In the hot summer, ice cream has become one of the most popular drinks. However, cold drinks are not exclusive to modern people, and the ancients began to enjoy ice cream long before the invention of the freezer. However, there are practices in various eras, so let's take a look at what the ancient version of "ice cream" looks like, and what are the interesting things behind it?
In the Tang Dynasty, crispy mountains were the prototype of ice cream
As far back as 2,000 years ago, in the Zhou Dynasty, people collected ice cubes in the middle of winter and stored them in ice warehouses for easy consumption in the middle of summer, and there is a similar record in the Book of Poetry: "The second day is the day of the ice rush, and the third day is the yin of the ling." "The Ling Yin here is the Ice Cellar where the ice is hidden." During the Western Zhou Dynasty, the imperial court set up a special organization in charge of ice, the ancients called ice "Ling", and the officials who were in charge of the storage and supply of ice were called "Lingren".
During the Qin and Han dynasties, the imperial palace built a special "Ling Room" for storing ice. The imperial court of the Han Dynasty held a solemn ice-giving ceremony every year in the middle of summer, and gave the hidden ice in the Ling Room to the Minister of Culture and Military Affairs to cool off. According to archaeological findings, Shaanxi once excavated the Lingyin ice cellar in the Qin and Han Dynasties, when it was with the help of grass and trees as an insulation layer, digging tens of meters deep underground to form a lower temperature ice cellar, so that storage, even after the high temperature summer, the ice will not melt. After the Wei and Jin Dynasties, it was more common to dig wells to hide ice, and the scale of "ice wells" became larger and larger.
In the Tang Dynasty, cold drinks and cold foods developed rapidly, and the flowers became more and more diverse. In the streets of Chang'an in the Tang Dynasty, there were more merchants who bought and sold ice. It is recorded that "the ice and snow of Chang'an are equal to gold in summer." "The book "Duyang Miscellaneous Compilation" specifically introduces the method of making cold drinks. At that time, the price of cold drinks was extremely expensive, and it was difficult for ordinary people to get along with them except for the rich and noble families.
In the Tang Dynasty, when people mined saltpeter, it was found that saltpeter would absorb a lot of heat when dissolved in water, so that the water would freeze, and this discovery was used to make ice in summer. According to the "Duyang Miscellaneous Compilation", "Midsummer Ann Wok, boiling water with crystal like a palm, taking a bottle of soup, sealing the oil vessel, re-boiling a thousand boils, sinking to the bottom of the stream, Flat Dan ice, the name of the cold feast ice." It can be seen that artificial icemaking was realized at that time, which was a miracle in the history of ancient science and technology.
In the "Collection of Flowers" of the five generations of poets and Ning, there are many poems that record the cold drinks in the summer of the Tang Dynasty, one of which reads: "The warm gold plate is lit with crispy mountains, and the king is expected to look carefully." More to the eyebrows of Xiao Dai, the rock edge is dyed with green masts. "Depicts the image of a dexterous palace maid who makes "Crispy Mountain". The "crispy mountain" in the poem is considered by posterity to be the prototype of today's ice cream. According to the literature, the bottom layer of the crispy mountain should be ice, covered with cream, ghee, and also planted with flowers, colored trees and other ornaments.
Ancient doctors discovered the magic of ice
In the Song Dynasty, summer frozen food became more popular. Some are also used as one of the emperor's rewards to the ministers, among them, on the day of the Volt, they also reward "honey sand ice", that is, ice poured with honey and put on bean paste, which is a special imperial food in the imperial palace.
Due to the popularity of ice storage technology, the folk ice and snow trading in the Song Dynasty was also very active. According to the "Tokyo Dream Record", some cold drinks in Kaifeng, Beijing at that time, usually added ice to it, there are a wide variety of types, including sugar mung beans, pear pulp, papaya juice, brine plum water, black tea water, ginger honey water, bitter water (a kind of tea with iced), mushroom drink, perilla drink, lychee paste water, white mash cold water, plum blossom wine, kumquat snow bubbles and so on. At that time, people also found that chewing ice cubes was a good way to decant and dissolve alcohol. For example, Xu Changtu's "Magnolia Flower" cloud "Red Window Wine Disease Chews Cold Ice", zhu Dunru's "Spring XiaoQu" said that "Jade People Are Thirsty for Wine and Chew Spring Ice".
Some scholars believe that during the Song Yingzong period, there were also drinks similar to our ice cream today. At that time, people mixed juice with various milks, put ice cubes, and made a frozen drink. The Song Dynasty poet Yang Wanli has five unique poems: "It seems to be greasy and cool, like condensation and like floating." The bottom of the jade plate shattered, and the snow melted toward the sun. The description in the poem is exactly the Song Dynasty version of "ice cream".
The hidden ice taken out of the ice cellar is a large piece, so people have to knock the large pieces of ice into small pieces before eating the ice. Therefore, in the poems of the Tang and Song Dynasties, there is a mention of the procedure of knocking ice. Tang Yanqian's poem "Farewell" mentions that "the green bowl knocks ice cane pulp", and Ouyang Xiu also has "rain when the sun is hot in June... Bi Bowl knocks on the ice pouring jade" words. Yang Tingxiu also specially composed a "Knocking Ice Poem", describing the fun of knocking on ice, saying that it was "the sound of breaking glass".
