Author: Yu Daojin
(Mistletoe)
Lushi County is located in the embrace of Kunshan Mountain, Bears Ears and Funiu Mountain, known as 4,037 peaks, nourished by three Luohe, Lao Stork River and Qihe River that have been with the Chinese nation for a long time, full of vitality, no matter how high or low, no matter how steep, there are olive trees that have walked through thousands of years with the descendants of Yanhuang.
Quercus trees are deciduous plants of the family Chitovanidae, with two species of tree shrubs. Shrubs are also known as quercus, and trees are also known as large leaf oaks. Places outside the Lu clan are called oak trees, oak trees, green hills, golden chicken trees, big-leaf Polo, and so on.
Before the Shang Dynasty, due to the small number of characters, it was also falsely disguised as sang, and the Zhou Dynasty used to call it "final kui". It is an ancient tree species native to China, mainly growing in the mountains of Henan, Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi and other provinces in northern China. In the mountains of southern Henan, trees are called oak trees, and shrubs are called acorn trees. As the official scientific name, in addition to being mentioned in botany, only the hundreds of miles of mountainous areas around Yuxi Lushi are called quercus trees. From the Xia Dynasty to the Han and Tang Dynasties, lu's place has always been the survivor of the imperial "central area", the pronunciation of "mistletoe" or the "Heluo dialect" or "Zhongyuan Yayin" that has not changed for 5,000 years.
(Quercus leaf)
The magic of the mistletoe may also be related to the historical interaction between the "Red Emperor's Daughter" and the Yellow Emperor's concubine Concubine And the Mistletoe Tree.
In the Bears Ears Mountains of Xiaoqinling in ancient times, the "Red Emperor's Daughter" nested in mistletoe (or tree), and the silkworms raised by later generations of ancestors with mistletoe leaves (or shrubs) also originated from the deep mountains of Lushi. Our ancestors either thought that the quercus tree had a certain divinity, so they wrapped food in mistletoe leaves to sacrifice the gods, or from the ancestors fed the mistletoe (tulip) silkworms with mistletoe leaves and had some understanding of the safety of the mistletoe leaves, the silkworm is edible, and people will not be poisoned when they eat it. Quercus leaf is really an irreplaceable food wrapping material, its veins are densely fibered, thick as cloth, with other plant leaves unmatched wear resistance, can be used repeatedly. Thousands of times in practice, our ancestors learned that food wrapped in mistletoe leaves also has the characteristics of being resistant to storage.
It is impossible for ancient people to understand the antiseptic and nutritional elements of quercus leaves from a scientific point of view, but careful ancestors must have found something from the fact that quercus silk is brighter than other silks, and germinated the simple conjecture that quercus leaves are pleasant. Therefore, our ancestors finally chose to place rice in the arms of quercus leaves. As a result, the first package-shaped food with manual labor attached was officially finalized in Bears Ears Mountain, which is called "knowing it without knowing why it is so". Since then, the mellow fragrance of the mistletoe has spread in the Chinese sky for a long time.
The Tang Dynasty poet Li He once wrote in "Gaoping County's East Private Road": "Invading the incense of mistletoe leaves, the wood flowers stagnate cold rain ... The stone is far away and desolate, and the tang is hanging hard. "The leaves of the quercus tree are as large as a giant palm and have a fragrance; "tang" refers to the fruit (acorns) of the quercus tree, which are edible. The quercus tree is a treasure, and the Tang Materia Medica also lists the quercus leaf as a medicine. The handle of the Zhou Dynasty royal ceremonial instrument Dagui was made of special mistletoe, and the more honorable the quercus tree became. Today, acorn powder is still a rare health food for people.
(Qinling Quercus leaf rice dumpling)
Lu's mistletoe leaves are much larger than in other places, and Lu's mistletoe leaves are the best produced in Fuchi Village in Zhuyangguan Town and Longshou Mountain in Gengdian Village, Wayaogou Township. The large wavy leaf edge, a mistletoe leaf is very similar to a miniature iron fan princess's banana fan. Touch a mistletoe leaf, furry, the leaf surface is bright green, the back of the leaf is pink white, tear off a piece and put it under the nose, there is a unique light fragrance. The leaves of the mistletoe are picked from the shrub mistletoe, and the mistletoe and mistletoe have each other's names, and the order in which they are named is unknown.
