Chapter 36 Beijing player Wang Shixiang

Wang Shixiang is the last gourmet patriarch of the Republic of China who passed away, and he is known as a famous scholar-style culinary master in the contemporary capital. Wang Shixiang, courtesy name Chang'an, was born in Beijing in 1914, and his ancestral home is Fuzhou. He died in 2009 at the age of 96.He is the most famous contemporary collector and connoisseur of cultural relics.Mr. Wang has a wide range of interests. He loves ancient poetry and has also specialized in various fields such as music, painting, furniture, and bamboo carving. In traditional culture, literati school is a kind of pleasure.Wang Lao's fame in the field of food is as well-known in the world as his reputation in Ming-style furniture, pigeon whistles, bamboo carvings, cricket pots and other folk customs. He is known as a modern wizard.

Mr. Wang knows how to cook and eat, especially how to comment on dishes.When friends eat exquisite dishes with Wang Lao, they all like to listen to his comments. In 1983, just after the reform and opening up, Beijing held a national first-class chef competition, and three judges were specially invited, namely Professor Wang Liqi, Pu Jie and Wang Shixiang from Peking University.It is said that Wang Lao tasted and judged more than 80 dishes of various genres in one day. Wang Shixiang was born in a family of officials, and his ancestor Wang Qingyun served as the governor of Guangdong and Guangxi and the Minister of the Ministry of Industry.His grandfather, Wang Rendong, served as a secretary in the cabinet. His uncle, Wang Renkan, was the number one scholar in the third year of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty and was Liang Qichao's teacher.His father, Wang Ji, used to be a diplomatic envoy and once served as the secretary of Zhang Zhidong, Minister of Military Aircraft. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, he served as the Secretary-General of the State Council in the Beiyang Government.His mother, Jin Zhang, was a painter of fish and algae, and his uncle, Jin Beilou, was a leader in the painting circle at that time and founded the Chinese Painting Research Association.This kind of background laid the foundation for Wang Shixiang to later become "the number one player in the capital".

When Wang Shixiang was very young, he liked to go into the kitchen and watch the chefs cook. These chefs were all famous teachers at that time.Under the guidance of these famous teachers, he started to cook by himself at a very young age. Wang Shixiang's ancestors were from a famous family in Fuzhou. Although he was born in Beijing, under the influence of his family, his taste has a strong Fujian brand.The cooking method of his specialty dishes is not Beijing cuisine, but mainly Fujian cuisine, supplemented by Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Huaiyang cuisine. When Wang Shixiang was a child, his father held family banquets and often invited Chen Yisi, a famous Fujianese chef living in Beijing, to be the chef.Chen's method is the Fujian method, which has a great influence on Wang Shixiang.In particular, the cooking method has become a major feature of Wang Shixiang's later famous dishes, such as fried fish fillets, stewed wild rice stems, stewed winter bamboo shoots, and sea cucumbers with bad eggs.Fujian cuisine believes that the smell of bad food is different from the smell of wine, and the dishes made have a special flavor, which cannot be replaced by wine.

Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Huaiyang, and Shandong all have a small amount of bad dishes, but a major feature of Fujian cuisine is the use of red bad food as seasoning, which is different from bad dishes in other places.The cooking methods in Fujian cuisine are divided into fried rice, kang rice, pulled rice, drunk rice and other cooking methods.The traditional famous dishes of Fujian cuisine, Drunken Chicken and Boiled Sea Clams in Bad Sauce, are all made with bad techniques. Because Zaoxiang has a strong local color, there is a saying in Fujian that "Zaoxiang misses its hometown".This kind of sentiment must also exist in the ancestors of the Wang family, which in turn affected Wang Shixiang.

Wang Shixiang is very fond of bad.Later, when he went to a friend's house as a guest, or even to a cadre school, he had to bring his own savory sauce. His son Wang Dunhuang introduced the practice of Wang's fragrant lees juice in his gourmet book "Eat Master". Use a high pile bowl to pour half a bowl of fragrant grains, which were bought at Kong Yiji's restaurant.First heat a little water, use a spoon to repeatedly crush the fragrant grains in a bowl until it becomes a sauce, then pour in old Shaojiu such as Guyue Longshan, add a little salt, and stir with a spoon.Cover the mouth of the bowl with a saucer and let it stand for twelve hours.Finally, the juice filtered out with white gauze is the fragrant lees juice.

In fact, the general practice of Fujian cuisine is like this.The bad juice can't be kept for a long time, and it should be used up within 12 hours after making it. The condiments of bad fragrance include Fujian-style red glutinous rice sauce, bad stewed shallot juice, bad oil garlic mashed sauce and so on. Bad cooking techniques also have a relatively long tradition in our country. There is a record of bad meat in "Qi Min Yao Shu" written by Jia Sixie in the Northern Wei Dynasty. In the Southern Song Dynasty, a variety of bad dishes such as bad abalone, bad sheep's trotters, and bad yellow vegetables appeared.Famous court dishes in the Ming Dynasty included bad melon and eggplant, bad pig's head, hoof and claw, distiller's grains and clams.The three dynasties of Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties have summed up various techniques such as old bad, fragrant bad, sweet bad, and Sanhuang bad.

Today's famous bad coriander in Fuzhou includes fried pork belly, deep-fried pork ribs, kang bad lamb, boiled sea mussels in bad sauce, fried fragrant snail slices, light fried melon pieces, fried eel, drunk chicken, and fragrant fried Chicken slices, bad sliced ​​duck, etc. We know that apart from Fujian, other regions of my country also have their own bad dishes. Among them, the famous bad dishes in Zhejiang include bad fried fish, bad chicken, bad eggs, bad stewed whip bamboo shoots, etc.In fact, most of Wang Shixiang's specialty dishes, sea cucumbers with bad eggs and winter bamboo shoots with bad taste, are based on the methods of Jiangsu and Zhejiang.Jiangsu's famous bad dishes include boiled herring, fried white fish and duck.Shandong bad dishes include bad steamed meat, bad fried noodles, bad fried peony fish, bad fried rice stems and so on.In his article "Osmanthus Fish Feast", Mr. Wang once said that Shandong cuisine is best at fragrant rice. I think this is not accurate. Fuzhou's Fujian cuisine is the best, followed by Huaiyang cuisine, including Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Sichuan cuisine also uses glutinous rice, but fermented glutinous rice is used.The difference between glutinous glutinous rice and red glutinous rice is that the former uses the grains of rice wine, while the latter uses the grains of glutinous rice wine. When I make fish and kidneys myself, I don't like to use cooking wine, but use fermented glutinous rice juice, which saves sugar.