Chapter 24 Three staple foods of Peking people - dumplings, noodles, pancakes

Since the Yuan Dynasty established the capital in Beiping, through the Ming and Qing dynasties to the early years of the Republic of China, the capital of emperors and emperors for more than 600 years has gathered a lot of humanities. Great achievement.However, if a person from other provinces is new to the country and asks people in Peking which restaurant is an authentic Peking restaurant, even the old classics in Peking will not be able to point it out, they will not be able to tell! The People's Congress of Peking has the habit of being frugal. When it comes to food, they only want to fill their intestines with good taste. If they can eat white rice and noodles every day, they will be satisfied.If you really want a change of taste to satisfy your cravings, there are restaurants in every province in Shannan and Haibei, so you don't care which one is the real Beiping restaurant.

According to the tastes of compatriots in various provinces in China, the southern sweet, northern salty, eastern spicy, and western sour are generally not bad.Southerners eat rice as the staple food. If you don’t eat rice for three meals and eat pasta every meal, you will feel that your appetite is not full, as if you are not full.Northerners have always taken pasta and miscellaneous grains as their staple food. If every meal is white rice, they will feel weak all day long. They can't wait for pancakes and steamed buns to fill their stomachs like a meal. Since people in Peiping regard pasta as their staple food, they naturally have to keep changing their patterns in terms of pasta.Although the types of pasta in Beiping are not as many as the sixty or seventy kinds that Shanxi's skillful hands can make, in addition to snacks made of pasta, there are also as many as a dozen kinds that can be used as a staple food.Let’s talk about dumplings first. There is a saying in the north: “Comfortable is better than lying down, and delicious is better than dumplings.” The reward for eating is dumplings, and dumplings are also eaten during New Year’s and festivals (the dumplings in Beiping’s banner are also called boiled dumplings). Whoever said that there is no smile on his face is said that he is not happy to see boiled buns.From this we can see how important dumplings are in the hearts of men, women and children.

People in Peiping pay attention to kneading their own noodles when they eat dumplings. They roll or press the skins by themselves. Five doses can be pressed together by a good hand. The pressed dumpling skins are not only round, but also very uniform in thickness.Now the machine-pressed skin is soft on the outside and hard on the inside, slippery but not moist. After cooking, it has swelled by a third. It is strange to eat it in your mouth.Dumpling fillings can be divided into raw and cooked, meat and vegetables.Whether the dumplings are delicious or not, the thickness of the dumpling skin is of course the most important thing, but the taste of the dumplings depends on the skill of mixing and frying the stuffing.

More than half of the average person likes to eat raw stuffing, which is mixed and packaged now, and not too much likes to eat cooked stuffing.Roughly speaking, there are only three types of cooked stuffing: three delicacies, dried shrimps, winter bamboo shoots, and minced meat (now the frozen fish dumplings sold in supermarkets are Shandong dumplings, which were rare in Beiping back then).Let’s take raw stuffing as an example. The meat is mainly pork, beef, and sheep. As for vegetables, except for catkins, almost any vegetable can be used as stuffing. Some people even use radish sprouts and mustards to make dumplings. Stuffing, this is something outsiders can't think of.Although it is said that dumpling stuffing is all-encompassing, the people of Peiping pay attention to everything in a proper way, and they can't make random things.For example, beef minced must be served with scallions, mutton minced with wax gourd and gourd, and shrimp with leeks.There are also two ways to make dumplings: one is to pinch, and the other is to squeeze. The pinch is slow and the squeeze is fast. Therefore, most families pay attention to pinching when eating dumplings, which are both beautiful and delicious.The dumpling restaurant had to be crowded because it was too late to make it due to the large number of customers.Of course, the hurriedly squeezed dumplings are not very attractive, and they are uneven in thickness, but it doesn't matter if you squeeze out a hundred or eighty dumplings in a large pot, and they won't be broken.The kneaded dumplings are different. Be careful not to put too much in one pot, and depending on the situation, you need to add water once or twice to start the pot!

When eating dumplings, you must dip them in vinegar to make them taste good. Shanxi rice vinegar and Zhenjiang vinegar are the best choices for eating dumplings in mainland China. That would be even more beautiful.Since I came to Taiwan, some dumpling restaurants seem to be taught by a master. The dumplings are dipped in chemical white vinegar and cold water. It just so happens that there is too much vinegar and too little water, which can really make people sweat so much.It's a rare sight, and I found a bottle of black vinegar on the table, and I found it was Gongyan balsamic vinegar after I ate it. The smell and smell are almost like spicy soy sauce, which is more unbearable than chemical vinegar mixed with cold water.It may be that the taste of vinegar is not right, so in order to please customers, some dumpling restaurants do not care whether the stuffing is salty or not, and add some small ground sesame oil to a plate of Tang Jing Gao soy sauce?I dare not say what compatriots in other provinces think, but people in Peiping think that it is candied haws dipped in marinated shrimp-it’s two hundred and eight.