In the long years since the advent of mistletoe, cooking used to be a highly skilled professional job, and the smartest people in the tribe were the smartest people in the tribe. Compared with millet porridge and millet rice, making a mistletoe was definitely a master cooking skill at that time. At that time, many outstanding figures, such as tribal chiefs and even the emperors of tribal alliances, stood out from the "chefs": like Yi Yin, a famous politician and thinker who assisted Shang Tang to extinguish Xia, he was born as a chef and was known as the ancestor of Chinese cooks; and Di Shaokang of the Zhongxing Xia Dynasty was also a chef, who served as the official in charge of cooking meals in The Yu Kingdom, and it is said that he also brewed a good hand.
(Quercus tree)
During the Han and Tang Dynasties, Japanese and Korean students discovered mistletoe, and they felt very magical, and worshiped the advanced scientific and technological level of the Chinese people in the production, processing and preservation of food; so they introduced mistletoe as a treasure to their home countries. Modern Japanese people have made a detailed study, the "so natural" of quercus leaves has been answered by the Japanese: quercus leaves are rich in a variety of vitamins, trace elements, especially its quercetin, is derived from plant flavonoids, as well as chlorogenic acid, tannin and other polyphenol physiological activities, has anti-aging and anti-cancer effects, but also a natural preservative, the Dragon Boat Festival of the mistletoe in the room temperature stored for three or five days will not deteriorate.
The taste of time, the agarwood of years, a mistletoe bag is not only a crystal jade millet, but the long-standing civilization attributes of the Chinese nation.
Mistletoe out of the Lu mountains, two large-scale spreads in history are worth writing about.
Once, when the great chief of the Zunlu clan was appointed as the emperor of the Great Fuxi Clan Alliance, farming, pottery making, and mistletoe cooking were promoted in the area of the Great Fuxi Clan Alliance.
Another time was when the last Yan Emperor, Jiang Yuyi, lost his throne and traveled to the south, bringing civilizations such as farming, mistletoe and pottery to the south. Mistletoe is the first spring water at the source of the long river of Chinese civilization, and the food culture it founded has a long history and has been prosperous for a long time. Our common food zongzi today, the southern "rice dumplings" and so on are indiscriminately coveted here.
By the Spring and Autumn Period, mistletoe had been widely spread around the world. In many places, there is food that wraps rice into a horn-shaped shape with the leaves of the skullcap (茭白叶), marking the "horned yellow" stepping off the altar and sharing with the gods. Or in order to show the mystery of the gods different from people, double mistletoe bags and dumplings for human consumption appeared one after another. Quercus leaves are not everywhere, in the vast plains and rivers where quercus leaves are scarce, the quercus leaves "horned" can only be satisfied with the worship of the gods, and the "horned yellows" of substitute packages such as the leaves are for human consumption. The Jin Dynasty was an era of the coexistence of mistletoe, horned buns, and rice dumplings, and it was not until the Tang Dynasty that rice dumplings were independently used as a food style.
Mistletoe spread throughout the land of China, and even spread to foreign countries, and constantly evolved, so there were wrapped foods such as horns, rice dumplings, rice dumplings, and even vegetable leaf rice balls, all of which were direct descendants of mistletoe; and the descendants of flat food (dumplings), wontons, Lanterns, Aiwowo, Hemp dumplings and even buns, mooncakes, vegetable leaf rice balls, Japanese sushi and other collateral descendants.
(Zongzi)
No matter how ever-changing the food is, they have inherited the excellent genes of the mistletoe in the evolution of the world, leaving the cultural imprint of the mistletoe and exuding the infinite charm of the mistletoe.
In Japan, the literature also records "Tang Rice Dumplings". In japan, Korea, and Korea, their international students who came to Datang brought back the processing and production technology of zongzi. This also contradicts the fact that the rice dumplings in the capital cities of Xi'an and Luoyang during the Han and Tang Dynasties were still made of quercus leaves. In Korea and Japan, the quercus leaf is known as the cypress leaf (or because the quercus leaf is white on the back), symbolizing auspiciousness and longevity.
The Japanese are deeply Chinese wisdom.
Japan developed the "Washoku Fruit" on the basis of mistletoe buns, and the wrapping is based on the use of quercus leaves (cypress leaves) as the most classic style. Every year, Japan and South Korea import a large number of quercus leaf-packed cooked food from the mountainous areas around Lu's in China. Rather than go far away from the ocean to import quercus leaves from China, is this a japanese admiration for the outside world, or is it a kind of consciousness of respecting human civilization?
Zongzi is also a traditional food of the Indians, who wrap them in banana leaves, and the main ingredients are corn flour and beans. Our neighbors Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Southeast Asian countries have zongzi, and the zongzi in the Philippines is also long strips, the shape is very similar to the mistletoe, and the flavor is the same as the zongzi in eastern Zhejiang, China.
