In the days of the ancestral home, anyone who has no good food, or who suddenly comes uninvited guests without decent dishes to entertain, will definitely go to the town to buy old geese.
Only because of the relationship between Huangjue Town, the most famous production area of Yangzhou Old Goose.
Just as when it comes to baking cakes, we must say "Huangqiao baked cakes" in a row, and when we talk about honey oranges, we must say "Huangyan honey oranges", as if these towns and food that begin with the word yellow have some indissoluble relationships, and when it comes to old geese, it is naturally Huangjue old geese.
Even if you entertain guests in Yangzhou, if you specifically point out that the old goose on the table is from Huangjue Town, which is only thirty or forty minutes away, you can make this dish immediately show his unusualness, which can also reflect how sincere the host's hospitality is. There are also some relatively good restaurants that run Weiyang Ben gang dishes, cold dishes always have a plate of old geese, and the waiter always has to say: "This is Huang Jue old goose Oh! "The whole room seemed to be glowing.
The old goose has a nice name, called the saltwater goose. But in Yangzhou and Huaiyin, the term brine goose is not much said, and even the signboard of the vendor is clearly written with the old goose.
The old goose is almost the old nest (the second sound) in Yangzhou dialect, because the "goose" in Yangzhou dialect is pronounced as "nest", and Yangzhou dialect always adds a "zi" word after these animals, which seems to be full of pleasure in pronunciation. But because of this, I have known laos since I was a child, and I still feel that this country is full of delicious phonemes.
The saltwater duck that Nanjing people love to eat, also called osmanthus duck, can not be found everywhere in Yangzhou, and it is not afraid that Nanjing is only a hundred kilometers away from Yangzhou. And yangzhou's brine goose can not be found in Nanjing.
And the brine duck now has a big brand, vacuum food national and even international sales, the old goose is always only in Yangzhou this area stall can only buy, mainly because the brine duck is a relatively dry state, and the old goose is to soak in the juice to eat. And the strange thing is that if the vacuum packaging is now hard, as long as it is sealed and then opened, the taste is also very different. Like Qionghua, the delicacy of the old goose is trapped in the time and space of Yangzhou, not knowing hundreds or thousands of years.
The delicacies of the Jiangsu generation, but whenever we want to talk about historical origins, they are generally inseparable from the Qianlong Emperor. This emperor only went to Jiangnan once, feeling that in addition to sowing illegitimate children, he was developing local cuisine. The Qianlong Emperor is estimated to be the first person in "China on the Tip of the Tongue".
Looking at Baidu, it is said that the "old" of the old goose is because of the long history, which I think is not true. The reason why the old goose wants to emphasize this old, mainly in the brine goose world, if the young goose is made into a brine goose and then sold, it is to be criticized, the young goose meat is relatively thin, the taste is much worse than the mature goose. And the young geese do not have much fat, the figure is not plump enough, the fat aroma is not enough when burning, it is indeed dull to eat, and the meat quality is also strange and not easy to bite off, in short, it is obviously not very tasty. It's not too old to say, but the goose of the next year is good.
It is also common for customers to guard the stall and watch the boss chop it down, revealing the cross-section of the goose breast, and customers sometimes have to complain: "The meat is so thin(thin)!" Are you selling old geese! ”
For as long as I can remember, old geese have always been sold at stalls. A three-wheeled board car, the back is built into a glass box like a large box, more than a meter high position is a metal plate, this is a cooking table, kitchen knives and cutting boards are placed on this, the front is sealed with glass cabinets divided into several layers, there are some old geese, and goose intestines, goose blood and other things, but also sell old goose brine made of rotten bamboo peanuts and the like. The glass cabinet is facing the outside part, and the paint is written "Huang Jue Old Goose" or "Yangzhou Old Goose", which is now mostly computer-cut stickers, and the handwriting is much more uniform.
About a few years ago, the Yangzhou government carried out a unified transformation of the old goose car, adding a Chinese-style pavilion roof with carved beams and paintings to each car. The roof of the pavilion with awkward materials suddenly appeared above the large glass lattice house, and this indescribable sense of violation made people semi-compulsively remember the old goose stall. And because the overall sense of design completion is too strange, so that I have to think of the unification plus this kind of thing, about the leadership of the money-making project may not be certain. Fortunately, there is no such terrible regulation erosion outside Yangzhou, and now I also feel that the town's rough and simple glass pavilion old goose car has a quaint nostalgia.
