Chapter 38 Chongqing's spicy and non-spicy

Travelers' photos reproduce cities and details, and Shanghai is as hard to tell as the plane trees in Paris.From Toronto to Singapore, you can eat twice-cooked pork and Kung Pao chicken. Similarly, you can also eat the craftsmanship of Sichuan cuisine masters in the middle of the night in Jiangnan.Even so, for the diners with a bad mouth, the signboard is only the appearance, and the "authentic taste" is the soul, so I still miss the food in Chongqing. When it comes to eating in Chongqing, Malatang cannot be avoided.Compared with those malatang in Jiangnan that are boiled in a pot, picked up and added, and similar to Laoya vermicelli soup, Chongqing malatang is much more vigorous.There are some tables and chairs lined up on the street, and each table has a big hot pot, with chilling red peppers, fine grains of Chinese prickly ash and spicy spices.The hot pot was rolled twice, the spicy taste pierced the eyes, and the aroma scratched the nose like a hook.So like a fish, knowing that it was bait, I closed my eyes and braved up, and ate a bunch of them—unexpectedly, it was not so spicy that it made my mouth burn.It is delicious and hot, and I feel my mouth crackling in a daze. Many spicy fragrances burn my tongue like fireworks, and my mouth is full of fragrance.After realizing that he was not afraid of spicy food, he grew taller, picked up a few bunches of jujubes and ate them whole, and then realized that something was wrong—the chili has a calm aroma, but it doesn’t kill people; the pepper is an assassin, sneaking in, and the whole mouth is numb , dumbfounding.

A friend from the north once said that hot pot was an invention of Kublai Khan’s expedition.The southerners have another saying that the golden hall and jade horses, and the murals clearly say that the trackers on the river are the origin of hot pot.In fact, if you think about it carefully, there is still a difference between the northern and southern hot pots.Most of Beijing’s fried belly shabu-shabu is cooked with white water and clear soup and dipped in sauce. Although some people in old Beijing use pork skin jelly and stewed chicken jelly to make hot pot, after all, they still have the vigor and simplicity of the north.Guangdong and Chongqing hotpots both pay great attention to the soup, and the thousands of spices and peppers are not in the sauce, but are all melted into the soup.Eating hot pot in Chongqing is serious, and everyone in the room is hot, and the Chongqing dialect is soft and melodious, which is not to say that it is not lively.It is said that Cantonese people dare to cook soup and porridge with long legs, except for benches and wings, except for airplanes. In fact, the same is true in Chongqing: all edible food, without exception, is put into the pot to be scalded, and it is contaminated. Spicy all over.Everyone blushes from eating, and the demeanor is out of the question.

Some hot pots in Guangdong and Hong Kong are light and elegant, and some flower petals are placed to set off, which is also mentioned in Li Bihua's novels.At first glance it is beautiful, but when the petals are boiled and wilted, I feel abrupt and beautiful. The flowers fall with the water. If Lin Daiyu sees the flowers she buried being boiled, she will have to cry a lot. If Chongqing people eat breakfast, there is a fetish called spicy noodles.Old Beijingers eat pancake casserole porridge for breakfast, and Jiangnan people eat porridge and pickles for breakfast, and they are mostly light.Chongqing people dare to eat spicy food for breakfast, which is really amazing.The spicy noodles are not big, but the ingredients are dense.The aunt who made the noodles turned around like Avalokitesvara. A bowl of noodles has been made colorfully, and the peanuts and peppers can be vaguely recognized, and the others are very mysterious.It is also the noodles for breakfast, Wuhan hot and dry noodles are also very fragrant and thick, but compared with Chongqing small noodles, it is a little less enchanting, which can be regarded as a contrast between one vigorous and delicate.Take a bite, it is also bright and spicy, of course, there is also the numbness of pepper, and the bouncing of many other mysterious spices one after another, the taste can be called fantasy.

I ate a few meals at a friend's house in Chongqing. Bacon, snow mountain mushrooms and so on are all served with spicy red ribbons.The sun-dried Guizhou peppers are placed in the kitchen, which is shocking to look at.At first I thought it was just a case, but when I went to the vegetable market, I found a lot of chili peppers on the ground. It hurts my nose when I smell it from a distance. When visiting the ancient town of Zhongshan, the local mountain people often cook with their hands.You can’t see the chicken in the spicy chicken, but it’s all bright red peppers—different from the spiciness used in Jiangnan’s spicy chicken, this spicy is enough to make a dead chicken come back to life again.As for adding spicy fish soup, it is also used in "Water Margin" to sober up, but in order to sober up, you don't have to risk tears from being spicy.Watching you eat with tears streaming down your face, the villagers were delighted: "Is this chili okay? It's so easy to dry." Obviously, in this diet system, using Chinese prickly ash to numb you and hot pepper to spicing you are the highest. love and etiquette.

