Wen Liu Xu
The food of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is no longer a kind of literary symbol, it has become vivid and warm in the hands of replicators.
Lu Xun said: "Dream of the Red Chamber is known to many people in China, at least, as it is a book that knows this name. Regardless of who is the author and the continuator, the intention alone is due to the reader's vision: the scribe sees the Yi, the Taoist sees the adultery, the caizi sees the entanglement, the revolutionary sees the platoon, the gossip sees the secret affairs of the palace..."
In the eyes of people who like to eat and drink, "Dream of the Red Chamber" is a piece of uncompromising food "rich mine". In the past one or two years, with the development of video platforms, more and more people have begun to reproduce the food in the book and record it with images.
The creations of the ancients, which are full of wisdom and beauty, should not be overwhelmed by the torrent of the times
B station UP main "bi cicada clothes" is one of them. She has loved to read "Dream of the Red Chamber" since she was a child, and the description of food in the book has left a deep impression on her. At the beginning of last year, due to the epidemic, Bi Cicada was idle at home, and re-read "Dream of the Red Chamber", and the portrayal of food in the book still attracted her. Bi Cicada felt that "the light that shines from eating has not diminished because of the passage of time." She loves to eat and drink on weekdays, and she has the idea of reproducing the food of the Red Chamber. Last August, she made a dish of Artemisia stalks at home, which became her first video content.
The "cream pine roll crisp" shown in the video.
In the following months, shrimp balls chicken skin soup, ham fresh shoots, oil and salt fried goji sprouts and other dishes were also copied by her. In the process, Bi Cicada got a lot of fun. First of all, through food, she has a deeper understanding of Cao Xueqin's views on fate, personality, etc.: "The well-digestible jujube mud yam cake indicates that Qin Keqing's life is imminent; Xia Jingui loves to eat 'fried charred bones', revealing the viciousness of eating people and not spitting bones..." Each dish seems to appear randomly, but there are many meaningful life stories.
At the same time, the food in "Dream of the Red Chamber" often makes Bi Cicada feel healed. Bi Cicada said: "Like drinking and skewering, most of the Red Chamber food I made taste good, and it is a very happy thing to make a few friends and enjoy tea and snacks together." In addition, she found that in the process of cooking, she can also learn a lot of health knowledge. And the food that has a medicinal effect will also have a higher number of video views. In the view of Bi Cicada, today's young people still pay attention to physical maintenance.
The cicada clothes also often encounter difficulties. In the choice and production of ingredients, it is difficult for her to restore according to the appearance described in "Dream of the Red Chamber". Some ingredients are very seasonal, and this is the case with ginger. Bi Cicada tried to pickle once last early autumn, but without success. She said that although the material conditions are now developed, it is necessary to wait for a year to miss some seasonal foods. Some ingredients are gone, so she has only two choices: replace the ingredients or give them up.
In addition to the food itself, how to present food is also a difficult problem for Bi Cicada. As a researcher in a university, she can only do this in her spare time. And the whole process of doing it is almost "going it alone", from the shooting of the rack machine, food production to post-editing, all rely on her alone. Due to the limitation of production costs, the grand scenes of Zhong Mingding and Jin Yuyu in "Dream of the Red Chamber" cannot be reproduced by personal strength.
The "chicken fat roll" shown in the video.
According to backstage data analysis, most of the followers of Bi Cicada are young people in their twenties. After the video was posted, she often talked to them in the comments section, and she felt happy to see some enlightening feedback. She wants to use these videos to let more young people return to the text of "Dream of the Red Chamber" and read this classic. For her, reproducing the meaning of these delicacies, in addition to providing people with a path to understand classical culture, she also hopes that the creations of the ancients, which are full of wisdom and beauty, will not be drowned by the torrent of the times.
The delicacy of reproducing "Dream of the Red Chamber" is essentially a transmission and expression of concepts
Like Bi Cicada, "Hamster Hotpot" is also a big fan of "Dream of the Red Chamber". Working in finance in Hong Kong, she has been on this culinary journey since last April. Her reason for the idea was pure: "I've watched it twenty or thirty times since I was in first grade, and I'd love to get a taste of what the food in it really tastes like." ”
In order to make the video look more professional, she purchased a series of equipment, hydraulic slides for filming, fill lights, and air dryers for cooking, all of which she took to the rental house. Hamster Hotpot said that everywhere she could stuff things in her quarters, she was full of utensils and unused ingredients. In addition to investing in hardware equipment, she also consciously learned some editing and presentation techniques.