When it comes to eating noodles, Peking people didn’t like eating machine-cut noodles at first, and they liked to eat stretched noodles (also called handle noodles).Some people say that machine-cut noodles have no noodle flavor when cooked, so they like to eat stretched noodles.When stretching the strips, first dip the noodles in alkaline water and then stretch them. It takes brute force to shake them.Housewives usually roll the noodles into slices first, then cut them into strips and then shake them. It is said that the noodles must be shaken in this way to get the fragrance of the noodles, otherwise it will be no different from machine-cut noodles.The most common home-cooked way for people in Peking to eat noodles is hot soup noodles, which is the so-called shabu-shabu noodles in Shandong. All the ingredients are boiled in a wide soup, and then the noodles are boiled. Soup, soup, and noodles are different from each other, and they are very different.The advantage of hot noodle soup is the soup, all the umami in the soup is mixed into the noodles, so Peking people don’t need three plates or five bowls to eat hot noodle soup, as long as there is a plate of kohlrabi and a plate of small cucumbers. Eating noodles with hot soup, the taste is already drunk and comfortable.

Noodles with fried sauce is also a daily way of eating in Peking, which can be divided into two types: "over water" and "over water".Over-water noodles are boiled noodles and picked in a water basin, washed with cold or hot water and then mixed with fried sauce in a bowl. The noodles are moist and smooth, and it is easier to mix evenly.However, the water is picked directly from the pot into the bowl, and although the sauce is not easy to mix, it is mellow and fragrant, so that you can appreciate the true taste of the fried noodles.After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, almost all the small restaurants in the north sold fried noodles with diced or minced meat, and some dried tofu diced, which not only took away the original taste, but also stagnated and astringent, and even added chili. How awkward it is to eat a kind of fried noodles in your mouth.

Whenever people in Peking have some festive event at home, they will eat noodles and vegetables with soy sauce and marinade.There are two types of brine: "Chuanzi brine" and "mixed brine".It is relatively simple to make Sichuan stew. First use chicken broth or pork, beef, and mutton to make soup, and then pay more attention to it. You can also use mushroom soup, then cut eggs into small cubes and add sea rice, diced meat, yellow flowers, fungus, spinach, and mushrooms. , Tricholoma is the so-called "Chuanzi bittern". In addition to the above materials, "Chuanzi stew" does not fry the eggs or cut them into cubes. When thickening the sauce, throw the eggs on the stew, and add oil with a small iron spoon, deep-fry the peppercorns on the fire and pour them into the stew while it is hot. The last pour, that is mixed stew, the so-called "Da Lu noodles" in Taiwan.If eggplant is added, it is called eggplant stew, and if chicken slices, sea cucumber, and ham are added, it is called three fresh stew.

Speaking of pancakes, there are many tricks, and there are two kinds of utensils: branch furnace and pan.Lifting the stove is also a special product of Beiping, which is produced in the Western Zhaitang of Beijing.People in Peking use casserole to cook porridge (there is a joke in Peking opera called "beating casserole", and the witty people say that there are endless sets of sons who sell casserole), thin sand hanging children for decocting medicine, and a stove for pancakes. Tang Bun came to Peiping to sell it.The support stove is like a round pot with a diameter of about one foot and three four. When it is turned over, it fits on the briquette stove. It is full of holes, and the flames have just jumped into the holes, so the baked cakes have small spots one by one.This kind of cake is crispy and crispy, and because it uses very little oil, it is refreshing but not greasy.Although northerners love to eat pancakes, most of the southern friends think it is dry and hard.In addition, home-cooked pancakes, pancakes, scallion pancakes, and a nest of steamed noodle pancakes, as long as any northern restaurant in Taiwan can make them, and they all do well.

In addition, there are two kinds of cakes called scallion cakes and sugar cakes with sesame paste. Almost everyone in the mainland can make them, but they are still not as delicious as those baked in steamers.Steamed pot shop is also called sliced ​​noodle shop. In addition to selling various thick and thin wide and narrow noodles, it also sells steamed buns in the size of Hanamaki.In the early years, this kind of shop mainly sold steamed food. Beiping families held funerals and put flames on them. The food protection food used by monks was also undertaken by steamed pot shops, so they were also called steamed pot shops. Later, they added cut noodles, so they were called cut noodle shops.The scallion pancakes they bake are different from the scallion pancakes baked in restaurants today. They are loose but not burnt, moist but not greasy, and they are delicious with or without vegetables.Another kind of sesame paste sugar cake is soft and soft, honey-soaked and sweet. I think that when the fellows in Beiping, Taiwan now think about the taste of steamed green onion cake and sesame paste sugar cake, they probably can’t help but think of sea bass with water shield!

The three staple foods listed above are the most common ones that people in Peking often eat.As for other pasta recipes, there are many tricks, some are also a staple food, and some are pure dim sum. Let me introduce them one by one when I have a chance!