The so-called state banquet is the banquet that the country conducts when it encounters a large festival or receives important foreign guests.
The most famous of the many state banquets since the founding of the People's Republic of China is the first National Day reception of New China after the end of the founding ceremony on October 1, 1949, which was attended by more than 600 people at that time, also known as the "first banquet of the founding of the people's republic".
In the eyes of many people, the state banquet is eaten with mountain treasures and seafood, abalone bird's nest, these situations did exist in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, but with the passage of time, especially after the 60s, Chairman Mao once criticized the state banquet, saying that the specifications of the state banquet were too high and wasteful, and it was very unaffordable. Since then, the state banquet has set the tone of frugality, and the more frugal it is, the more frugal it is, and the number of dishes is gradually decreasing.
So, sometimes the state banquet is not as rich as we think, everything is available, in fact, sometimes it is just a few simple dishes.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" what is the first > and the "first feast of the founding of the country"? </h1>
October 1, 1949, was the big day of the founding of the people's republic of China, after the end of the founding ceremony, a large-scale National Day reception was held, which is what we commonly call the "first banquet of the founding of the country".
This task fortunately fell on the head of the Beijing Hotel, but for the Beijing Hotel, it is absolutely the first time to receive such a major task from the state, not only that, such a formal large-scale Chinese banquet, for the Beijing Hotel, has never been.
Because the Beijing Hotel has basically never operated Chinese food, the scope of business has always been based on Western food, to ask the Beijing Hotel whether there is a record of Chinese food, it should be said that there are very few, and the cases that can be found are only in the negotiations between the Kuomintang and the Communists, when in order to take care of the eating habits of the Chinese delegation, they specially invited several Chinese chefs from Taifenglou Restaurant.
Beijing Hotel
Therefore, for the "first banquet of the founding of the people" of New China, Beijing Hotel attaches great importance to it, and it is also a challenge for Beijing Hotel.
Because the guests who participated in this state banquet were from all over the country, from all over the motherland, as the saying goes, it was difficult to adjust, so it took a lot of effort to choose the cuisine.
The state banquet pays attention to the unification of standards, and it will definitely not be because everyone is from all over the world and all over the world, and everything is cooked. That would be a hodgepodge.
Therefore, in the end, the premier of Zhou decided that in order to adapt to the taste of the public, huaiyang cuisine, which is compatible with the length of the northern and southern cuisines, was finally selected as the standard of the state banquet cuisine.
However, for Beijing hotels, they lack the experience of making Chinese food, coupled with the setting of dishes, the difficulties come out at once.
In order to run this state banquet well, Premier Zhou personally gave instructions to the Beijing Hotel to transfer 9 Huaiyang cuisines from the "Yuhuatai", a relatively famous Huaiyang cuisine restaurant in Beijing at that time, to take charge of the "first banquet of the founding of the country."
The dishes of this state banquet are mainly composed of the following parts, namely appetizers, cold dishes, hot dishes, snacks and fruits, of which the largest number of cold dishes, with a total of 8 courses, namely:
Osmanthus duck
Zhenjiang cuisine
Oil chicken
Spiced smoked fish
Braised melon strips
Shrimp seeds winter shoots
Dried orchid beans
Eat shiitake mushrooms in oil
6 hot dishes, namely:
Abalone juice four treasures
East Slope Meat Square
Crab powder lion head
Boil the chicken sauce to dry shreds
Stir-fried emerald shrimp
Family
There are 4 courses of dim sum, namely:
Fried rice cakes
Yellow Bridge Baked Cake
Aiwowo
Huaiyang soup buns
Finally, there is the fruit.
Although these dishes sound very commonplace, but each dish has a very deep foundation, it is quite not simple to do, kung fu is very deep, such as soup, are used chicken soup, looks very light, very ordinary, but the taste is very thick, very not simple.
The dishes of the "First Banquet of the Founding of the People's Republic of China" also set the tone and format for the National Day reception every year in the future, and every year the National Day will hold a state banquet at the Beijing Hotel to entertain guests from all over the world, which lasted until 1959.
State banquet
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > Second, in 1959, the first time to experience a state banquet of 5,000 people, how to complete? </h1>
The National Day banquet in 1959 was held for the first time in the Great Hall of the People, and this banquet was unprecedented in scale, with 5,000 people participating, and preparations for such a banquet began in August of that year.
