When the weather is hot in the summer, people often have no appetite, and the high temperature brings people not only physical exhaustion, but also mental exhaustion. If you work for a day and can't even eat a good meal, it's really sad.
In the summer, in order to appetize, all kinds of cold dishes are on the table, of which the most raw materials for cold dishes are cucumbers.
Cucumber is yin, cold, often eaten with mahjong, can be appetizing. Because cucumbers are cheap and grown everywhere, they have become one of the favorite vegetables for most people.
In the hot summer, eat some cool cucumber mixed vegetables, you can also eat two bowls of rice, there are good for the body, when you go to work, sometimes you will bring some cucumbers to eat raw, quench thirst and hunger, much stronger than drinking water.
And cucumbers can also be cut into slices, made into vegetable masks, is a kind of most close to the people's cosmetics, home from work, put on a few slices, beauty and beauty.
Cucumbers have been planted in the Han Dynasty more than 2,000 years ago, and have been developed to this day, and its morphology has changed, and it has also witnessed the rise and fall of each period of history.
So the question is, was the cucumber first produced in China? Obviously not, Zhang Qian went to the western region, opened up the Silk Road, and brought back a lot of novel fruits and vegetables, including cucumbers, but at that time it was still called courgette.
Chinese cucumbers first came from the Han Dynasty during the Han Dynasty during the Han Dynasty, but were not produced in China, but were imported from abroad. Join me in the history of cucumber development, and you will understand after reading it.
Cucumber, alias courgette, prickly melon, king melon, diligent melon, cucumber, tang melon, hanging melon and so on. Cucumbers are an annual herb that prefers warm areas and is therefore mostly grown in temperate and tropical areas.
Regarding the origin of cucumbers, historians basically believe that cucumbers originated in the northeast and northwest regions of ancient India. The British botanist Hooker recorded the origin of cucumbers in The Origin of Cultivated Crops.
Hooker first discovered wild cucumber native species in the Bhutan to Sikkim region in the foothills of the Himalayas, more than 3,000 years ago, nearly 1,000 years earlier than China, so there is a historical basis for the origin of cucumbers in ancient India.
After a long period of growth, cucumbers were finally introduced to France and Russia in the 9th century. In the sixteenth century, it was transmitted to the Han Dynasty.
There are two different ways to say about the introduction of cucumbers into the Han Dynasty:
It is said that through Zhang Qian's Silk Road, overseas markets were opened up, and cucumbers were able to appear in China.
The second theory is that it was transmitted from ancient India by waterway to the Han Dynasty, and another variety of cucumber was formed in South China and other places.
In either case, in the ancient Chinese literature, there are more or less records, so it is believed that cucumbers were transmitted to the Han Dynasty through the above two paths.
After arriving in the Han Dynasty, it turned out that the domestic soil environment was very suitable for the growth of cucumbers, and gradually became a big country for cucumber cultivation, which was very rare when it was first introduced to the Han Dynasty, and there were many stories, and listened to me slowly.
Because cucumbers came from the Western Regions, in the Western Regions during the Han Dynasty, they were called "Hu", so cucumbers were called "Courgettes" from the beginning.
Li Shizhen recorded in the "Compendium of Materia Medica":
"Zhang Qian made the western region planted, hence the name courgette."
Li Shizhen's literature records justify the identity of the courgette. It is also recorded in the Western Regions of the Book of Han:
A "courgette". Planted in mid-April. It is advisable to erect firewood and make the vines fall.
After the introduction from the Western Regions, in the succession of dynasties after the Han Dynasty, the name of the courgette has been inherited, and the real renaming of the cucumber is actually a small story that happened in the Jin Dynasty.
The Book of Jin has clouds:
Le saw that Tan's clothes were bad and bad, and he was shocked: "Fan joined the army and was even poorer!" Frank and honest, he was frank and simple, but he said to him: "It is a thief who has no way out, and his wealth is exhausted." Le laughed and said, "The thief Nair is violently plundering the evil!" Now it's time to pay off. "Tan was terrified, and prostrated his head in thanks. Le Yue: "Lonely law self-defense layman, not related to the qing generation of old scholars also." ”
According to legend, in the second year of the Daxing of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Shi Le established the Zhao Dynasty, because he was a member of the Qi people, but he hated the Chinese people to call them Hu people, so Zhang Bang, whoever said the word "Hu" in the Zhao Dynasty, or wrote the word "Hu", could not escape death.
