Chapter 37 Worship and Hybrid Vegetables

Mr. Wang has an article "Answer to Mr. Wang Zengqi", saying that the specialty of his cooking is "hybrid cuisine" or "fancier cuisine", which shows that he cooks with both strengths and has his own display. Wang Zengqi mentioned in a memoir article that when Wang Shixiang went to a friend's house to eat, he not only cooked the stove by himself, but also brought the main ingredients, ingredients, and seasonings by himself.This is actually not uncommon for some gourmets. In the 1980s, when I went to a friend’s house for dinner, I always brought my own ingredients, especially the home-made watercress, fermented bean curd, pickled ginger, and pickled peppers.Sometimes I bring my own kitchen knife because it is difficult to cut vegetables with other people's knives.

Wang Lao and his friends have dinner together, which is called worshiping three meetings. Usually about ten people gather regularly, and they take turns as the host, and the host is the host.Because the meeting time is every Wednesday, it is called the Sanbaihui. When Mr. Wang was the host, in addition to the bad dishes he was good at, he often made braised yellow croakers with pickled vegetables and braised green onions with dried shrimps. In fact, these two dishes are home-cooked dishes in Huaiyang cuisine.In addition, there are ham and cabbage, chicken slices with roasted peas, sweet and sour spicy cabbage, suet sesame tofu, breaded shrimp, etc.Here we introduce two special dishes of Mr. Wang.

The first dish is stewed beef tongue. This dish was invented by Mr. Wang based on the practice of stewing beef in a Western can.He removes the outer film of the fresh beef tongue, cuts it into thick slices, and puts it into a casserole.Use high heat first, then turn to simmer, and simmer for six hours.Add rice wine, refined salt, soy sauce, sliced ​​ginger, onion, and carrots cut into hob pieces in turn. If I were making this dish, I would also add a lot of brisket, because the brisket and tongue are simmered together, which makes the dish more flavorful. Yuan Mei from the Qing Dynasty also recorded the method of making beef tongue: "Beef tongue is the best. Peel off the skin, tear off the film, slice it, put it in the meat and simmer it together. There are also winter salted and air-dried ones, which are eaten every other year, which is very similar to good ham. "The "simmering in the meat" mentioned here is consistent with my thoughts.In addition to simmering with the beef brisket, I will also add about 20 peppercorns when cooking this dish to remove the fishy smell and increase the aroma.

Every year in the twelfth lunar month, I go back to my hometown in Sichuan to buy local pork and beef to make salt meat and bacon, and then bring them back to Beijing.Next year I will make some cured beef tongue again, it must taste good. Another specialty of Mr. Wang is the potted tofu.There are two recipes for this dish in Beijing and Shandong. Mr. Wang learned it in a small restaurant in Beijing and made some improvements himself.The specific method is to soak the shrimps in rice wine, add soy sauce, refined salt, and sugar, and add a little broth if it is even better.Half a catty of southern tofu, cut into three-centimeter square thin slices and put them in a bowl.Break three eggs into the tofu bowl, add a little stir-fried green onion and mix well.Put vegetable oil in the frying pan, heat it up, pour in the tofu and eggs, spread it into round cakes, and fry both sides until golden brown.When the pan is cooked, pour in the seasoning soaked with shrimps, poke a few small holes on the cake with chopsticks, let the seasoning seep into it, and the pan is ready to serve.

The small restaurant where Mr. Wang learned this dish was in the north of Mashenmiao Road in the beach before liberation. At that time, many teachers and students of Peking University went to eat it.Mr. Wang was full of praise after eating it, thinking that it has a unique flavor, which is different from the "Shandong method of frying piece by piece in a pot".Mr. Wang made a mistake here. "Put them into the pot one by one and fry them" is not the traditional method of Shandong, but the method of Beijing. Wang Shixiang's cooking is not limited to genres, but home-cooked dishes in his own way.He believes that taste is the most important thing in cooking. Chinese cuisine pays attention to color, aroma, taste, shape and utensils. All of them are important, but the most important thing is taste.However, color, aroma and taste are also closely related.Generally speaking, dishes with poor color and fragrance will not taste very good.

In his later years, Wang Shixiang often complained that the current diet has changed, and the happiest are the children, because they have never eaten the good things in the past, and they don't know how bad the current food is. After the 1990s, Mr. Wang never wrote food articles. He said that he had no way to write and he just had a full stomach. Mr. Wang's complaints are not unreasonable. Now many ingredients and raw materials are gone, and the craftsmanship has also been lost.Livestock and vegetables are all grown by feed additives and chemical fertilizers, losing their natural taste.The effects of chemical fertilizers and natural fertilizers on the taste of vegetables are quite different.I did an experiment in my hometown. I used two plots to grow onions and cabbage, one was fertilized with chemical fertilizers, and the other was fertilized with natural fertilizers. The texture and taste of matured vegetables were very different.Today's vegetables rarely have umami taste, and can only be enhanced by monosodium glutamate and chicken essence.

Both Wang Shixiang and his son Wang Dunhuang believe that ingredients account for 90% of the quality of a dish, and craftsmanship only accounts for 10%.I agree with this point of view, but they put too much emphasis on the ingredients. I think 60% is almost the same. Tofu, one and a half catties; fresh shrimp, one or two; eggs, two; refined salt, one qian; dry flour, one qian; wet starch, one qian; minced green onion, five cents; minced ginger, three cents; ; Monosodium glutamate, three points; soy sauce, two money; clear soup, one tael; cooked lard, one tael. 1. Cut the tofu into rectangular slices 1.5 inches long, 7 fen wide and 3 fen thick.Chop the shrimp into a puree.Knock egg whites into a bowl, stir until foamy, add refined salt (3 fen), wet starch, Shaojiu (1 qian), monosodium glutamate (1 fen), and shrimp puree to form a filling.

2. Put a layer of tofu on the plate first, and spread the shrimp filling evenly.Cover the shrimp filling with the remaining tofu.Then steam in a cage for fifteen minutes, take it out, and drain the water.Put egg yolk, Shaoxing wine (five points), monosodium glutamate (one point), refined salt (three points) and flour into a bowl and stir into egg yolk paste.Spread the egg yolk paste evenly over the tofu. 3. Put lard in the frying spoon, turn it on a low heat, and when the oil is 60% hot, push the tofu into the spoon completely, and fry on both sides until it turns light yellow, add green onion and ginger, clear soup, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine and monosodium glutamate are covered with a large plate, stewed until the juice is exhausted, and then buckled in the plate.

This dish has a deep egg yellow color, and after being collapsed, the marinade is soaked in tofu, which is rich and tender.