The banquet basically brought together the celebrity chefs of major hotels in Beijing in order to perfectly complete this unprecedented event.
At that time, these famous chefs in order to study the recipe, but put a lot of effort, or that sentence, the guests are from all over the world, from all directions, how to achieve unity under the difficulty of the crowd, really let these famous chefs rack their brains.
At that time, it was stipulated that some dishes could not be served:
First, you can't put on dishes with bones.
Because if you eat while eating, and then spit bones at the same time, it doesn't look very elegant.
Second, you can't put on the dishes of xiang ke.
Because some foods mixed together may cause physical discomfort, eat bad stomach, and if it is serious, it will cause food poisoning, so these dishes must not be on.
Third, foreign guests cannot be on dishes that do not understand the method of eating.
For example, the soup dumplings, some foreign guests do not know how to use, if the foreign guests eat at that time, dirty clothes, juice flowing that is, is absolutely unsightly phenomenon, so dishes like this can not be on.
State banquet dish
Finally, after discussion, these celebrity chefs finally decided on the menu, and handed over the finalized menu to Premier Zhou for approval. After the discussion of the famous chefs, the dishes of the state banquet are mainly light, soft and rotten, mellow, mild and non-irritating.
At that time, because the processing capacity in the Great Hall of the People was very limited, it was impossible to ensure multiple hot dishes at the same time, so this state banquet was mainly based on cold dishes, and there were only two hot dishes at that time, and the rest were dim sum, fruit drinks and so on.
Once the menu is set, the chefs start to step up their preparations. Because the Great Hall of the People does not have sufficient conditions for these state banquet ingredients to be completed one by one, the chefs can only use the assembly line operation method to process the raw materials in advance, and then use a large truck to transport the processed raw materials to the basement of the Great Hall of the People for fine processing.
It is conceivable to cook for 5,000 people at the same time, for the back kitchen, even if the division of labor is clear, it is like a war, busy, for this reason, many chefs have not slept for several days and nights, in this busy process, some chefs are injured when cutting vegetables, but also simply bandaged, and then put into work, some chefs due to continuous combat, tired is really not good, lean on the wall and fall asleep.
At 7:00 p.m. on September 30, 1959, the state banquet for 5,000 people officially began in the banquet hall of the Great Hall of the People. The staff strictly follows the process and finely divides the work. When the hot dish is served, dozens of waiters push the car into the banquet hall at the same time.
At that time, in order to make the work uniform and not have any flaws, the staff also innovatively adopted the "traffic light" method, for example
The yellow light indicates that all personnel must be in place;
The green light indicates the start of action, according to the procedure to walk and serve;
The red light is bright, indicating that you are standing still and stopping all work.
Such a large-scale and high-standard banquet was the first time at that time, and it also accumulated experience for holding more people's banquets in the future.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > Third, in order to receive Nixon's visit to China, the staff ran through most of China to find ingredients. </h1>
For a state banquet of thousands of people, there must be no problems in food safety. At that time, the management department of the Great Hall of the People also formulated many strict rules and regulations for food safety.
For the state banquet, food safety is always the first priority. The administrative department of the Great Hall of the People has formulated a number of strict systems for this purpose.
At that time, the raw materials used in the state banquet were not bought at will, but had a special fixed point to supply, the purpose of which was to ensure that the ingredients would not have problems at the source.
After the food is purchased, it must go through layers of acceptance, and no problem can occur in any link, for example, when the purchased ingredients are transported into the Great Hall of the People, they must first be inspected by the visual inspection of the staff, and secondly, the health inspection report of these ingredients is also needed to prove the provenance and safety of these ingredients.
In addition, these purchased ingredients must be frequently spot checked, and no ingredients that are not passed will be spared and entered the table of the state banquet.
To this end, there is also a special laboratory for the inspection and quarantine of ingredients in the Great Hall of the People, and there is also a special full-time personnel for testing, and even in all aspects of the storage and distribution of ingredients and the collection of food, there is a strict health system for checking.
