urgent need of Empress Bo, but also nourished a generation of kings. Later, when Empress Lü came to power, in order to prevent her son from being involved in the imperial struggle for no reason, Empress Bo took Liu Heng to live in Huaide County (present-day Huaiyang City, Huazhu Township, Fuping County) in the land of Gyeonggi. The local people learned that Liu Heng was raised by fire cake, so they followed the example of making it for their own children, and it was really delicious and stomach-healthy, because it was learned from Empress Bo, and the locals called it Empress Dowager Cake. Since then, the Han Palace scones have settled in the folk and continue to this day.
Zhai Jiangfeng, the owner of Lu's Empress Cake Shop, is one of the inheritors of the provincial intangible heritage of Empress Dowager Cake. Taking advantage of the busy interval, Zhai Jiangfeng told reporters about him and the Empress Dowager Cake. "The first time I ate the queen cake, it was more than a decade ago, and it wasn't long before my lover and I met, and one day she took a few for me and my friend and said it was made by her mother. I tasted one, and the smell I can't forget for a long time. After I got home, I searched on the Internet, and the queen cake was still a Fuping specialty. ”
Later, Zhai Jiangfeng heard that her lover was going to work in a hospital in Xianyang and gave up the craft of empress dowager cake, when the mother-in-law was distressed about her only daughter and did not want her to engage in the hard food industry. But what a pity to give up such an ancestral craft. Intangible cultural heritage should still be passed down by young people, and he feels that as long as he is willing to study, the queen cake will definitely have a big market.
So he first persuaded his lover to give up his job in Xianyang Hospital, and then resolutely quit his stable job in Xi'an, and the two of them worked together to persuade their mother-in-law to return to Fuping and her mother-in-law to learn how to make empress cakes.
Zhai Jiangfeng is down-to-earth and dedicated to studying the skills of making Empress Cake. Over and over again, master the best soft and hard degree and soft and hard dough matching ratio; over and over again, think about the new distribution to adapt to different consumer groups... Soon, the mother-in-law relaxed her heart, handed over her daughter to him with confidence, and also handed over to him the craftsmanship of the queen cake that was not passed down from her family, along with the shop.
"Lu's Empress Dowager Cake has been favored by customers for so many years, what are its characteristics?"
The reporter's question made Zhai Jiangfeng come to the fore: "Our family's 'Empress Cake', from the main ingredients to the ingredients, is very exquisite, and the process is also very exquisite. It uses fine white flour and lard oil as the main raw materials, and noodles, waking noodles, ingredients, dough, kneading, patting, throwing noodles, sprinkling seasonings, kneading dough, rolling, drawing, kneading into round cakes of similar shape and size, brushed with honey, sprinkled with sesame seeds, baked for ten minutes or so can be eaten, more than a dozen processes are purely handmade. Now that people's living standards are better, more pay attention to health, I will adjust the proportion of this lard, in addition, we also launched the osmanthus flavor and chives flavor on the basis of the original, you see the current customers in my store, men and women, young and old. ”
Zhai Jiangfeng, who is practical and diligent and actively innovating and exploring, moved the sale of Empress Cake from a small shop of more than ten square meters that his mother-in-law had opened for decades to a 300-square-meter front, because he was too busy to persuade his mother-in-law to hand over the craft to his cousin and take charge of the operation of the new store with his cousin.
"It's a hard job, it's hard work. I've been in the shop since the 1990s and start making noodles every morning at three o'clock. Our cakes are all handmade, labor-intensive, difficult, slow to learn to make, my next generation is not willing to learn and I do not want to let the baby work as hard as me. But my son-in-law likes to make queen cakes, help me pass on the craft, the baby is diligent and down-to-earth, has the idea of studying, and makes new flavors for me and my family to taste first, delicious and then sell. Now that his bread is so popular, I can rest assured that I will retire and enjoy it. Zhai Jiangfeng's mother-in-law told reporters happily.
Zhai Jiangfeng said that the queen cake should be baked and eaten fresh, hot to eat the best, in addition, this is to eat, summer at most a week, he tried vacuum packaging before, but the color of the cake will change, in the market expansion of this aspect is a big problem. "Fortunately, in recent years, there have been more and more tourists in Fuping, and everyone will come to try the famous Empress Dowager Cake in Fuping." Online shopping also provides us with convenience, customers want to eat the queen cake after returning home can be WeChat order. The store often receives orders from Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other places, and the farthest is a Xi'an man who works in Canada, saying that he has eaten the taste of his hometown in Canada. ”
However, there is still a difference between the queen cake purchased online and the queen cake eaten in the store, and he is now constantly learning the relevant knowledge of enterprise management, in order to attract talents and retain talents, he also gave important positions in the store to the dry stock. He hopes that in the future, he can open direct-operated stores in major cities, break the regulation that the family's craftsmanship is not passed on, train more apprentices, and let everyone in the country eat the taste of freshly baked hot queen cake.
Li Wenpu, an expert on intangible cultural heritage in Fuping County, told reporters that the Empress Cake has been circulating in Fuping for more than 2,000 years, which is not only a unique food, but also a memory of many people's childhood food, carrying a long history and culture. Speaking of the master of making empress cakes, we must mention Wang Jingzhou (who died in the early 90s of the last century), known as the King of Jingzhou. It is said that Wang Jingzhou's grandfather passed on the skill of making empress cakes to his father, who in turn passed it on to him. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Wang Jingzhou's father opened a façade in Xi'an's Descending Zi Lane (near the north of the present-day Kaiyuan Shopping Mall) to sell Fuping Wangjia baked cakes (that is, Empress Dowager cakes). At that time, the name of the queen cake had not yet been spread). "Now the government is carrying out intangible cultural heritage project protection, which is a good time for the development of the queen cake." Now to pass on a good inheritance, rely on more young people with lofty aspirations like Zhai Jiangfeng to take over the baton, while maintaining the tradition, actively adapt to the market, open up the market, and let the niche eating craft of the Queen Cake be better carried forward. Li asked Pu.
The future of the queen cake still needs a longer time to explore and test. And its meaning, as Zhai Jiangfeng said: "It is not only a means of supporting the family, it is also a inheritance, a cultural inheritance, a Chinese inheritance of goodness and love, and the soul destination of Chinese." ”