Because of the main business, hamster hot pot videos often rely on squeezing time. She cut the video until two or three in the morning, and had to get up at 8 a.m. to go to work. And these efforts have made her videos more and more concerned. Among them, she remade the issue of "Cold Incense Pills" and received 300,000 views. In this regard, she is not very surprised: "Someone has long proposed that I do 'cold incense pills', and the voice of the masses is very high, so the number of broadcasts is relatively high, which is also expected." ”
Hamster hot pot in the video shown in the "cold incense ball" restoration.
But for a creative UP owner, the difficulty is that not every video can match the aesthetic taste of the audience. Sometimes, traffic problems can still bother hamster hot pot. For example, it took her a long time recently to reproduce the successful "melon oil pine mooncake", and the data is somewhat bleak. Although the mood was affected, the hamster hot pot still felt that he was very powerful. Because when making this meal, she mastered the skill of making puff pastry. For her, every bit of progress in life will make her feel a sense of accomplishment.
In addition to satisfying the needs of the taste buds, the biggest pleasure of hamster hot pot is chatting with people who watch videos. She never called her followers fans, but as friends they had never met. The interest in "Dream of the Red Chamber" allows everyone to gather in the same field, communicate together, and share together. Some people pointed out the error of her pronunciation in the comments, and she gladly accepted it; others proposed the true location of certain ingredients in the bullet screen, and she carefully verified and modified them.
In the view of hamster hot pot, perhaps ordinary enthusiasts can not put forward insightful claims in academics like researchers, but it is valuable to form this atmosphere of discussion. She prefers the feeling of dialogue to the conclusive statement. She has always felt that the reproduction of the food of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is essentially a transmission and expression of concepts.
In the process of restoring these delicacies, Hamster Hotpot has a new understanding of "Dream of the Red Chamber", and at the same time has more understanding of her own life, she said: "Living can not just be tired of running to make money. There are some such little pleasures, but it is actually very happy. ”
Commercializing the Red Chamber cuisine is not a rush
The "Red Chamber Banquet" account is slightly different from the "Hamster Hotpot" and "Bi Cicada Dress", and the videos released by them are relatively more sophisticated in the picture and have more texture of food documentaries. That's because behind it is an e-commerce company operating and supporting.
More sentences and plots from the original book have been added to the video of the Banquet of the Red Chamber.
The boss, Li Rongkang, said that making Red Chamber dishes was a fortuitous opportunity: "At that time, when I was researching near Jiaxing, a chef inside the company touched the scene and proposed that I should not try this field." "There happened to be a few girls in the team who were interested in 'Dream of the Red Chamber', and this business was carried out.
The chef recreates the taste of the food, Li Rongkang borrows the ancient house from a friend to restore the scene of eating, and several "Wenqing" employees are responsible for the writing of the copywriting and visual presentation. The whole process, including the cost of external procurement, accommodation, catering and production, costs nearly 30,000 yuan per episode. Li Rongkang said frankly: "In the final analysis, this is a commercial project, but because of its cultural attributes, it must be slowly accumulated, and now it is not in a hurry to monetize it." ”
Due to the limited budget, the company did not invest in marketing expenses, but with excellent video content, in one year, the Red Chamber Banquet had nearly 150,000 fans. After becoming famous, some commercial institutions were attracted, some of whom let them do commercial hospitality catering, and some wanted to cooperate with them to do youth education with the Red Chamber cuisine as the entry point. But Li Rongkang declined one by one. He felt that now was not the time.
Li Rongkang believes that the biggest difficulty in promoting the related products of "Dream of the Red Chamber" to the market is that there is no matching environment. In his vision, the future of the "Red Chamber Banquet" should be a theme park. He wanted to make a commercial complex: "Radiating out from Dream of the Red Chamber, eating Red Chamber dishes in themed restaurants, playing script killing, watching theater performances, interacting with virtual idols, and so on." However, he also knows that it is still a stage of "talking on paper" and that there is still a long way to go to realize this vision.
In the present, what they can do is to make quality content at a limited cost. Li Rongkang said that what touched him was that some primary and secondary school students would use sentences from their video copy when answering questions on the exam. At that moment, he would feel that it was worth it to do it. "It makes sense if culture and tradition are infiltrated into young people in this way."
Osmanthus cake shown in the video by the "Red Chamber Banquet" account.
In these UP main videos, the food of "Dream of the Red Chamber" is no longer a text description on paper, it has become vivid and warm. In a way, it's also a way to go deep into tradition and recreate it. The up masters of these videos may not be able to become red scientists, but in the process of presenting them, they have written down the glittering details of life. At the same time, the reproduction of the red chamber cuisine also makes this literary masterpiece become eternal in the fireworks.