Hebei eye, see history from different perspectives. Today I will talk about tangshan's famous food - chess piece baked cake.
Tangshan famous eat chess piece baked cake
Chess pieces are named after the shape and size of Chinese chess pieces.
Speaking of chess piece baked cakes, Wang Jiahui, chairman of the Tangshan Writers Association and a scholar of Tangshan history and culture, said in an interview with me: "Speaking of chess pieces burnt cakes, it is not a simple kind of snack circulated by the folk, in the past, it was very famous, at least in a famous book called "Tokyo Dream Hualu" that describes the living customs and habits of the Northern Song Dynasty, there has been a food, called 'chess piece cake', which is actually today's chess piece baked cake; later, in the famous novel "Golden Bottle Plum" written in the Ming Dynasty Wanli Period. It is also written that the protagonist Ximen Qing also loves to eat chess piece cakes. According to research, this kind of thing only exists in the north, and later it spread from Kaifeng and Luoyang to Shandong, and from Shandong to Fengrun, Hebei. ”
Wang Jiahui talks about the history of chess pieces baking cakes
Why does the "chess piece cake" take root and sprout in abundance? How did it evolve into a "chess piece burnt cake" and blossom and bear fruit in abundance? This is related to the rich geographical location and human environment.
The Qing Dynasty Dayu Road passes through Tangshan Fengrun
Fengrun is located on the Qing Dynasty's "Great Royal Road" (the road taken by the Qing Emperor to return to Shengjing to worship his ancestors), and people from Guanwai and Jingdong also have to pass through Fengrun City when they enter Beijing.
The old shadow of the Fengrun Tiangong Temple Pagoda
Therefore, Fengrun has a caravanserai, inn, restaurant, and officials, students and merchants generally choose to settle here. According to legend, during the Guangxu period, there was an inn called Shuangsheng on Guanxi Street in Fengrun City, and adjacent to Shuangsheng was a restaurant called Yushengxuan. People who live in Shuangsheng every day will generally eat at the nearest Yushengxuan.
At that time, the distance between the stations was relatively far, less ten miles and eight miles, more than twenty or thirty miles, in order to catch more roads during the day, guests had to bring dry food on the road to fill their hunger before leaving. At first, Yushengxuan's spare dry food was mostly steamed buns, flatbreads and pot roast cakes and the like; but these dry foods would become dry and hard over time, and they would be dry and dry on the road, and they lacked taste. Once, a student who had entered Beijing to take the exam was staying at Shuangsheng, and the next day when he was preparing to leave for dry food, Yushengxuan's boss was playing chess with someone. The student took a few pots of oven baked cakes and helplessly said to the boss: "If you add some bean paste stuffing, how good it would be to be as big as this chess piece!" The boss held up a chess piece and asked, "What good is that?" The student replied: "Add some bean paste stuffing, and you will have a taste when you eat it; it is smaller, it is easy to carry!" The boss listened to the student's words and felt that it was very reasonable, so he said: "Let's try it, when the officer is in high school, I congratulate you with a small baked cake!" ”
Afterwards, the owner of Yushengxuan consulted the customer's opinion with the chefs. They think that there is no problem in making the pot roast cake the size of a chess piece, and it is no problem to add bean paste filling inside, but the problem of drying the baked cake is not easy to solve. In order to solve this problem, after several experiments, they finally found a way to use chicken fat and noodles to make a chess piece baked cake with bean paste filling. This kind of baked cake is still baked in a vat oven, because the use of chicken fat and noodles, coupled with the aroma of sesame seeds, it appears to be tender on the outside, soft and sweet, and the result is very popular with passers-by.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Tangshan became an important industrial town in China, and commerce also prospered, and in the small hills of the bustling business district, there was a very famous restaurant called Jiumeizhai . The owner of Jiu Mei Zhai heard that Yu Sheng Xuan's chess piece baked cake was very popular with customers, so he sent a chef to learn the art as a customer. After the chef figured out the reason, he and the boss of Jiu Mei Zhai suggested using fine noodles to make, and the filling was no longer limited to bean paste, but also could make some assorted and some stuffed with meat. Through experiments, they also figured out the proportion standard of the main ingredient and ingredients. The chess pieces baked in this way are as big as chess pieces, the appearance is golden, the inner layer is more crispy, the taste is burnt on the outside and tender on the inside, and the filling is fragrant, and soon became famous and became a unique flavor of Tangshan.
In 2019, the Tangshan Municipal People's Government officially announced the "List of the Fifth Batch of Municipal Intangible Cultural Heritage Representative Projects in Tangshan", and the Fengrun Chess Cake Making Technique was successfully selected.
Talk tomorrow, Hebei Eye will tell you more about Tangshan's eating culture and eating history.