Museum Legends Season 4
Wandering around the streets of Yangzhou, you can inadvertently encounter a salt merchant's residence, the large ones are Wang's Xiaoyuan, Wang Lumen Salt Merchant's Residence, and a famous garden, which has now become a salt merchant culture exhibition hall. Imagine what kind of life scene was in the door of these salt merchants' mansions more than 100 years ago? The push between cups and cups is the most telling.
Yangzhou Tea House
There is such a sentence, depicting the urban ecology of Yangzhou at that time, called "morning leather bag water, evening water foreskin", morning tea house to drink morning tea, night bathing in the bathhouse, bathhouse but also to pedicure, Yangzhou's bathhouse, three knives famous in the world, but also become a means of livelihood for many ordinary people in Yangzhou. This is the life of a person with idleness. It is precisely because there are salt merchants in Yangzhou that they feed a group of idle people.
Eating morning tea is the prologue, and yangzhou's food culture is famous for its Weiyang cuisine. It is a salt merchant who pushes Weiyang cuisine to the extreme, and now people are talking about braised lion's head, boiling silver carp head, grilled pork head, as well as large boiled dried silk, eel paste, raw fried turtle, etc., just a dime, at that time some were just peripheral dishes at the banquet.
Yangzhou salt merchants have an extremely complex process:
Yangzhou morning tea
Guests are present, each person on the table must put a menu of the day, very exquisite, after eating, guests must take away according to politeness, probably equivalent to remembering what I invite you to eat, the next time you invite me to follow the meaning. Then go home and ask your servant to send a reply and thank you. Today, you can still find the menu of Qing Dynasty salt merchants in the used book market.
First say that after the guest arrives, if the status is low, the host welcomes the guest inside the door, if the status is high, the host must go out of the gate to welcome the guest, and open the door to invite in.
Then invite to the water pavilion or the open living room next to the water to offer tea, the opposite side of the tea, across the water must be a stage, on which there is a domestic Kunqu opera team singing.
Drinking tea is not today's clear tea, but lotus powder, apricot cheese, or fruit tea, or Tieguanyin plus Jiangxi small orange cake, southern jujube, cinnamon meat, olive and peanut rice tea, of course, the most common is the bowl of eight treasure tea, which has white sugar or rock sugar, goji berries, red dates, walnut kernels, cinnamon meat, sesame seeds, raisins, apple slices, etc., tea can be arbitrarily selected.
Drinking tea with tea food generally includes: four dried fruits, four fresh fruits, four snacks, known as sixteen plates. In fact, there are very few people who drink tea and eat tea. Drinking tea has two functions, one is to wait for the guests to come to the table, the other is to exchange information, who earns and who loses, who is promoted, who is unlucky, and so on.
When the guests arrive, they will be seated according to the priority and order.
There are four kinds of butterflies on the seat, which are filled with soy sauce, red vinegar, sour plum sauce, and sweetness.
One seat is a large round table, and the middle is a plate. Salt merchants invite guests, and the middle plate is made of color spelling, that is, the use of sauce beef, shiitake mushrooms, eggs, lettuce and other ingredients to form a pleasing pattern, such as Fulu Shou three-star annunciation, Songhe Yannian and so on. Of course, you can eat it, but usually no one eats it, just look.
The plate is surrounded by a variety of plates, surrounded by sixteen plates, including eight cold meats and eight vegetarian dishes. Interestingly, these dishes were the dishes to be watched at the Yangzhou salt merchants' banquet, but now they are the main dishes at the banquet. For example, garlic pork ribs,
Crispy fried crucian carp, fried river prawns, drunken clams, roasted suckling pig skin, as well as vegetarian sesame oil dried shreds, assorted roasted bran, etc., roasted bran is fried gluten. Chairman Mao went to Shanghai and ate assorted roasted bran at the Jinjiang Hotel, and was full of praise, and Ke Qingshi, then secretary of the municipal party committee, transferred this chef to Beijing, and this chef spent a long time in the red wall, and his specialty dish was to buy flour to make gluten, and then make assorted roasted bran.
Unlike now, when cold dishes are served, cold dishes were also seen and not eaten, and at most they were mixed as snacks, although these cold dishes tasted good and the level was very high.
The real wine is the wine dish. Chefs all know the principle of "wine is afraid of beef rice and afraid of fish", so wine dishes generally have to arrange dishes with chewy taste and strong taste, such as beef; and next meals, they must arrange light and delicious dishes, such as fish.
Wine dishes are generally eight hot dishes, such as hanging oven roast lamb, honey sauce fire party, wine hot beef, salt baked pigeon, honey roast goose, braised hoof tendons, rice wine duck gizzard, sauce stewed fish mouth.
The wine is Shaoxing yellow wine hot on the table.
After drinking, first put on a pot, which is a huge casserole, and in winter, it should be kept warm with charcoal fire. A pot of chickens, hen ducks, fish balls, meat balls, shrimp balls, squid, hoof tendons, pigeon eggs, bamboo shoot slices, shiitake mushrooms, etc., simmered with broth to soft rotten, mainly provide appetizing soup, a small bowl per person is enough, in order to remove the intensity of the wine dish, for the following to enjoy the main dish cleared.