When it comes to diet, most people in the world make generalizations.Before I went to Chengdu, I thought that there must be a place where everyone rinses their mouths with chili water and the whole city swims in hot pot. Only after walking around did I realize that Chengdu people still have such a sweet thing as Sanheni.According to my friends from Chongqing, Chengdu people are more relaxed and elegant, leaving room for everything, while Chongqing people pursue extreme enjoyment.When you go to Chongqing to eat and drink, the spicy food is of course majestic and can impress anyone. However, if you go to the spicy food, the scenery is still prosperous.

Starting from Chongqing, I took a bus to Dazu County to see the stone carvings designated by the United Nations as a cultural heritage. On the return trip, I went to a "Lotus Villa" for dinner.I was born in the south of the Yangtze River for more than 20 years, but I was still shocked by the lotus pond.Sit down on a water pavilion with long windows on all sides and order food. First, the fish caught in the lotus pond was steamed and eaten.It was the first time I saw delicate and clean dishes in Chongqing for a few days, and I was shocked.The fish must have been in the lotus pond for a long time, and it tasted tender and refreshing after picking up the fragrance of hibiscus.There are also a lot of lotus roots, and a hoof flower soup is stewed in a crock.The lotus root is originally sweet. It seems that in order to appear light, almost no ingredients are added to the soup, which is a bit overkill.Chongqing specialties, there must be a soup pot on the dinner table, but fortunately there is no chili in the pot.The waiter brought a plate of lotus tip, the so-called "little lotus just showing its sharp corners", which is eaten hot in the pot, and the taste seems to be similar to bean sprouts.After finishing the fish, soup, and lotus leaves, another plate of steamed dumplings in lotus leaves was served.It is probably because the dumplings mixed with lotus leaf powder smell a little like lotus leaves, and the dumplings are so green that people feel chills all over their bodies.The lotus leaf noodle soup belonged to the sideshow, and it was used to feed the beaten Jia Baoyu. Except for the lotus leaf fragrance, it was actually not too surprising.

In order to see the tall buildings where the pros and villains fight in "Crazy Stone", I went to Chongqing Jiefangbei.My friend told me that "Old Sichuan" is a wonderful place, so I went to worship the mountain.First is a sample soup, "Oxtail Soup with Goji Berry".There are two Sichuan dishes that are often mentioned in Gu Long's novels, one is "braised oxtail" and the other is "Zhangcha duck".Oxtail seems to be really loved by Sichuan people.It is said that this soup in "Old Sichuan" is unconventional fresh, fragrant and mellow, and it tastes wonderful when paired with the pink bean curd that Chongqing people especially love. "Old Sichuan" boiled kale, the juice is thick but not thick, delicious and pleasant.Kale originally has a bit of bitter taste, but when paired with fresh juice, it tastes refreshing and antipyretic, which is similar to bitter gourd.

One day, dinner was overwhelmed by spicy food, and his mouth was like a mountain of flames.In a hurry, I wanted to find something cold to eat.I saw a peddler on the street, and put up a sign: "ice powder, cold shrimp, sago dew." I paid for a portion, and the Chongqing uncle on the opposite side quickly took out a plastic bowl, and took one from each of the three boxes. A spoonful of transparent ice powder, a spoonful of white things that look like cooked shrimp, and a spoonful of sago dew are mixed together.Asked me: "Drink fermented glutinous rice?" Seeing me nodding, I added a spoonful of fermented glutinous glutinous rice—Jiangnan called Jiuniang—and a spoonful of brown sugar, and handed it over.Stir slightly with a spoon, and then take a bite. It is sweet, cool and smooth, and immediately puts out the fire in your mouth.

Thinking about it now, the ice powder is probably similar to the jelly and tortoise jelly that can be seen everywhere on the streets of Guilin, and its effect is also similar: to clear the mouth and moisten the throat, but with the addition of sago dew and cold shrimp, the taste is much richer.Cold shrimp seems to have nothing to do with shrimp. It is cooked with rice pulp and poured into a cold water basin with a colander.Anyway, they are all ordinary plant products, which are sweet and moving thanks to the diligent hands and ingenuity of the working people. The ancient town of Zhongshan is a two-hour drive from Chongqing. The so-called ancient town is actually nothing more than a piece of rural architecture in a mountain depression that is difficult to industrialize.However, since the tourism industry is developed, the common people will show their talents.The home-dried chili, the fish caught in the stream, and the home-made bacon are all excellent treasures, and the people in the city eat them with admiration.I was on the narrow bluestone alley, looking at the utensils from the 1970s sold in the shop all the way, looking for the eaves to hide from the sun.There is a bamboo forest at the end of the town, and the bamboo leaves are rustling in the wind. An old man is setting up a pile of bamboo tubes in front of the door pasted with old couplets.ask him what?The answer is wine.The red hijab on the green bamboo tube is lifted, and the sweet fragrance comes out.The fermented glutinous rice in the south of the Yangtze River and the fermented glutinous glutinous rice in the southwest have different names, but the essence and production process of what people drink is the same after all.I bought two cans, sat by the stream and drank it. On the way home, my eyelids were heavy and I fell asleep.Obviously, the sweet wine in the southwest is different from that in the south of the Yangtze River. Although the taste is the same sweet and strong, there are some mysterious spells between forests and springs in the southwest that will make you intoxicated.