Chapter 24 Pastry shop in Beijing

Folklore expert Jin Shoushen often said: "The oldest shop in Beiping may be regarded as a pastry shop. The Yuan Dynasty entered the Central Plains and established a metropolis in the Yanji area. The cakes made of butter were only used for sacrifices. At the beginning of the founding of the capital, everything was difficult to start, and the palace had not yet set up an imperial dining room, so all the cakes for such sacrifices were handed over to dim sum shops. Later, a large number of Inner and Mongolian people moved south , there are many people who eat it, and the pastry shop has become the most profitable business."

Beijing did not levy income tax until after the successful Northern Expedition of the Revolutionary Army.During the preparatory period, the first step is to find out the capital amount of the shop owner, so as to determine the taxation standard based on this.The inspectors looked through the old accounts and found that the oldest store was a dim sum shop in Dengshikou, Dongcheng City, called Hefanglou. His family opened at the beginning of the establishment of the capital in the Yuan Dynasty.Secondly, Wanchuntang Pharmacy in Dongsi Pailou and Liuquanju Tavern in Xisi Pailou are also old businesses opened from Yuan Dynasty to Zhengzheng period.As for the stove temperature of Longfusi Street, the oldest Erhun shop, and Lei Fafa, the founder of the Lei family, whose style of small woodwork is well-known at home and abroad, it was only opened during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty.

Hefang Building has nine facades, Danying and green, painted and painted with gold, shining and eye-catching, and the architectural design is light and elegant.During the Gengzi period, the Eight-Power Allied Forces entered Beijing and found the Hefang Building to be antique. All foreigners liked to take pictures there, so all tourists who visited Beijing later had to take a few photos of it as a memento. Originally, the earliest pastry shop only made butter and salty pastry, which was specially used for royal and folk ancestor worship. The table used was the same size as the Big Eight Immortals, but the legs were short and thick, and the material was heavy.Those used for funerals are painted with gold and silver, and the color is still black, while those used for ancestor worship are decorated with red lacquer, algae and Libao patterns.The pastry tables are divided into three, five, seven, and nine, and each floor is divided into two categories: 200 yuan and 350 yuan.This kind of pastry is baked with pure butter, and it will not be moldy or cracked when placed on the altar table for 50 to 60 days (preservatives were not invented back then, so it is puzzling why it can be stored in the open for two months without mildew).

In the early years of the Republic of China, folks met relatives and friends who were mourning for the elderly. To show their grandeur, some people also sent pastry tables as sacrificial seats.The sacrificial table is removed as soon as it is offered before the funeral, and the pastry table can be offered for several days before the funeral.But later, someone felt that pure butter cakes had a strong smell, and it would be too costly and impractical to throw them away, so they discussed with the cake shop to use flower cakes instead.Beijingers have always had the habit of not eating from time to time. The flower cakes will not be available until the first day of September, but if you go to the bakery shop to order the cakes for the cakes, they will be happy to open the oven to make them. .

It is said that in the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the Mongols all went north to Mongolia, and even those who stayed were Sinicized. There were few people who sold monopoly butter cakes, and it was difficult to maintain the business, so they added various snacks for sale.At the beginning, there were eight large pieces, medium and small eight pieces, and later added roll cakes, peach cakes, almond cakes, chess piece cakes, chicken oil cakes, champion cakes, pretzel cakes, chrysanthemum cakes, sesame cakes, rose cakes, wisteria cakes, Ham cakes, Xizi cakes, Fushou cakes, flower cakes, oil cakes, trough cakes, hibiscus cakes, Lama cakes, etc.

In the Dingding Central Plains of the Qing Dynasty, Beijing’s pastries worshiped gods and ancestors. In addition to improving the pastry tables of the Yuan Dynasty and renamed them Dianzi, they added Manchurian dim sum Sachima, small fried food, lettiao, jujube paste, and Zhongguotiao. Crispy twists with rock sugar slags, vat roasts with raw and raw edges, sweet and salty steaks, bald buns and so on.In season, there are all kinds of Lantern Festival, Mid-Autumn Mooncakes, Double Ninth Flower Cakes, and honey offerings for New Year’s festivals and stoves.Although there are more than one hundred kinds of snacks in the pastry shop, they still maintain a simple and simple style, only hanging a few strings of wooden bells on the door.When you enter the store, there are no snacks on display, but they are all sorted and placed in a large red-painted lying box inside the counter.Customers go to the pastry shop to name what kind of dim sum they want, and what kind of dim sum he will bring you. There is absolutely no cabinet displaying dim sum samples inside and outside the counter. It is said that it is a legacy from outside the Great Wall.Mobei is very windy and sandy. If you put it outside and get sandy, you won't be able to eat it.

