Chapter 22 Jinhua Shaobing and Ningbo Moss

There are some things that northerners don’t get much food for. I remember once I went to Shanghai with a few northerners. After eating steamed buns in the Town God’s Temple, I wanted to buy some Shanghai specialties and bring them back to Beijing. I introduced many varieties to them. They were not very interested, so in the end they had to choose by themselves.I just bought a bottle of "one tripod" yellow mud snails and a dozen duck gizzards.As for Huangniluo, they have already experienced it at the dinner table of friends in Shanghai in the past few days, so they should stay away from it.As for those duck gizzards, there is a lot of discussion, thinking that this thing can be bought in Beijing for a few dollars, or it is not easy to braise or sauce, why buy salty and hard salt water duck gizzards like Shanghai.

Northerners have a more direct sense of taste, sweet is sweet, and salty is salty. The taste of food is the same after eating and chewing, and the taste cannot be changed.Northerners are not as greedy as southerners, and they don't eat much snacks.Apart from eating, at most you can eat melon seeds, and the variety of snacks is far less than that in the south; and some things in the south are neither meals nor snacks, but things to eat and play with.Some of these foods need to be eaten with tea, while others need to be chewed slowly in the mouth until they have a special taste.Jin Shengtan in the Qing Dynasty said before his death that dried tofu tasted like ham when chewed with peanuts.I was very naive when I was a teenager. I used to chew various kinds of dried tofu with peanuts, but I never chewed out the taste of ham.

Some food tastes better the more you chew it, the first time you eat it, the taste may not be very good. Only when you chew it carefully can you gradually get better.Jinhua's dried vegetable biscuits and Ningbo moss are such foods. Jinhua dried vegetable biscuits are not limited to Jinhua, Zhejiang. They are sold as far as Huzhou in the north and Quzhou in the south. However, the best ones are in Jinhua and Quzhou, and Hangzhou is much inferior.The appearance of dried vegetable sesame seed cakes is really ugly. There is no sesame seed, and it looks dry and hard. When you flick it with your fingers, the shell is hard and makes a sound.This kind of sesame seed cake is made of oil and flour. When it is fired in the furnace, the skin swells up to form a hard shell.There is very little filling, with a thin layer of dried plums and extremely fatty minced meat.Dried prunes are also unacceptable to northerners, and they are in the same shell with shiny fat minced meat, which is even less attractive.Although the shell of dried vegetables and sesame seeds is hard, the inside is crispy.Chew together with dried plum vegetable stuffing, the more you chew, the more fragrant, salty and sweet.It makes sense to pair dried plum vegetables with minced fatty meat. Dried plum vegetables are the most oily, and without oil, they will not show the fragrance of plum vegetables, and minced fatty meat will not be greasy at all after being absorbed by dried plum vegetables. It complements each other.

Brew a cup of Longjing tea, just chew two dried vegetable sesame cakes, it will have a special taste.Jinhua dried vegetable sesame seed cake is definitely a local specialty. It is not sold in Beijing, and no one is willing to introduce it without effort.A relative of my family lives in Quzhou, and every time he comes to Beijing, he always brings a carton of dried vegetables and sesame seeds.It seems like a lot, but it will be finished in a few days.Dried vegetable biscuits are quite durable, regardless of spring, summer, autumn and winter, they will not deteriorate after ten and a half months.

Ningbo moss cake is also an unremarkable food, and its main raw material is moss.The official name of moss is called Enteromorpha, which is an algae plant in the spore plant, which belongs to the Chlorophyta Ulvaceae. It is composed of a single layer of cells, which are tubular and dark green. between bands.Dried after picking is edible moss.Both the coastal areas of Ningbo and Japan like to eat food made of moss strips. The Japanese also use moss strips to make sauce and sell them in small bottles, which are very expensive.People in Ningbo have more ways to eat moss strips. There are two types of moss cakes: baked and baked, but the moss strips are spread on one side of the cake instead of filling.The baked moss biscuits are a bit like biscuits. The bottom cake is sweet, and the moss strips on the top are salty. When chewing, the sweet and salty flavors are mixed together, and it tastes very addictive.Stir-fried greens in the south of the Yangtze River is like eating Jinhua dried vegetable pancakes in Longjing.

Jinhua dried vegetables biscuits and Ningbo moss cakes are not dim sum, they are just something to eat and play with.