Mistletoe - rice dumplings - wrapped food, we can find the original path of human migration and the development of human civilization from the spread of food culture.
(Japanese sushi)
As a pottery for daily necessities, the printed pottery for cooking food is one of the symbols of the Baiyue ethnic group, and the Dragon Boat Festival is a festival founded by the Baiyue people for ancestor worship.
In Huaihua, a deep mountain in western Hunan Province, there is a food called "pillow dumpling", although it is also wrapped in bamboo shoot leaves, but it still retains the traditional stick and pillar type left by the Chinese ancestors. The ancestors of the South Vietnamese region also had a wrapped food made of mixed grains, the "籺", which is usually also a long strip, almost a replica of the mistletoe. The "籺" is put into the pottery and cooked, and sacrificed on the altar of the gods and ancestors on the fifth day of the first month of May. This is one of the sources of the intersection of rice dumpling foods and the Dragon Boat Festival.
Today, there is also a wrapped food in the Lingnan region, and it is also classified as a rice dumpling, called rice dumplings. In Maoming, Guangdong, at the southern end of the mainland, "籺" is still a famous local food.
"籺" is also passed down in a different guise on the food of northern China. In modern northern rural areas, there are also "vegetable dumplings" stuffed with leeks, amaranth and pumpkin fillings with cold or hot dough skins, and now there are beef and mutton dumplings. There are two kinds of bars and horns, and in some places they are called "vegetable pythons" and "vegetable horns", and the word is mistaken for "box" and "combination".
Historical records have supported the "Dragon Boat Festival as a day of worship for the ancestors of the people who hold the dragon totem"; in addition, there is a saying about the Dragon Boat Festival that originated in the "Lan Bath" of the ancient times. The "Great Dai Li Ji Xia Xiaozheng" contains: "On this day, many medicines are collected to remove poisonous gases." It can be seen that the Dragon Boat Festival did not begin with the sacrifice of Qu Yuan.
(Qu Yuan)
In 340 BC, Qu Yuan, the Grand Master of the Chu State, was overwhelmed by the pain of the fall of the country, and he died in early May by throwing stones into the Luo River on the fifth day of May. In order not to let the fish and shrimp damage his body, legend has it that people used bamboo tubes to load rice into the river, and bamboo tube rice evolved into bamboo tube rice in later generations. It shows that the sacrifice Qu Yuan was not originally a glutinous rice dumpling. Since the date of Qu Yuan's toujiang investment coincided with the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, the Han Dynasty added the content of the Duanyang Festival to sacrifice Qu Yuan. The "Beginner's Record" contains: During the Jianwu period of the Han Dynasty, the Changsha people dreamed of a person at night, claiming to be the Doctor of Sanlu, and said to him: "The things you sacrifice have been stolen by the dragons in the river, and in the future they can be wrapped in ai ye and tied up with five-colored silk threads, and the dragons are most afraid of these two things." As a result, the Yangtze River Basin has "MuGwort Dumplings". This is what is specifically used to sacrifice Qu Yuan.
Zongzi was not officially designated as the Food of the Dragon Boat Festival until the Jin Dynasty, and the Central Plains Summer Solstice Sacrifice and the Baiyue Dragon Boat Festival were thus unified, and since then Zongzi has been more widely spread among the people in the north and south of the river. In addition to rice, the raw materials of the rice dumplings are also added with traditional Chinese medicine nootropics, and the cooked rice dumplings are called "nootropic dumplings", and the "Records of Customs" around the time records: "It is customary to wrap rice with leaves,...... Cooked, cooked, from May 5 to the summer solstice, sticky a 'dumpling', a 'horn'. "Midsummer Dragon Boat Festival, cooking the horns." It can be seen that there is still a difference between the Horned Dragon and the Rice Dumpling in the Jin Dynasty. This information is enough to help you judge the generation of zongzi.
By the Tang Dynasty, the rice used in zongzi was "white as jade", and the ingredients could be broken were glutinous rice; its shape appeared cone-shaped, diamond-shaped and so on. Tang Wei Juyuan's "Recipe" records that Xi'an's honey cold rice dumplings, that is, peeling off the mistleto leaves, taking the glutinous millet balls dipped in honey to eat, Tang Xuanzong also went to the imperial court state banquet. On the morning of the Dragon Boat Festival in the twentieth year of the new century (732 AD), Li Longji held a pilgrimage meeting at Shangyang Palace, and received envoys from various countries, and set up a banquet at noon to entertain the courtiers and foreign envoys. Emperor Xuanzong also gave the poem "Dragon Boat Festival Three Halls Feast Group Ministers Explore the Divine Characters" for this purpose, in which the sentence "Four flowers are skillful, and nine sons and rice dumplings compete for the new" can be corroborated.
