Purple rotten pear red wrinkled dates, always lose easy chestnut is very sweet. In the increasingly depressed late autumn, the hot sugar fried chestnuts can be called "gifts". I believe that many people will ask heavenly questions in their hearts when they put the sweet chestnut kernels into their mouths after biting their teeth with their hands:
Why are chestnuts fried in a big pile of sand? Why is the sand sprinkled with sugar that does not penetrate the hard shell at all?
Sugar sautéed chestnuts
01
Sugar fried chestnuts without sugar flavor?
The first question is a good answer, the sand and gravel heat absorption ability is strong, can maintain a stable temperature for a long time, so that the chestnut heating is uniform, the same principle can also be used in fried shell peanuts. This title even the Qianlong Emperor, a poet and a master of stamping, would say: "The little mature one is born, and the big one is small, and the big one is scorched." The size is cooked, and the heat is adjusted. ”
Although these few slip-of-the-mouth poems represent his writing level, they are not his originals, but "borrow" from the liao dynasty's great Confucian Xiao Hanjianu, who once was in charge of Nanjing's chestnut garden—the Liao Dynasty said that Nanjing was not the current capital of Jiangsu Province, but the southwestern part of Beijing, which is where chestnuts are produced. Later, when Emperor Xingzong of Liao asked Xiao Han about what he had seen outside, he used the know-how of roasting chestnuts to talk about the concept of "not one-size-fits-all": "The subject only knows that fried chestnuts: if the small one is cooked, the big one will be born; if the big one is cooked, the small one will be scorched." Make the size of the cooked, the beginning is beautiful. It seems that Qianlong only understood the literal meaning.
Sand is a necessity
The sticky sugar on the surface of the fried chestnuts seems to have only the effect of staining the fingers, just like the lettuce in the egg cake. And because the thin syrup cannot penetrate the chestnut skin, it does not increase the sweetness of the chestnut kernels. However, the store is not to add sweetness to the chestnuts and put sugar, the role of sugar is to stick to the epidermal impurities, so that the chestnuts look shiny and shiny, smell sweet and fragrant, the name of "sugar fried" also makes customers feel more tempting than simple "fried".
02
A home with chestnut trees is equivalent to a mine
The history of cultivation of chestnuts in China can be traced back to the Zhou Dynasty, and the history of collecting and eating is even older.
The word "chestnut" in the oracle bone very vividly depicts the shape of a tree full of hairy chestnuts
Chestnuts appear frequently in the Book of Verses, not only growing on the mountains and lowlands, but also being planted as street trees, and chestnut trees are also planted in the monarch's imperial garden, and chestnuts are sacrificial offerings ["biān, in fact chestnuts"), wood is also the designated raw material for making the tablets of the temple. The "Han Feizi" records the story of the famine in the Qin kingdom, and Fan Ju asked The King of Qin Zhaoxiang to take the chestnuts and acorns from the inner garden to relieve the disaster. The family of a person who owns a large number of chestnut trees is equivalent to having inexhaustible wealth, "Yan, Qin Qianshu chestnut, this person and the Thousand Household Hou and so on."
The chestnut tree is tall and luxuriant, and there is a surviving "Hundred Riding Chestnut Tree" in Sicily, Italy, and its branches and leaves are said to have shielded the hundred knights of the Kingdom of Aragon from thunderstorms, hence the name.
Chestnut wood is solid, so the word "chestnut" also has a hard meaning, and on this basis, the shape of the sound word "慄", which expresses fear, such as "chilling and fearful", has now become one. The imperial tombs of the Han Dynasty originally used a large number of cypress wood to form a "yellow intestine inscription", and later changed to chestnut wood with similar texture and thickness because the cypress material was cut down, but the color was darker, and it was ridiculed by later generations as "black intestine inscription".
03
Chestnut Eating Guide
The ancients usually paid more attention to the original taste of chestnuts, steaming, boiling, simmering, and eating raw. "Pile chestnuts fried deep yellow, guests to long talk about wine tasting", at the latest song Dynasty has a record of "fried chestnuts", the poet Lu You not only loves cats but also loves chestnuts, he wrote poems in his old age to lament that his teeth were loose, fortunately he could also eat some fried chestnuts when he was supper, recalling the past of eating chestnuts when he was young: "Arouse the dream of young Jingyuan, and the early dynasty outside the Ningmen Gate", it turned out that when waiting for the upper dynasty, he did not forget to seize the time to eat some chestnuts.
Lu You also recalled in his notes a past event, when the most famous chestnut shop in Beijing was called "Li He Yan (chǎo) (fried) chestnut", which belonged to the level that could only be imitated and could not be surpassed, and many years after the fall of the north, the Southern Song Dynasty envoys sent envoys to Yanshan, and Li He's two sons sent ten packs of chestnuts to the envoys for the homeland.
Fire roasting is the easiest way to do it, but be careful to cut a small bite first, otherwise the chestnuts will burst.
But the method of frying at that time may be different from today's sugar roasted chestnuts, and Lin Hong of the Southern Song Dynasty wrote in the "Mountain Family Qing Offering" that the way to cook chestnuts was to put a chestnut dipped in oil and a chestnut dipped in water in the "diào" shaped like a teapot, and then pile up forty-seven chestnuts, put the iron into the charcoal fire to heat, and cook it when it heard a cracking sound.