Therefore, friends from the south who came to Beijing for the first time and returned to their hometown as gifts to their relatives and friends all like to buy some fine Kyoto snacks. However, there are too many famous snacks in the pastry shop, so they had to buy some Beijing eight-piece suitcases to take back.The so-called row circle is a wooden box made of extremely thick wood with a cover that can be pulled, and it is just painted with red clay.Later, it was slightly improved, replaced with thin tinplate, painted with vulgar colors, and painted a few bad flowers.Friends from the south thought that the imperial capital, with finer decorations, is so rustic and rustic, which is really ridiculous, but they don’t know that this is also a legacy of Mobei handed down by the people of Yuan Dynasty!Later, someone made the dim sum into wooden models and hung them in strings at the door of the store, which was regarded as a way to attract people.But when you go to a pastry shop to buy dim sum, who would notice the inconspicuous wooden cover!

There are three special places in the pastry shop.The first is the left and right walls outside the counter. The paintings are all about shooting and hunting on camels, or eating barbecue and drinking milk tea in the yurt.The second is a large lying box for dim sum. It is said that the boxes used in the pastry shops at first were covered with a layer of hairy yak skin. The lying box is no longer covered with cowhide.The third is the oven for dim sum. It is hung from the side beams with iron chains. Although it is also made of wood and charcoal fire, the structure has a unique structure, which can heat up and dissipate heat quickly.The cakes baked in a low-fire oven are particularly crispy and delicious.They use the embers of the fire to make a kind of stuffy fire, and eat it with big pickled radishes, which has a special flavor.This is their own food, and they don't want to take it out. Unless they have friendship with the cabinet, this kind of delicacy is not easy to eat.

Butter was the main food in the Yuan Dynasty. In the Ming Dynasty, there were more dim sum styles. Because lard is easy to crisp, most of them used lard instead.In the Qing Dynasty, except for Manchurian dim sum, which was still made with butter, the general dim sum also used lard instead. Beijing’s pastry shop is a big customer of lard. Pastry shops must use aged lard to make dim sum. Except for small dim sum shops that make and sell fresh lard, general pastry shops use five-year-old lard. Above.There are 20 to 30 years of old oil. The dim sum baked with old oil has a fragrance but no fishy smell. It is wrapped in glossy paper, and there is no oil stain on the paper for three to five months.According to a person in the industry: "Dim sum made with aged oil for more than five years can be kept for half a year in winter and two months in summer. Laihong, Zilaibai, pulp, puff pastry, puff pastry, and egg yolk pastry mooncakes all have to be made with lard. Unless the ingredients are specified, the mooncakes are made of sesame oil. According to the northern custom, Mid-Autumn Festival It is called the Reunion Festival, and the moon cakes for the moon must be eaten by the whole family. If there are people who go out to do business and study, they should hide some in porcelain jars and save them for eating when they go home. Some people go home after the Lunar New Year. It will last for more than four months, so old oil must be used." These are based on my personal experience, and it is by no means an exaggeration.

Shexia’s Beijing apartment has a cross-courtyard, with a wisteria on one side of the yard. In the late spring and early summer, the sky is full of greenery, and the whole courtyard is full of century-old trees.It is said that the older the wisteria is, the earlier it blooms. Every year, lilac flowers are ready to bloom, and the wisterias in the house have already been frenzied with bees.When it comes to time, we should pay attention to being the first. There is an old pastry shop called Lan Yingzhai in Xisi Pailou, who has been eyeing my wisteria for a long time.When the wisteria flowers can be picked, they come to trouble, always have to pick a hundred catties before leaving, and sometimes come twice to pick them.Once I went to his cabinet to get ham to order ham cakes. In order to show his goodwill, the cabinet wrapped another twenty freshly baked puff pastry wisteria cakes for me. In the porcelain jar, I will eat it after half a year, and there is no mold or oil.It can be seen that the snacks made of old lard can last for a long time, which is not fake at all.