The ancients loved to eat smoothies and other drinks, and then discovered the wonderful use of ice. According to historical records, once, Emperor Huizong of Song was upset because of "eating ice too much", and the treatment by the imperial doctor was ineffective, so he summoned the famous folk doctor Yang Jie into the palace. Yang Jie then used Dali Zhongmaru as a prescription and cooked it with ice, and after Emperor Huizong took it, the illness was suddenly cured. In fact, the use of ice for medical treatment began with the famous Tang Dynasty doctor Sun Simiao, who in "A Thousand Golden Fangs" yun: "with ice frequent ironing" and "extinguish scars", its effect is "good". Li Shizhen, a famous doctor in the Ming Dynasty, used "Xia Bing" to treat "typhoid yin poison, hot and comatose", creating a precedent for ice cooling.
Kublai Khan invented authentic ice cream
In the Yuan Dynasty, the development of cold drinks has reached a new level. This has a lot to do with Kublai Khan, the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty.
The Mongols were nomadic people who loved to drink milk, but the summer heat in Yuan Dadu (present-day Beijing) made it difficult to preserve milk. Kublai Khan thought of a way to put milk in ice cubes to preserve freshness, and unexpectedly, this milk tasted better, and was called "milk ice" at that time. Kublai Khan tried to add honey, jam, etc., and the result was a dairy product that looked like ice and snow. In this way, the condensed ice is like sand mud, and with a strong milk flavor, it is both delicious and relieving the heat.
In the 13th century, the Italian traveler Marco Polo came to the Yuan Capital to visit and saw many miracles that amazed him, and he recorded ice cream in his book "Oriental Observations": "In the El Dorado of the East, the inhabitants like to eat milk ice. Because Marco Polo was deeply appreciated by Kublai Khan, he made an exception and taught him the ingredient making techniques of ice cheese. After Marco Polo returned to China, he improved the original manual operation and wrote it into the "Oriental Observations" together with his production process.
For the sake of its own enjoyment, the Italian royal family kept this production technique secret for 300 years. It was not until the 16th century that Italy transferred its recipes and production processes to the French dynasty. In 1640 AD, the production technology of milk ice was introduced to Britain, and its recipe and production process were further improved to make it more refreshing and thirst-quenching. Around the middle of the 18th century, the production technology of ice cream was introduced to the United States and even more countries and regions.
In 1769, the Oxford Dictionary published in England first named ice cream, which is composed of "ice" and "cream". In the 19th century, a Jew invented a machine specializing in making ice cream, which debuted at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, allowing ice cream to become widely popular around the world.
The old ice house was transformed into an "ice cellar restaurant"
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Beijing formed a thriving ice storage industry. According to the Ming Dynasty's "Imperial Scenery and Material Strategy", "Establish a summer day to start the ice, give the minister of culture and martial arts, and the editor must sell it." "This record refers to the official government's granting of ice cubes and the sale of ice by the people. By the time of the Qing Dynasty, the amount of ice hidden was constantly increasing, according to the "Great Qing Huidian": "Fanna Ice, the inner cellar of the Forbidden City, hid 25,000 pieces of ice; the west cellar of Jingshan West Gate was 6, hiding 54,000 pieces of ice; the third cellar outside the Desheng Gate, hiding 26,700 pieces of ice." ”
At that time, there were two kinds of official ice cellars: one was the "official cellar", which was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Works and was specially used by the court and the government for ice. According to the "Records of the Yanjing Chronicle", the Qing court also gave ice to officials at all levels extensively on the three-volt day, and because there were many officials involved, "ice tickets" had to be issued in advance, and officials at all levels went to the ice cellar to collect it. The second is the "palace cellar", that is, some royal palaces are chartered to run their own ice cellars for the royal palace to use ice. There is a "Snow Pond Ice Cellar" on Qionghua Island in beihai, which takes ice directly from the north sea and is the largest ice cellar in Beijing that year, which is dedicated to the emperor's royal use. There is also an ice cellar on the east side of the garden of the Cining Palace in the Forbidden City, which has now been developed into an "ice cellar restaurant".
The Qing Dynasty made many cold drinks, especially the ice cold plum soup is the most famous. According to historical records, when the Eight-Power Alliance invaded Beijing, Cixi fled to Xi'an. When Cixi spent the summer in Xi'an, she wanted to eat iced sour plum soup, but there was no ice well condition in the local area to chill sour plum soup. Later, some people remembered that there was a cave in the Taibai Mountain, more than a hundred miles southwest of Chang'an City, the ice was bone-deep, the depth was bottomless, and there was ice that had not been dissolved for many years, so they sent people to the Taibai Mountain to get ice, which solved Cixi's needs.
For a long time, due to the limitations of freezing technology, ice cream maintained its status as an aristocratic food, until the invention of the refrigerator came out in 1923, and ice cream entered the homes of ordinary people. In today's era, it has become a very common cold food.
(Source: Xinhua News Agency)
Column Editor-in-Chief: Gong Danyun Text Editor: Peng Wei
Source: Author: Liu Yongjia