Wang Xiangjin of the Ming Dynasty recorded a similar method of frying chestnuts: choose two flat chestnuts, wet the bottom with oil and water, buckle them together and put them on the bottom of the pot, pile them with chestnuts, cover them tightly, and cook them; or cut the shell bottom of the large chestnuts with a knife, fill the pot with the bottom down, sprinkle a pinch of salt around the pot, and heat and cook.
More complicated ways to eat it include "plum blossom preserved pork" where chestnuts are sliced and eaten together with olive slices, "golden jade soup" where yam and chestnuts are stewed together in mutton soup, and chestnut flour mixed with glutinous rice flour and steamed with honey water. Recently, chestnut grilled cabbage and chestnut roast chicken are more familiar to us.
04
Chestnuts also have salty parties?!
Japan and Korea, which belong to the same East Asian cultural circle, also have a long history of eating chestnuts, and these two countries mainly grow Japanese chestnuts (Castanea crenata Sieb.& Zucc.) and Chinese chestnuts (C. mollissima Bl.), C. Euphorbia (c. sativa Mill.), C. Mill., American Chestnut (C. Mill. dentata Borkh.) is a different species of the same genus.
Because the Japanese chestnut peel is "pound" and "victory" pronunciation is the same, the ancient samurai believe that it has a mouth color symbolizing victory, several places in Japan have spread the story of "under the blessing of a celebrity, the chestnut tree here bears fruit three times a year", related celebrities include Master Kukai, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Pro-Luan Master, etc., similar to the same Chinese food legend has Liu Xiu, Li Shimin, Cixi and other sources. The traditional Japanese way of eating chestnuts includes sweets such as chestnut gold balls and chestnut yokan, as well as staple foods such as chestnut rice, and chestnut cakes, chestnut ice cream and so on under the influence of Western tastes.
Chestnut rice
Chestnuts are also a must-eat food in South Korea every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, there is a utopian myth of "Peach Blossom Garden" in ancient China, and South Korea actually has it, but their utopia is called "Chestnut Island Country", which is the place where Hong Jitong, a good man who resists tyranny, travels far away, and the importance of chestnuts can also be seen.
In Europe, chestnuts were once an important source of carbohydrates, with a high starch content that allowed it to replace a staple food, and the taste was much better than acorns with the same high starch content, known as "poor people's bread". If you want to understand how to eat chestnuts as a staple food, you may wish to go to Napoleon's hometown of Corsica to taste its flavor, chestnut powder can spread pancakes, fried dough rings, although the calorie is not low, but we can not resist its delicious taste.
Mont Blanc chestnut cake
In addition, there is the famous chestnut cake, the domestic cake we are accustomed to the cake shape, is the delicate chestnut minced and cream stirred, put on the bottom of the sponge cake slice to eat, this practice in France is called "Mont Blanc", cream is the chestnut peak snow. Another chestnut cake is baked with chestnut flour instead of flour and looks quite solid.
Candied chestnuts are also a time-honored dessert, in which peeled whole chestnuts are dipped several times in a syrup with vanilla and brandy, constantly increasing the concentration of the syrup until the chestnuts absorb sugar to saturation, becoming the "sugar chestnut" without compromise, which is the favorite of the heroine of "La Traviata".
Roasted chestnuts on an iron plate
The European "fundamentalist method of eating chestnuts" is usually to cook raw chestnuts with fire, so there is also a fable of "taking chestnuts from fire". In order to keep chestnuts from being burned, they are usually grilled on a barbed wire mesh or in a pot with holes. The boiled chestnuts are mostly salty, and are generally cooked in salted and fennel water. There is still a special "Chestnut Festival" in Catalonia today, where in early November people are dusted on their faces and jumped over the chestnut-roasting campfire to pray for good luck, which was later combined with some Halloween celebrations.
05
The American Chestnut that is heading for the end of the world
In North America, the distribution of American chestnuts was also extremely widespread, providing people with food and wood selflessly. Because of the high content of chestnut tannins and corrosion resistance, the 19th century American railway sleepers, telephone poles, coal shaft pillars, etc. are almost all made of chestnut wood, which can be said to have made great contributions to industrial development.
But today, the American chestnut has fallen almost entirely under attack from the Cryphonectria parasitica. Chinese chestnuts and Japanese chestnuts are resistant to chestnut blight, but american and European chestnuts are not, and this pathogenic fungus was introduced to North America by attaching it to imported Asian chestnut trees.
American 19th-century prints depicting chestnut picking
Test results in 1906 showed that 98 percent of the chestnut trees in the Bronx of New York had been infected. The fungus can be airborne, turning 3 billion American chestnut trees into "living dead trees" over a few decades — when the main stem dies, new shoots sprout from the roots and then continue to be infected, so they are classified as functionally extinct. Only a few hundred have survived, becoming the first species endangered by fungal infections. The fate of the American chestnut is lamentable, and it also makes people feel that "it is better to cherish the chestnut in front of you".
So, don't you have one?
If you don't eat sugar and fry chestnuts, you feel that you have failed the autumn!