Chapter 33 Also talk about lard

Some time ago, I saw the article "Where did the lard go" published in the Vientiane edition, which reminded me of many things about lard. In the early years in North China, and even in all provinces of the country, whether it was a family or a large or small restaurant, unless you told the cook at home or the waiter of the restaurant to use vegetable oil in advance, most of the dishes were fried with lard (some provinces in North China, such as Shandong, Henan, etc.) , the lard also needs to add the word "big", which is called lard oil).In all fairness, dishes fried with lard are indeed smoother and more delicious than those fried with vegetable oil if they are served hot in the right amount and at the right time.Most of the maids used by Shejian were brought back to Peiping from the South.The Chongtang is in the palace. Some of the elders are vegetarians all the year round, and some worship the Buddha. They always eat Huazhai for a few days a month. The vegetarian dishes are probably not clean in the big kitchen, and they are all cooked by the maids.At that time, there was no so-called safflower oil, salad oil, etc. Northerners only knew to use small-ground sesame oil for frying vegetables, while southerners only used peanut oil, so the vegetarian dishes in Shejian used both peanut oil and small-ground sesame oil.When frying vegetables with vegetable oil, the only thing to decide is that the oil must be boiled thoroughly before the vegetables are put into the pan, otherwise there will be a beany smell and the sesame oil will not taste good.In the earliest German and French hospitals, two famous doctors Di Boer and Keli strongly advocated that their patients eat sesame oil or peanut oil instead of animal oil. 9. Nine out of ten patients who are overweight are caused by eating too much lard.Advise the patient not to eat animal oil in the future, but to eat vegetable oil instead.Shejian was the first to fully respond to this point, and asked the kitchen to use vegetable oils for cooking, regardless of meat or vegetables.However, in general restaurants, because lard makes dishes rich and thick, and it has become a habit for many years, it is hard to change.

The most famous Shandong Restaurant in Beiping is Dongxing Building. The kitchen stove is set on the left side of the gate. Not only the dining seats, but also passers-by can see the master chef who is in charge of the stove by the stove. A big iron spoon can The dishes in the spoon are overturned so high, the spoons and shovels jingle, and the flames are sprayed more than a foot high. On the stove, there are large pots and small bowls of seasonings in front of you, and you can get them with your hands.The most wonderful thing is that there are as many as four or five pots of lard alone. Not only must the old and tender be separated, but also the old and the new are different. What kind of dishes should use old oil, what dishes should use tender oil, which one should use old fat, and which one should be used. Use new ointment, or first old and then tender, or old bottom and new, divine and clear, with one mind, practice makes perfect, as if the skill of the oil can be used at home, to get the magic of the spoon.So when it comes to eating Huohou dishes, no matter how high the home cooking skills are, it is impossible to scold the restaurant. This is the reason.As for the later advocacy of using vegetable oil for cooking, as the author of the article, Chen Liming, said that lard "turns light into darkness" around us, it is 100% true, and it is not false at all.

In Beiping, another outlet for lard is the Chinese-style bakery. No matter what kind of dim sum they make, they always use lard, because lard is easy to shorten.As for the vegetarian dim sum eaten by vegetarians, there are dim sum shops that sell pure vegetarian foods, because northerners did not know how to use vegetable oils such as peanut oil at first. , no one wants to eat vegetarian oil snacks.When it comes to the lard used in the pastry shop, it is not only special, but also exquisite. One year, the author asked Lan Yingzhai, Xisi Pailou, to make some wisteria pancakes, and let them make the stuffing after mixing them at home. Let's talk about lard.He said that he specially made 20 wisteria cakes on the counter, which were delivered from the counter, and asked me to go home and put them away in a porcelain jar, so that I could keep them until the end of the year, and they would never become moldy.These cakes are baked with 30-year-old lard. Not only are they extremely crispy, but they are guaranteed not to spoil after a year or so. Later, these wisteria cakes were eaten after more than half a year, and they were not spoiled at all.

In the early days, there were no slaughterhouses in Beiping, and the places where butchers slaughtered pigs were called soup pots, and they were all concentrated in the East Fourth Archway and West Fourth Archway.They poured the boiled lard into large pottery jars, marked the year and month, and stored it in cellars. Every year after the Double Ninth Festival and the heights, the big shopkeepers of the pastry shop were busy buying.At this time, as for the soup pot, the price of oil discussed by the peers was also marked with a water plate (buyers and sellers in Peiping have a wooden note board hung in the cabinet, and the note is called a water plate at any time). The older the oil price, the higher the price. Although the market price of oil more than 30 years old is different in the morning and evening, it is said that it is more than ten times more expensive than new oil.However, the price of such aged lard is too high, and every pastry shop only buys twenty or thirty catties a year.

In the south of China, before it became popular, it has long been known to use vegetable oil, peanut oil and soybean oil to stir-fry vegetables. At the time, Gongdelin, a vegetarian restaurant opened by Shanghai Wenren Guan Gangzhi (No. Guan Master), had a name called Fried Tofu Song, because it is crispy and crispy. Crisp, plump and flavorful, most people don't believe that it is fried with vegetable oil.In fact, there is a Buddhist hall on the upper floor of the Gongde Forest, a Buddhist place, absolutely no meat, and the Gongde Forest is set up for the convenience of vegetarians. It is not for profit, so why deceive yourself and others.

At the beginning of Taiwan’s recovery, not only restaurants, large and small, all used lard for cooking, but every household also used lard for cooking. When You Mijian was the mayor of Taipei City, the Society of Engineers was held in Taipei, and his cousin Zhang Wentian came from Shanghai. When I came to Taiwan to attend the meeting, You and Zhang were classmates when we were in mainland China, and they lived in the same room. You asked your relatives to have a drink in the apartment. All the dishes were cooked with vegetable oil. There was an old man who was Mayor You’s elder relative. When the dishes came, the old man didn't move his chopsticks all the time, and later he said that he didn't eat vegetable oil. At that time, the author thought it was very strange.Later, I participated in a few big banquets with friends from the province, and lard was used in all dishes. No wonder You's eldest relative suddenly couldn't adapt to eating vegetable oil.

Over the past decade or so, every housewife knows that eating animal oil is extremely bad for health, so no matter when you go to eat with relatives and friends in other provinces, the smell of cooking with lard can hardly be smelled on the table, and almost all of them use vegetable oil instead.Although some restaurants still secretly use lard for cooking, and pastry shops use lard for pastry, the consumption of vegetable oil is indeed rising sharply, and the supply is often in short supply.Based on this, the amount of animal oil used has naturally been relatively reduced.However, one thing that is puzzling is that the number of pigs slaughtered every day is still gradually increasing. Restaurants, Chinese and Western dim sum shops can't digest the huge amount of lard. How do these extra lard be digested? It is indeed a puzzling mystery.Recently, a customs friend told me that surplus lard has already been included in the ranks of exporters, and you probably don’t know it yet.I hope that what the friend at the customs said is 100% true, otherwise some lard will turn into a shadow and cause trouble around us, and the impact on our health will be too great.