At lunch or dinner, the boss rode a tricycle to his point and stopped, holding up a large chrome-yellow tarpaulin umbrella and covering his old goose stall. The stalls did not have their own names, unlike the people who paste the mobile phone film now, this is called the membrane brother, the one is called the pony, and then the one is called the membrane fighter or something, all have their own names. The old goose stalls are not very famous, and they are all recorded in place names.
Generally speaking, as long as the old goose stalls in an area are done in a decent manner, people are not willing to give up the near and far, so they agree to go to his house to buy, which is also "the old goose at the Phoenix Bridge" and "the old goose at the gate of Cuigang", probably because of this, willing to run far to Huang Jue to buy, it really gives enough face.
Today, when everyone in the milk tea shop makes a transparent semi-cut mask, the old goose stall still has no obvious health protection measures. Some bosses also directly take out the old goose with their hands, cut and bag it, and then find money, and will not disinfect their hands or anything, it seems that in this aura and boundary, everyone has returned to the simple era of the last century. The wonderful cleanliness that seems to have been cultivated elsewhere has been eliminated in the old goose stalls.
If you say that in the cake shop, the clerk took the bread with his hand to give it to you, probably to jump up, and in the old goose stall, the owner grabbed one with his hand, and you were not satisfied, so he grabbed another one, you did not care at all that the owner had just found the money of the previous customer, and had been rummaging through the greasy money box for a long time.
But there are also many old goose stalls, and hygiene improvements have been made, such as using a stainless steel clip to turn over these old geese to choose from, or when bagging, the thin plastic bag is turned back into gloves to hold the meat pieces.
The marinade of the old goose is more special, always two small bags. One bag is brine, about the green and yellow color of the goose eggs, and the other bag is boiled goose oil. Brine is some tricks, famous shops, such as Huang Jue's Xie family, this old brine is said to be kept day and night, for eight or nine years. Brine is packed in a thin plastic bag, on which to tie a knot in a circle, if you go home to eat to try to untie this knot, but to make a hand is oil, so pinch the bottom corner, pick up, with scissors small oblique cut a corner, carry the bag, it is like watering flowers, the marinade is evenly poured on the old goose.
I don't like to eat too greasy, so my family always doesn't want goose oil when I buy old geese. Sometimes the customers around them are very sad and want to go, it is said that when the spring noodles are lower, put a small spoon, very delicious. Some people also took bibimbap with marinade and goose oil, which is about the way they were eaten in the early years. I haven't tried either of these ways of eating. However, sometimes the rice at the head of the bowl is dipped in some old goose marinade, but it is indeed delicious, but if you eat a complete bowl, I am afraid that the salt intake is a bit excessive.
The most famous people who do old geese are, of course, in Huangjue Town. It is said to be Xie, Wu, Zhang, and the three families. Adding another king's words, the pronunciation is similar to the configuration of the four giants of the tomb robber's notes.
The Wu family is said to have turned to specializing in pig head meat, and the old goose fell to the Xie family alone.
"Xie Family Old Goose" has always been heard, I subconsciously feel that it must be "Xie" rather than "Xie", about the surname "Xie" is very rare in Yangzhou.
The old goose of the Xie family is in the east of Huangjue Town, and now there are also tricycles stalls for sale, and the old geese of other families can be bought for dinner, and someone in his family has robbed it early in the morning. Goose intestines and goose blood are rare items that cannot be bought without catching up in the morning. If my father one day brought the goose intestines of the old goose of the Xie family back to fry green peppers, it would be to go in the morning, and often boasted to us complacently, "As soon as I went, I saw two packs of goose intestines, and immediately took them down and grabbed them, and two people immediately came to buy them, fortunately, one step earlier!" ”
The competition is fierce, and it is almost as good as taking the civil service examination.
The Xie family had three sons in this generation, each of whom took a wife. The family has a row of very good houses, all of which are made from selling old geese.
However, if you eat more old geese and eat a bite of the Xie family, you will say that the three big houses of others are what people should earn.
Not only is the meat layer thick enough - it can be seen that it is a free-range goose of full age - the meat is soft and rotten just right, the marinade is also a first-class delicious taste but not salty, the taste is peculiar, as soon as you eat it, you know that it is extraordinary, and you are anxious to ask whose house it is, and you have to go to his house to buy it later!
