Chapter 51 cold dish

In Lao She's "Two Horses", it is written that Lao Ma is in London and asks the landlady to cook. The old lady brings beef and hot tea, and Lao Ma frowns when he sees that the beef is cold.Here we can see the Chinese people's views on cold dishes: cold dishes are good, but you still have to order them hot for dinner-of course, if you talk about this with the British, you will inevitably talk about it.It is said that people in the Jiangnan market usually serve cold dishes with wine and porridge, and there are also white rice with cold dishes, but not many.The range of cold dishes is huge and all-inclusive.If the hot dishes are famous and authentic in terms of heat and texture, the cold dishes are wild and elegant, with a charming smile.There are a lot of meat and vegetables, and even tropical fruits can be regarded as cold dishes. In "Water Margin", the Yuan and Ming Dynasties are used to describe the Song Dynasty, and there are such things as placing fruits with wine, which shows that this trend has been going on for a long time.Wang Zengqi wrote that when a certain painter surnamed Ji was painting, he drank Huadiao and ate fruits, which can be regarded as elegant.

Although cold dishes are all-encompassing, there are also taboos: cold dishes should not be thick, greasy and fat.For example, pork head or big hoof, braised in soy sauce and crispy, it is very suitable for rice.But if it is cold to make cold dishes, it will be disgusting to death.There are also pork cold dishes, such as garlic paste white meat.A good white meat with mashed garlic must be sliced ​​very thinly, and the meat must be boiled into tough and chewy "white meat", which is light enough and served with stimulating and fresh garlic, which will make people feel confused.Derived from this, we can actually get many essential characteristics of cold dishes: coolness is necessary, and the rest must be light and crisp, and the taste must be delicate-so the production of cold dishes can be easily simplified into "good taste material + graceful taste" combination.

For example, here, Jia Baoyu is a nobleman, and he likes to eat duck with goose feet pickled by Aunt Xue's house with wine.Goose palm duck letter and the Baiyun pork trotter that Cantonese are good at actually have the same effect: not much skin and meat, tough and glutinous, chewy and easy to chew, and the most important thing is that it takes effort.Experts who eat goose paws can naturally be like a professional processing machine. A goose paw is put into the mouth and bones are spit out in an instant. However, most people eat goose paws like eating goose breasts. Knock the bone to suck the marrow, smack the taste.Li Bihua said that duck necks are the most active and have delicate muscles, and their flavors are transparent, chewy and delicious, and Baiyun pork knuckle is the same.Good Baiyun pork knuckle is not easy to handle, hot and cold shocks can make it sour and sweet, and the skin is crispy.

When it comes to cured meat, Zhenjiang people's delicacies are the gods in pickled cold dishes.My friends from Zhenjiang love meat with vinegar and shredded ginger. They say it is cool, crispy and firm, especially the jelly, which is far better than the fat of white-cut mutton.In the Republic of China, people in Zhenjiang ate meat like ham in Yunnan, and they could serve it with tea and wine. The meat with bones was the so-called "sky lantern stick", and people with dignity could use it to show off.It is said that people in Zhenjiang used to like to use crispy eel as a side dish. I don’t see many of them. People in Wuxi like to use crispy eel as a cold dish, but they often make it too sweet. Except that the taste is a bit like eel, you can’t taste eel. coming.

Of course, pickled cold dishes are not just meat, but also give souls to many plants by the way.The folk customs in the south of the Yangtze River used to be simple, and pickled radish and salted peanuts were the two magic weapons.The older generation often jokes that the reason why children of our generation don’t know enough about plants is because they don’t have the spirit of digging vegetables to pickle them.The soul of all-match cold dishes in the south of the Yangtze River is pickles.Pickled vegetables in the south of the Yangtze River like to use potherb mustard, also known as pickled vegetables, with a salty and delicate taste, like a white-faced scholar with an interesting conversation.In Beijing, the pickles seem to be shredded mustard greens, and some friends say that the authentic ones have to be served with chili oil, so I can only imagine.In recent years, it has been very popular in Shanghai to use Sichuan pickles and peanuts to make cold appetizers. Good pickles have a unique taste of natural fermentation, which is fresher and tenderer than pickles.

Of course, it takes a long time to marinate cold dishes. If you want to be simple, you can do it. For example, the practice of garlic and white meat is the so-called "mixing".The northerners are straightforward, and so are the cold dishes.Shandong Dahan is as big as pork skin jelly, cold cucumber, lotus root box, and as small as a piece of green onion. You can eat it crisp and lively.What turns decay into magic is the sauce. The sauce in the north is miraculous. Once the food is dipped, it turns stone into gold, and it is even more powerful with some green onion and garlic.Jiangnan is a more graceful and lazy way of arranging dishes, which is to cut petals of preserved eggs and put a plate of soy sauce on the side for dipping.The white-cut chicken that Shanghainese love to eat is also plain and without ingredients, served with carefully considered seasonings.In the past, Tan Jiacai believed that a good white-cut chicken should be tender and boiled in boiling water, so that it can be moist.Mixed vegetables are more refreshing than pickled vegetables, but they also take a lot of work.Westerners eat salad dressing, and tossing vegetable salads is commonplace, but Jiangnan people have to fine-tune the ingredients by themselves when they mix coriander and lettuce. Just like Cantonese who are good cooks, they often make their own soy sauce secretly, and no one else can get their hands on it.Husband and wife lung slices, a famous dish in Sichuan, are the pinnacle of cold dishes.My friend told me that this thing was originally called "husband and wife waste film", and the waste film is the cow scalp that no one likes to eat.I don’t know if it’s true or not, but once all the seasonings are blended together, they become crispy, crunchy, and varied in taste. With the addition of seasonings, the spiciness is full of subtle flavors.This dish can be regarded as the perfect use of Sichuan cuisine's ability to season and blend ingredients with various ingredients.

There are also some cold dishes, which are cooked first and put aside until they are ready to eat.The famous eggplant here seems to be the case.There are also salted fish, and Suzhou people do use salted fish as a cold dish to accompany wine.Tang Lusun said that in the past, Beijingers had no time to cook during Chinese New Year, so they prepared some dishes in advance.The famous one is ten coriander, which is said to be fried with more than ten kinds of vegetables, and eaten as porridge when guests come.People in the south of the Yangtze River want to eat beef, and 80% of them deal with it in the same way: most of the beef in deli is white-cut beef, cooked with a few seasonings until it is tender, and you can eat slices with your fingertips without greasy hands.From the perspective of appetizers, Shaanxi’s cold dishes are very good, and many of them are served cold and thoroughly. They often add the sour that Shanshaan people love, refreshing, tender and crisp, appetizing and relieving greasy, the most authentic.