In order to ensure the safety of these ingredients before the state dinner table, two full-time laboratory inspectors will take a small box, a tweezer, and then add two pieces of vegetables to the box to take away. After the hot dish is out of the pot, the laboratory inspector will come over again, take the sample again like a cold dish, put it in the culture medium, and the sample will not be destroyed until 24 hours after the end of the meal.
At that time, No. 34 Donghuamen Avenue in Beijing was a special place for ingredients for state banquets. He was established to provide food safety for party and state leaders and foreign heads of state in preparation for major state events such as state dinners. Due to its confidentiality, for a long time, it could only be named after the house number "No. 34".
In February 1972, when then-US President Richard Nixon visited China, which was an absolute shock to the world at the time, Premier Zhou personally hosted a banquet for him.
In order to prepare all kinds of food ingredients needed for the banquet, the staff of special supply office 34 traveled almost all over China. At that time, when it was learned that American guests liked to eat seafood, the relevant parties decided to prepare fresh Yellow Sea abalone as an alternative. When Nixon heard that these fresh abalones were harvested from the depths of the Yellow Sea, he couldn't help but be touched by the hospitality of Chinese.
At the state banquet to welcome Nixon, there was a "hibiscus bamboo soup", which was made from Changning, Sichuan. In that year, the county received a notice from the superiors to urgently mobilize 2 kilograms of Changning bamboo thorns, and said that this was a political task and must not be delayed. It can be seen that in order to obtain some special ingredients at that time, the staff in charge of the state banquet really tried everything.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="6" > Fourth, in order to be frugal, Chairman Mao issued a series of instructions, which finally made the state banquet embark on the frugal wind. </h1>
The state banquet after the founding of the People's Republic of China for more than a decade did have a little luxury strictly speaking, although the dishes sounded ordinary, but in terms of its exquisite production, the effort of a dish was indeed very large, and the choice of ingredients was sometimes superior.
Therefore, since the 1960s, Chairman Mao has issued a series of instructions on the requirements of the state banquet, during which Chairman Mao has also criticized the phenomenon of waste in the state banquet, saying: "The current banquet specifications are too high, and what has been eaten has not been thrown away much, and the state's materials have been wasted in vain." All of them are on bird's nest shark fin soup, which costs a lot of money and is not affordable. There are some things that foreigners don't eat at all. We invite foreigners, I think there are 'four dishes and one soup' on it. ”
In Chairman Mao's words, this was indeed the case at that time, the state banquet looked very neat and very faceless, but the waste caused by the state banquet was also very large. And at that time, the state banquet blindly pursued high-end ingredients, which was really unnecessary, and it was a bit of a waste of national resources at this point.
After Chairman Mao gave instructions, this phenomenon quickly changed, and Premier Zhou, in accordance with the spirit of Chairman Mao's instructions, specially set rules for future state banquets: The standard for future state banquets is "four dishes and one soup."
As soon as this rule came out, the standards for future state banquets were also fixed, and basically did not change since then.
Since then, on the basis of "four dishes and one soup", the dishes of the state banquet have been continuously reduced, and then they have begun to try "three dishes and one soup" or even "two dishes and one soup." ”
For example, at noon on August 24, 2008, the day of the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games, a state banquet was held at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in order to entertain the dignitaries from all over the world who participated in the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games.
At this state banquet, the standard of the state banquet is no longer "four dishes and one soup", but becomes "three dishes and one soup". This practice, which not only saves money and materials, but also saves time and manpower, and has become a common format of dishes used in China when entertaining VIPs.
Today, with the increasing improvement of people's living standards, for the dishes with the standard of the state banquet, it is no longer so mysterious, if at that time due to the lack of materials, resulting in many dishes appearing very tall, far from the people, then with today, a variety of materials are dazzling, all kinds of dishes are available, those with the standard of the state banquet, now can also enter the homes of ordinary people, if there is time, there is leisure, for the people, it is also easy to taste.
Chinese cuisine has a long history, thousands of them. There are styles everywhere, there are tastes everywhere, whether it is four major cuisines or eight major cuisines, they are representatives of Chinese cuisine, the difference between the state banquet cuisine is that it is not luxurious, but it is well-made, the delicious state banquet, many people may be able to taste it through other different ways, the difference is that the state banquet may be more prominent in its political nature.