The main course is six bowls, including yellow braised shark fin, braised abalone, rock sugar bear paw, grilled sea cucumber with green onion, fish maw with white sauce, and braised guan yan. Veritable mountain treasures and seafood. Before serving braised GuanYan or Clear Soup Swallow dishes, send each guest a small cup of clear tea, usually a light tea brewed with Longjing tea or Taiping Monkey Kui, please rinse your mouth. Because this dish is delicious and mellow, after not cleaning the mouth, you can't better appreciate its wonders.
After eating the main course, the meal is generally eight hot stir-fried, of course, there are sixteen hot stir-fried.
The food emphasizes freshness, melting in the mouth, and the aroma is rich and plump. Therefore, it is often used for river fresh, and occasionally with some seafood. In the era of Yangzhou salt merchants in the Qing Dynasty, the status of seafood in Huaiyang cuisine was not as good as that of river fresh.
Typical dishes such as ginger and shallot fried tape, fried shrimp with curd milk, fried turtle skirt with black pepper, crab tofu, sour soup squid, braised eel segments and so on.
After the meal is finished, it is time to serve vegetarian dishes, vegetarian dishes are generally six hot stir-fried, such as oil braised spring shoots, abalone juice double mushrooms, vegetarian roasted double winter, soup amaranth, milk soup pu cabbage, chicken fat loofah and so on. On the soup amaranth, the salt merchant invited the amaranth, only use tender buds (the so-called bird tongue), a bowl of soup amaranth, about to use more than two hundred pounds of amaranth to do, then not like now to put what skin eggs and salted duck eggs are small diced, directly with the broth to cook, adjust salt and pepper, sprinkle fried golden garlic, sprinkle green onions can be served. Tender and sweet, refreshing and refreshing.
After eating the vegetarian dish, it is time to serve the staple food. Staple food is generally only dim sum, you can imagine the first dozens of dishes to eat, indeed no one has the appetite to eat a large bowl of rice and noodles. The main food is four small bowls of dim sum per person, a small crystal bun, a small crab yellow roasted wheat, two shrimp fried dumplings, and two fish soup dumplings stewed.
The banquet generally does not take the initiative to provide rice, but if you do not eat snacks, or the snacks are not enough, you can apply for rice, rice is generally peach blossom rice, that is, shrimp fried rice, each grain of rice is fried crystal clear, caramelized, shrimp tender, and then put a little tomato sauce embellished, like peach blossom flooding, so called peach blossom rice. When eating, put four small dishes in front of each person, usually sweet and sour nectar, pickled cucumber in sauce, crispy radish, and rock sugar.
After eating a snack or meal, entering the closing stage, it is generally the first to come to the refreshing soup, and the refreshing soup is generally a clear soup, such as mushroom chicken soup.
After the refreshing soup, generally on the dessert, Yangzhou salt merchants on the desserts are colorful, generally there will be four small bowls, which must have rock sugar lotus seed silver ear soup, rock sugar hash ant, and other look at the season, such as sometimes on the cheese, according to the season, may be jujube puree + milk made of oak cheese, may also be peanut walnut + milk made of peanut walnut cheese, sometimes on the cake, sometimes on the sago dew, sometimes on the wine to make lantern and so on. Anyway, it will be full of four bowls.
Fruit platters, generally according to the season, such as early autumn now, most of the fruits after the meal should be cantaloupe, grapes, peaches and so on.
Sending guests to clear tea, generally Biluochun. However, there are also salt merchants who like six angua slices. This one is based on personal preference. When drinking clear tea, it is also a time to suggest that guests should leave, the so-called tea to send guests.
Yangzhou salt merchants like to entertain guests, some people are invited to several waves a day, they continue to turn the table one night, some people simply open the water table every day, and some people let themselves raise several home cooking teams to cook pk every day, play the ring, and invite guests to taste and evaluate freely. It's called a battle for the better. This is also the salt merchant's money has nowhere to spend, only to practice the status of Huaiyang caijianghu.
The eating and drinking style of Yangzhou salt merchants can be said to be arrogant and lascivious, and one of the typical figures often mentioned is Huang Juntai, a salt merchant in Yangzhou during the Qianlong period.
Yangzhou egg fried rice is now the signature rice. A bowl of egg fried rice eaten by Huang Juntai must ensure that each grain of rice is 100% complete, and it must be all separated from the grains of rice, and each grain of rice must be soaked in egg juice, which is golden on the outside and snow-white on the inside. With this bowl of rice, there must be a hundred fish soup, including crucian tongue, carp white, silver carp brain, spotted fish liver, yellow fish fat, shark fin, turtle skirt, eel blood, bream paddling, mullet fillet, etc., the cost is fifty taels of silver, according to the current purchasing power, it is more than ten thousand yuan.
Yangzhou fried rice
The extravagant style of salt merchants also affected the entire city style, and the salt merchants in Yangzhou at that time, "the rich were tens of millions", and those with property below 1 million taels of silver were not in the stream, and could only be regarded as "small merchants". Yangzhou salt merchants ordinary family earn money is enough to feed a large family, resulting in Yangzhou "rich" a large number of idle people, no work, nothing to do, so "in the morning skin wrapped water, evening water foreskin", tea houses and bathhouses have thus become service industries, feeding a side of the people, and then yangzhou people go out to live, Yangzhou's teahouses, bathhouses and three knives to the country, and even brought overseas.
(Some of the information is excerpted from "Light Mang Magazine: The Luxury of the End times: How Yangzhou Salt Merchants Invite Guests")
Author Smell it