Your Majesty, if you move the capital to Luoyang, can you still eat yellow cake stew? What a great meat cake! How can you give up? Yu Qiuyu said in Datong, you go from here to Datang! There is no mistake, although you can take away more than 300,000 elite troops, but can you take away the yellow cake stew?
In 493 (the seventeenth year of Taihe), in order to facilitate the study and acceptance of advanced Han culture and further strengthen his rule over the Yellow River Valley, Tuoba Hong was determined to move the capital from Pingcheng (present-day Datong, Shanxi) to Luoyang. Emperor Xiaowen of Wei personally led more than 300,000 infantry and cavalry south, starting from Pingcheng and arriving in Luoyang.
When I went to Luoyang, it is estimated that I will no longer be able to eat meat cakes. Someone asked, was there a cake at that time? I tell you, yes, know that there were drops of millet in the ancient grains.
The unhulled millet is the unhulled millet laid from the primary raw material for making yellow cakes, and it is the primary raw material for making yellow cakes
It was one of the earliest food crops cultivated by our ancestors, and there are many records of "millet" in some of the poems in the Book of Poetry that originated about 3,000 years ago. For example, "Wei Feng Shuo Rat", there is a sentence of "Shuo Rat Shuo Rat, No Food For Me" (Big Rat, Big Rat, Don't Eat My Yellow), expressing the anger and hatred of the working people for the exploiters. "Wang Feng Huang Li" has the sentence "Pi Huang is away, Pi Ji zhi miao", which modern translators translate as "where the millet is flourishing, where the millet is sprouting new seedlings". There is a poem in the Shang Song of the Miao, which says: "The seedlings of the seedlings, the ointment of the rain" (the seedlings grow so luxuriantly, all nourished by the rain). There is also a verse in "Feng Feng July" that reads, "黍稷重穋 (音路), He Ma Shu Mai". "Wang Feng Huang Li" and "Feng Feng July" are probably about the Shaanxi area, "Shang song huang miao" is about Henan, and "Wei Feng Shuo Rat" is about the southern part of Shanxi. It can be seen that as far back as the Zhou Dynasty, millet has been widely cultivated as a major food crop in Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan and other vast areas of the Central Plains. Later texts and poems prove that Shandong and Hubei also planted millet. But now, it seems that the cultivation of millet is becoming less and less, and it is classified as a "small grain", as if only a few areas outside Yanmen Pass in northern Shanxi are still cultivated.
Growing millet
Before the Han Dynasty, millet was used to brew liquor, and later gradually began to be eaten as a staple food, according to legend, in the Northern Wei Pingcheng era, there was a history of eating yellow cakes here. Perhaps this kind of food was only suitable for local people to eat, and as a large city in China at that time, the immigrants were not accustomed to eating. Therefore, it has always been a very regional food in history, and to this day it is still a kind of Local Cake Food of han Nationality. It is mainly prevalent in Datong, Shuozhou, Shanxi, Yangyuan County and Wei County, Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province, surrounding counties and villages, and Yulin, Shaanxi.
After the yellow rice is peeled off the shell, is it the yellow rice we use for cakes? Yellow or not yellow?
Preparation Method:
Yellow cake is steamed with yellow rice noodles, but its color is golden, hence the name. Peel the yellow rice. Speaking of which, the Creator is really fair enough, Datong is thin and does not fight grain, and the underground coal reserves are abundant; Although the yield of millet crops is low, the taste of yellow cake is very good. "Datong has two treasures, Ugin and Yellow Cake." ”
People who have eaten yellow cakes know that yellow cakes are delicious and difficult to shake. Steaming cakes require pots and pans, cage drawers, and pots; When steaming, the cake noodles should first be wet with water, the cake powder should be thin and even, and the heat should be mastered. It is difficult to put the steamed cake powder into the basin and beat it back and forth with both hands, which is what the locals call "cake". Cake making is a key process, and cake is not "block base", and it is easy to beat it. Therefore, some people "would rather not eat cakes than hurt their hands." Datong people love to eat cakes and yellow cakes as an indispensable staple food, elderly housewives pick up cakes like children playing with mud, which snaps sound, and in an instant, a quick yellow rice cake is magically presented in front of them.
Datong yellow cake has four characteristics of "yellow, soft, tendon and fragrant". To what extent, tell a joke: it is said that a family just steamed out a piece of cake, a careless bite by the dog, the hostess hurried to grab, the dog with the cake ran out of a mile far away has not been torn off, the hostess had to use a knife to split. As a result, the dog was also hit on his back by the cake that popped up.
This is the molded yellow cake
Meat is more fragrant to eat cakes
Datong yellow cake has many ways to eat, which can be eaten vegetarian and fried. Vegetarian eating is to combine the steamed yellow cake with meat dishes, swallow the dates and swallow them, and then swallow them. This is "one eat, eat an oil tiger; A swallow, swallow a chicken chirping", "yellow cake soaked meat, eat a not enough" that fragrant, that cool, let people drool. Frying is to pinch the vegetarian cake into walnut-sized pieces, knead it into a skin, wrap it in filling, fry it in oil, and fish it out to eat. The skin should be small and thin. The cake filling is all based on personal taste, including bean paste, date paste, marrow oil, sauerkraut, and minced meat. Datong people pay attention to "bean filling with roses, vegetable filling with leeks", in order to improve the taste. There are many shapes of the cake, some round like chess pieces, some long like a crescent moon, some pinched into triangles, some clamped with two hands to become a "xianggong hat", and some simply wrapped into dumplings and so on, and so on. Cake man oil pot, warm and slow frying, after fishing out the cake soft and delicious, the more you eat the more fragrant.
Yellow cakes are not only delicious, but also particularly resistant to hunger. "Thirty miles of noodles, forty miles of cakes, ten miles of soba noodles hungry and broken waist." What is said is that if you eat a full meal of noodles, you can walk thirty miles without hunger, and a full meal of yellow cake can walk forty miles firmly, and after a full meal of soba noodles, you can't even walk ten miles to be hungry. "One side feeds the other". So our coal miners in Datong especially like to eat yellow cakes. Eat a full meal of yellow cake before going down the well, and you don't feel hungry after a day of work. After going to the well, the wife brought hot, crisp and fragrant oil cakes, plus two or two liquors, a few small dishes, and the moisturizing energy could not be mentioned.
"Cake" is harmonized with "high". Eating cakes is festive, just like eating hair vegetables in Hong Kong and Macao is to make a fortune, which means that they are happy and prosperous. In order to please the taste, whenever the local festival is held, the wedding is celebrated, the cakes must be fried, and then distributed to each family, commonly known as "eating cakes". Yellow cake is a kind of food, after injecting feelings, it has also become a culture, and the yellow cake culture of Datong is so wonderful!
Such a good thing has some people give up food in order to move the capital, it is great to say, in fact, the relocation is not a few years to finish, I often think, is it because I can't eat cakes and lose motivation?
Interestingly, the millet is not only for food, but also has a deep cultural connotation. It is very interesting to say that the earliest weights and measures customization in China is actually using "黍" as the standard. According to the Book of Han and the Chronicle of laws and regulations, the length is taken from the medium particles of the millet, and the longitudinal length of a grain is one point, and the 100 grains are one foot.