Most of the workshops selling lard are the sideline business of soup pots.The soup pot shops are concentrated in the area of ​​Duofu Lane, Shenlu Street, Dongsi Pailou, and they are all from the east.They boiled the lard, poured it into a large pottery jar with glaze, marked it with the year and month, and then stored it in a cellar.Some courtyards are spacious, so large open sheds are set up in the courtyard, and the tanks are buried one by one. Only the mouth of the tank is exposed and sealed, so it will not be damaged after several years.The older the oil, the higher the price. As for how to make the oil last longer, it is a secret that belongs to the industry, and they are not willing to talk about it. The characteristic of Manchurian dim sum is that it does not use lard or butter, but butter. The real Manchurian dim sum made by the pastry shop is naturally the pastry table of Tianjiao Temple Festival.The so-called pastry table, the table is regarded as a sacrificial vessel, which is roughly the same as that of the Yuan Dynasty, with gold lacquer carved in green, and red boats interlaced, which is very particular.The pastry tables given by the emperor are piled up layer by layer, and there must be twenty layers.The masters of the pastry shop are not so skilled, so they have to be made by the masters of the big inner pastry house.As for the later folk funerals, it was also fashionable to use the pastry table as a sacrifice, and the pastry shop could have eleven floors.Therefore, the eleventh floor is considered the highest limit for folk hanging sacrifices. Saqima, small fried food, lettiao, and fire paper tube are all special among Manchurian dim sum.Let’s take Sachima first. The real Sachima has a kind of fragrant frankincense, which is not sticky to the teeth, soft and not broken. It's big and thick, holding it in your hand, it's like a monkey eating hemp walnuts, feeling like you don't know where to eat it.There is a kind of deep-fried hard, which can scratch the chest if you are not careful when eating. Small fried food is the main staple food of the Qing Dynasty. There are small steamed buns, small chopsticks, small clam shells, snail shells, and small flower drums. There are more than ten different types. Only the thumb is too small, and they are all made by hand. It is a high-end Manchurian dessert.It is said that each style has different explanations, but the people in the pastry shop can no longer tell the ins and outs of it. Lettiao is a kind of dry food that Manchurians carry when hunting. It is shaped like square bamboo chopsticks and is only half the length of the chopsticks. It is made of creamy honey and flour, pressed so that it is not brittle or broken. It is placed in the interlayer of arrow pots, or It is carried in the bosom, which neither takes up space nor hinders the operation.The effect of alleviating hunger and promoting body fluid is the same as that of the concentrated dry food eaten by the U.S. military during the war.In the Republic of China, the only people who went to the bakery to buy Le Te strips were people in the banner, generally younger, not only had never seen it, I am afraid they had never even heard of it! Egg rolls, which are popular in Taiwan, are also sold in Beijing Bunbo Shop (called "fire paper tubes" in Beijing), which are divided into two types: thick and thin.The thick ones are thicker than a thumb, and the thin ones are only as thin as chopsticks. They are all baked with butter, crispy and fragrant.It is said that people in the Yuan Dynasty recovered from a serious illness, and eating milk tea can not only nourish but also strengthen the body.Later, due to the unsatisfactory packaging of the pastry shop, all of them were smashed when bought home, and the sales naturally shrank day by day. Cylinder roasting is also a special product of Beijing Bobopu, which can be divided into two types: raw and non-raw.It was a custom in Beijing in the early years, when relatives and friends had a wedding, the birthday party was relatively light; if someone had a funeral, the birthday party was more important than the birthday party; It seems to be a bit more serious than giving away funeral workers.To give someone a baby, they have a deep friendship with each other, so it is natural to need jewelry such as gold and jade locks, bracelets, and the Eight Immortals; when visiting a pregnant woman, there is nothing more than eggs, millet, brown sugar, dried noodles, and another indispensable thing is crock pot.It is said that the mother who eats the crock iron can recover early and not lose her hair.I am afraid that poor people will spend too much money in the pastry shop, so the vats made are divided into two styles: raw edge and non-raw edge.In fact, there is no difference between the two kinds of heat, and it is nothing more than a small calculation for those who are in short supply.Now shopping malls are shouting about business ethics all day long. If you compare the practices of pastry shops back then, can you not be ashamed? Honey offering, Beijing Chinese New Year, honey offering is also an essential embellishment.The big politics are the table of heaven and earth, offerings in front of the Buddha, and offerings to the Stove King.Except for the kitchen king's offering, which has three, the rest are five, and if the table of heaven and earth Buddha's front offering is too short, it is obviously shabby.Money is spent everywhere during the Chinese New Year, and it is really expensive to get some money in one go for these few honey confessions.In order to attract customers, the pastry shop invented that the honey offering will be paid in installments, and set up a