However, one day, when Xiangguo Junshou was answering Shi Le's question, he accidentally said a nonsense, and when Shi Le saw him in such a miserable situation, he was extrajudicial and spared his life. Later, when setting up a banquet, Shi Le once again gave him a problem, and the finger courgette asked him what it was? The sheriff replied:
Purple case delicacies, silver cup green tea, golden bottle manna, jade plate cucumber.
Because Hu Zi committed Shi Le's chong and learned the lesson of the last time, the county sheriff knew that it was important to save his life, so he used "cucumber" instead of describing "courgette", which not only saved his own life, but also made Shi Lelongyan happy.
Since then, the name of cucumber has been handed down, but it must be noted that the name of cucumber has only been passed down for a few decades, and since the fall of the Zhao Dynasty, the name of cucumber has been revoked, and people have called this crop "courgette".
In the decades after the fall of the Zhao Dynasty, the title of the gourd was passed down to the Sui Dynasty, because the Sui Emperor felt that the hu character was not good, which became a cucumber again.
In the Miscellaneous Records of the Great Cause, it is recorded:
In September of the fourth year of the Sui Dynasty (608 AD), the Sui Emperor "changed the beard bed to the cross bed, the courgette to the white dew cucumber, and the eggplant to kunlun purple melon from the north to the eastern capital." ”
The Sui Emperor felt that Hu Zi had violated his mother's impulse, so he used this as an excuse to change the courgette to "white dew cucumber", which gradually evolved into a cucumber. And in the thousands of years that followed, the name of cucumber never changed.
In the Tang Dynasty, cucumbers became a royal tribute, and ordinary people were not blessed to enjoy. The Tang Dynasty poet Wang Jian recorded in the "Palace Words":
"A hundred high-rise buildings in the wine curtain, flowers in front of the Yangliu Temple in front of the palace." The inner garden was given warm soup water, and in mid-February, melons had been entered. ”
The "inner garden" mentioned in it is the place where cucumbers are specially planted in the court, similar to the current vegetable garden, and the melon refers to the cucumber naturally.
It can be seen that during the Tang Dynasty, the status of cucumbers was very high, and even as a tribute in the court, specially for the royal family, the folk themselves can not eat.
But in the Song Dynasty, the cultivation of cucumbers began to popularize, many ordinary people's vegetable gardens, cucumbers can also be seen everywhere, in the Song Dynasty there are many poets like to eat cucumbers, Lu You is one of them, there are poetry clouds:
The gardener picks cucumbers on the shelf, and the village girl picks the green flowers along the hedge. The city is still three volts hot, and Autumn Light first goes to the wild man's house.
A gardener in the countryside picks cucumbers, depicting a summer scene, contrasting cucumbers and green flowers, first suppressing and then rising, expressing the author's love for cucumbers.
Since the Northern Wei Dynasty, there have been people who have made detailed records of cucumber planting methods, and after the Yuan Dynasty, the peak of planting has been reached, and people's planting experience has gradually become rich. It is recorded in the Qi Min Zhi Shu:
Cure melon cage method: Dan rises, dew is not solved, to enumerate melon vines, scatter ash under the roots. In the next day or two, when the roots are piled up with soil, there will never be any insects.
Even how to prevent pests in cucumbers, there are detailed solutions, it can be seen that after the Yuan Dynasty, the method of planting cucumbers has been pure fire.
After the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was popular for people to eat melon in February, and Chen Jiru's "Book of Getting Rich" in the Ming Dynasty mentioned:
"The Min people eat in February, and they dry up in summer."
But after the season, what if people want to eat cucumbers again? In order to meet the needs of ancient foodies, under the continuous experimentation, it was finally studied into an anti-seasonal cucumber.
In the Kyoto Bamboo Branch Dictionary, it is recorded that the anti-seasonal cucumber is:
"Cucumbers first saw more than ginseng, small as a hairpin worth a few gold. Micro things can not increase life expectancy, ten thousand dollars a meal is what is the heart.
Using cucumbers as a metaphor for the human body, and describing anti-seasonal cucumbers with an exaggerated price of ten thousand dollars, it can be seen how rare this special vegetable was at that time, generally only for the royal family to cultivate, others can not afford to eat.
Cucumbers were introduced from the Han Dynasty and passed down for more than 2,000 years, if it were not for Zhang Qian's opening of the Silk Road and the introduction of overseas markets, I am afraid that we would not be able to eat cucumbers, a cool vegetable, a feat that has an important significance to this day.