(Glutinous millet)
At that time, there were even shops selling zongzi in Chang'an City, which showed that eating horns in the Tang Dynasty became a fashion that swept the government and the opposition.
Where there are no mistletoe leaves and no glutinous millet, various alternatives have emerged, and packaged foods have become popular; however, rice dumplings have always been a luxury spot for the upper class. Su Shi's "Southern Songzi" has the phrase "菰黍連昌歜", 菰黍 is glutinous millet rice dumplings. It is evident that during the Northern Song Dynasty in Yangzhou, in the southern rice cultivation area, glutinous millet was rare and expensive, and glutinous millet dumplings became valuable cakes in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, which also revealed a feeling of advocating tradition by the elite of the upper class at that time.
After the Ming and Qing dynasties, local officials still called eating mistletoe as "eating horn". The main ingredients began to evolve, and gradually there were glutinous rice, glutinous millet, bean paste, taro puree, etc., and began to add a variety of fillings, such as red beans, mung beans, peanuts, dates, chestnuts, lotus seeds, walnuts, bacon, ham, egg yolk, crab yolk, etc., and now life is more luxurious, and even have sea cucumbers, abalone, oyster fillings of mistletoe dumplings. These supporting roles make people more fond of sticky foods. The rice dumplings wrapped in fillings and the combination of vegetables and rice are also considered to be the development of inheritance.
Nowadays, in order to pursue the taste of the palatable, the taste in addition to the most raw materials of the natural taste, pattern renovation, successively sweet, salty quercus dumplings came out, and now even have osmanthus flowers, roses, jasmine flowers of various fragrances; the shape of the mistletoe food is infinitely changing, such as rods, circles, triangles, diamonds, cylinders, pyramids, square conical (nine zi dumplings), etc.; the wrapping materials are also five methods and eight doors, in addition to the mistletoe leaves, intelligent Chinese descendants are locally sourced, bamboo shoot leaves, bamboo shoot leaves, bamboo shoot leaves, bamboo shoot leaves, asparagus leaves, sternwheel (zibai) leaves, lotus leaves, Banana leaves, chestnut leaves, etc., can also be used to make dumplings.
However, the changes are inseparable, and you can always find the strong genetic genes of the quercus from these wrapped foods, and clearly see the evolutionary history of the balsam foods.
People who have eaten zongzi first taste the mistletoe, taste carefully, to tell the truth, glutinous rice dumplings which have glutinous millet mistletoe bun is fragrant and more beneficial to life and health. Not to mention that today's mistletoe buns, all kinds of delicious, are not seen by the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, Tang Emperors and Song Ancestors, let alone blessed to enjoy. Do you see this as variation or evolution? In any case, I think that rice dumplings are less than mistletoe with some of the infinite charm of historical vicissitudes.
There is no doubt that quercus is the ancestor of rice dumpling foods, and the history of cereal cooked food is as long as the history of quercus is. The mistletoe is infused with the creative wisdom of the Chinese ancestors, and its history overrides the history of modern people. I said to my friend, "Zongzi can not remember the ancestors, but people cannot forget the ancestors, and forgetting the ancestors is unforgivable." "If you still have respect for primitive civilization, it is best to call it mistletoe; if you pay attention to the development of food culture in the inheritance with a forward-looking attitude, it is also good to call it "quercus". Although it sounds like a little less original genes and reduces the thick color of the mistletoe, there is still a trace of history.
Without millet and no mistletoe, how long Chinese food culture and civilization will be delayed I dare not say, but its form must be different. The past has become the present, and the past has been created; but all the past is the prologue. The mistletoe is fragrant because there are Chinese ancestors who carry the weight forward. Today, its charm still attracts us to pursue the history of the creation of our ancestors, inspiring us to bravely create a better future.
References: History of Human Development, Molecular Biology, Botany
【About the Author】Yu Daojin, pen name Yu Zhe, independent writer, member of Henan Miscellaneous Literature Society and Henan Provincial Reportage Literature Society, writer of literature and history of Xinyang Municipal CPPCC, vice chairman of Huanhe District Writers Association. At present, he is mainly engaged in literature, essay reviews, and financial review writing.
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