discount at the beginning of the year, and send people to the house to collect the payment on a monthly basis.After the sacrificial stove, the whole hall of honey offering bakery shop sent someone to pick it up and take it home.No matter how the price rises, the honey offering at the meeting will never draw a short scale, so Beijingers, rich or poor, like to attend the honey offering. Drum epilepsy is also a kind of dim sum sold in the pastry shop. It is not sweet but slightly salty. It has only two layers of skin, and the top of the drum is covered with white sesame seeds.Mongolians are most afraid of smallpox and chickenpox in children. Mongolian doctors are helpless when encountering such symptoms.It is very lucky to be able to leave a face full of pimples and escape the ghost gate.When a child is sick, when the scab falls off, relatives and friends go to visit, and they always go to the bakery to buy some drumsticks to take with them, saying that they are ill.This kind of dim sum came to around the tenth year of the Republic of China, because it was little known, and the bakery shop stopped operating. In a few years, the term will naturally tend to disappear. There are two types of dim sum in Biaobopu: handmade and molded, like all kinds of moon cakes, and all kinds of shortcakes are molded.For example, Saqima, Lettiao and the Lantern Festival in the first month are all handmade.The mainland and Taiwan eat Yuanxiao regardless of the north and the south, but it is also the Lantern Festival. In the north, there are Lantern Festivals sold in every bakery shop in the first month. You can eat Yuanxiao during the Winter Solstice and the Lantern Festival, and the county is hand-wrapped, which is sweet and salty, which is much better than the sweet Yuanxiao shaken in a dustpan in Beijing.Some places in the south of the Lantern Festival are called Tangtuan, and all provinces in Hebei, Shandong and Henan are called Yuanxiao. When Yuan Xiangcheng was stolen from the throne by the President and changed to Yuan Hongxian, his favorite ministers Yang Du, Lei Zhenchun and others ordered all the pastry shops in Beijing to be called Tangtuan (because "Yuanxiao" is a homonym for "Yuan Xiao" and it is regarded as "Yuan Xiao"). inauspicious).All the pastries are under the despotic power of guns, and whichever one is not obedient does not disobey.However, Zhengmingzhai, the most famous seller of Lantern Festival on Qianmen Street, put up billboards for all kinds of stuffed Lantern Festival that have been erected at the door over the years during the Chinese New Year.Because of this every year, I forgot to change the word "Yuanxiao" to "tangtuan", which was discovered by the police and constitutional agency.After Hong Xian's death and the republic was restored, Zhengming Zhai not only built a colorful archway in front of the gate during the Chinese New Year, but also used small light bulbs to form four characters of "all kinds of Lantern Festival" to vent their anger. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the author was ordered to serve in the Northeast, and went to Beipiao to participate in the work of sinking mud and digging caves.The mining area was destroyed by the Russian soldiers, and the recovery work was extremely difficult. Although the staff ate food all day long, it was badly cut and cooked, and it was so dirty that they could not eat chopsticks.The author knew that Beipiao was desolate and cold, and after the catastrophe, the food must be very poor, so I bought five or six catties of Saqima and five or six catties of Lett sticks in two biscuit tubes at the Beiping bakery and brought them to Beipiao for preparation. A rainy day.The lunch in the office is Jinzhou apples and Sachima, and the dinner is homemade scrambled eggs sandwiched with biscuits. Fortunately, I travel to Pingjin once a month, and I always buy twenty or thirty catties of dim sum at the bakery shop to take to the Northeast.Later, Biaobopu could be delivered in a box, and Beipiao Coal Mine took care of Lanying and Yumei's two to three hundred catties each in January. Unexpectedly, I became a big customer of Biaobopu. I came to Taiwan in the early summer of the 34th year of the Republic of China. I was afraid that the food in Taiwan would not suit my taste, so I also brought two large cans of various desserts from Beiping Biaobo Shop as a supplement to my food.At that time, there were no other restaurants in Hebei except for the Fuzhou restaurant in Green Garden. Drinks and feasts were held in Penglai Pavilion, Dazhonghua, Shanglinhua, and Xiaochunyuan restaurants.Because I have been to the restaurant so many times, I still know all the famous wine girls.My mother-in-law likes to play on every occasion, and has taken in several goddaughters in every restaurant.At that time, the author and my mother and uncle lived in a huge Japanese-style garden house. One day the restaurant was closed, and some acquainted wine girls coaxed them together, and were going to play in our apartment for a whole day.I borrowed words to write a plan, and hid in the library to read books.When I went home in the evening, although the guests were gone, my two big jars of Peking fine point were eaten up by the wine girls who had just tasted the delicious food.I stopped replenishing dry food, but the wine ladies never forgot after eating Sachima. After meeting, they called me Sachima until around 1951. Occasionally, when I went to a restaurant for dinner, some people called me Sachima! After reading "Going and Coming from the Mainland" written by Zhu Junyi, I remembered the past and wrote down every bit of what I knew about Beijing's pastry shop to show my nostalgia.