Folk Cuisine 158 - Glass Meat
Qi Fengchi
I remember that more than thirty years ago, there was an ordinary cold dish called glass meat, which was on the table of the New Year's Festival wedding and funeral. Now that I think back to the cold, sweet and crispy, fragrant glass meat, I still feel delicious.
Unfortunately, the glass meat in my memory, with the changes of the times and the improvement of people's dietary standards, the high-fat, greasy and polysaccharide glass meat has long been eliminated from the menu and far away from the table and people's memories.
Nowadays, people's dietary concepts have begun to change towards health, nutrition and health care. Therefore, many of the good dishes I ate when I was a child were eliminated. If you want to eat now, you have to remember. I began to reminisce, to taste and feel the taste of those dishes and the lost years.
In the past, the more upscale glass meat was a major cold dish on people's holiday or wedding tables. Today, it has long been forgotten. Needless to say that people eat it, even chefs today don't do it.
I know how glass meat is made, and I've done it in the past. It is made with the fat and sugar of pork. First remove the skin of the ribbed meat, then remove the lean meat, leaving the remaining layer of snow-white fat fat, and then cut into chopsticks as thick as chopsticks, more than an inch long, and then stir into a paste with egg white starch flour, put the fat strips into the batter, dip well, and fry them in a frying pan. When the strips of meat harden, the discoloration floats up and fishes them out. Then use a spoon to boil the sugar, when the sugar is boiled with a spoon, after dripping the sugar into silk, the sugar will boil to the heat. At this time, fish out the strips of meat that have been oiled on another stove, immediately pour them into the boiled sugar, turn the spoon repeatedly, so that the sugar is all wrapped in the meat strips and finally sprinkled with fried sesame seeds on top of the spoon, and then, poured into a large flat dish, greased on the bottom of the plate, so as not to let the glass meat stick together. Once it has cooled, you can eat it. This dish is characterized by being sweet, fragrant, crisp and greasy. Because the fat strips are fried twice, the meat has basically turned into oil, and the oil has seeped into the hanging batter. Wrapped in white sugar on the outside, a bite is of course sweet and crispy and fragrant.
At that time, people's living standards were low, and people were not easy to eat meat several times a month, so it was very tempting for people to see sweet food.
I remember, it was October in the early seventies, my neighbor's eldest brother got married, and the chef made this glass meat cold dish. After the dish is ready, it is placed outside in a cool place. When the guests arrived at noon and were ready to serve, the chef put the glass meat on the plate and found that there were several tables of glass meat. This time the chef was in a hurry, he asked the owner, how to make less glass meat, in fact, the owner did not know, later, someone told the chef, it is the children who pinch one, he takes one, and eats it. The table is about to open, what to do. The chef had to make a temporary decision to make another dish and make up for the plates of glass meat that the children had eaten.
Nowadays, glass meat has long since withdrawn from recipes and people's dietary concepts. Glass meat belongs entirely to the years of hunger and people's lack of nutrition.
Today, when it comes to glass meat, I still feel that the years of lack of meat sugar and the days of poverty in the past are so kind, and the glass meat that disappeared in the recipe still feels so sweet and greasy.