Only to know that it was the Xie family. If you don't have time to catch up early, you can't buy it.
A little discouraged again.
His goose blood goose intestines are delicious, fresh, and very authentic, picking a few green peppers from his home, cutting and sautéing goose intestines, a small plate is delicious enough. If you put one or two more peppercorns, the aroma will simply be clustered into the sky.
Goose blood can be stewed with tofu to eat, soup soup water, leaving a little or two points of the complex aroma of old goose brine, only a little salt is also minimalist.
The old goose stall sells the head, body, claws, wings, and internal organs separately. If you buy a goose head, you must buy it with your neck, and you must buy a claw with wings, and you must buy a goose gizzard with foie gras to sell. The name is called goose head, claw wing, gizzard liver.
The delicious parts of the goose head are the goose brain and goose tongue, and the lean meat on the cheek part. The goose head is always split in the middle, so it is very convenient to use chopsticks to clip the goose brain out, dip it in the brine, and sip it down the throat. It's very fragrant. This taste and texture, chicken, duck and pigeon, can not be compared. Goose tongue is more delicious than duck tongue because it is larger and has more parts to eat. However, some stores in the urban area that lack morality, remove the tongue of the goose head and sell it, sell the goose tongue to the restaurant, and the guests often do not care, and when they buy it home, they find that there is no tongue, in addition to scolding a few words of lack of morality, there is no other way. The lean meat at the cheeks should be ripped off the beak of the goose, and then the meat should be carefully removed and eaten, which is very lean and fragrant.
The neck is thicker than the duck neck, and naturally it is much more delicious than the duck neck. It falls in the brine and tastes great.
The clawed wings are preferred by each person, and if someone like me does not eat skin, the wings are a little distressed to eat. But converted into the human arm section, the meat in the middle is also quite a rich piece. And goose paws are my favorite food, the flipper part is delicious, and the tendons at the base of the claw are also delicious. My father had a technique of removing all the bones without destroying the shape of the claws. When I was a kid, I didn't spit out tiny bones, so I didn't necessarily invent them. Now that I have learned this skill, I will also be patient to make one like this, and then dip it in the marinade and bite it down.
The previous anxious work of removing bones was all satisfied at this moment.
The liver is cooked badly, and of course it is delicious. It's just that I don't like to eat these two parts very much, and the part of the hip is also done well by the old goose of the Xie family, cooked to the point of internal organization, the juice is also more in, soft and delicious, that is, people who usually do not eat internal organs will probably not reject tasting one bite or two. The old goose foie gras is of course different from the French one, it is a very small piece, although the basic taste is similar, but there is a delicate grainy feeling, like plump grit, and the fragrance contained in the same volume is richer than the French foie gras.
The most authentic way to eat French foie gras is steamed directly on the bread to eat, although the original taste is natural, it is not like the old goose foie gras, the taste has reached a complex height, overlapping and overlapping, there are mountains outside the mountain.
According to their fathers, although Huang Jue's old geese have reached an old age, they can't set up private stalls when they are young, and even in Yangzhou, they don't have much to eat. After liberation, there were stalls, and to buy old goose whiskers, they had to bring their own bowls to pack back, and the shop did not provide suitable bags, presumably soup and water, and there was nothing to hold at that time.
I heard that when my parents were young, the pork head meat was wrapped in lotus leaves. It's a very elegant thing to think of, and if the old goose is also wrapped in lotus leaves, it would be good.
At night, pacing, the robe was rolled up by the wind, under the chrome yellow tarpaulin umbrella, talking a few gossip with the neighbors, buying a goose, watching the boss cut it, wrapped it in lotus leaves, tie it with hemp rope, or just hold it in your hand and bring it back. Another glass or two of white wine or Shaoxing wine, poured into a thin bowl of plum ziqing, the days are comfortable and kind.
And now every time I worry about the thin plastic bag broken, the old goose falling on the ground can no longer eat, or complaining that you can't gracefully cage a bag of lotus leaves, the long shirt can still be worn, but you have to endure the strange eyes of the people around you, and the gentle wind at night is gone. There are so many people coming and going, and the traffic is busy. And chrome yellow tarpaulin umbrellas, many have also been replaced by ugly red-green-blue modern sun umbrellas.
It's really unethical.