Chapter 29 Talking about eating and drawing cakes to satisfy hunger

There are a lot of words about food in the newspapers and magazines, and there are never too many.Chinese people are delicious, I think it is something to be proud of, because it is the most basic art of life.For example, flower arrangement and interior decoration are not something that everyone can do, and they are trivial things in comparison. "Food is the most important thing for the people", but looking at the exquisite pancakes and fritters, you know that "food" is not just about filling the stomach.Shaobing was introduced from the Western Regions in the Tang Dynasty, but fried dough sticks were only available in the Southern Song Dynasty. Because of the public outrage against the traitor Qin Hui at that time, it was called "fried juniper", at least in Jiangnan.In the school I went to, the old maid in the dormitory who smuggled snacks and peanuts called you fried dough sticks "Fried Hinoki".Eating flatbread fried dough sticks together, due to the contrast between sweet and salty texture and thick, tough, crisp and thin texture, tastes very different from eating sesame seed cakes alone. This is invented by the Chinese themselves.Some people eat fried dough sticks stuffed in sesame seed cakes, but the fried dough sticks are slightly worse when they are squashed, because the air in them is also one of the indispensable ingredients.

Zhou Zuoren likes to talk about food when he writes prose, and he defends himself by saying that "eat and drink men and women, people's great desires exist", but the things of men and women are the same everywhere, there is nothing to talk about, and the food is different in different places.This is also reasonable, but what he writes about is some of the most frugal and light dishes in his hometown of Shaoxing, which seem to have no special features except for the local bamboo shoots.Frying cold rice too many times can make people feel tired. The same nostalgia, written by different authors, is interesting, most of them have a special atmosphere of a city, or a strong local flavor.Even in the backcountry where there is not even glutinous rice or red dates, if you use substitutes, it may not be very delicious, and because of nostalgia and childhood memories, you claim to be salivating.These substitutes are historical materials.In addition, there are memoirs of gourmets. The famous dishes and snacks recorded are not only unavailable, but also out of shape. Even the local places on the mainland have probably disappeared.However, for ordinary readers, the feast is hard to come by, and it is unavoidable to fill the hunger, especially those who live overseas.We Chinese are accustomed to eating good food, except for the local area, which is a disaster area for Chinese people, thousands of miles away. ——Of course it doesn't have to be so miserable.There is a Western proverb: "Two birds in the woods are not as good as one in the hand." Let's talk about the two birds chirping in the bushes first, although they have disappeared after a glimpse.

My aunt once wanted to eat "Nian Nian Zhuan", which was green wheat grains brought from Maeda, which were not ripe yet.I'm too indifferent to the five grains, I can't imagine, I only think of "Qinghe", one of Wang Anshi's new policies, the old gentleman who talked about "Steel Jian Yizhilu" kept a series of ideas next to the sentence with a sullen face, because it disturbed the people.Always paid taxes - or loans?When I think about it, my mind is in chaos. I can't hear my aunt's words clearly. I can only hear the small green ideas in a pot of boiling water, and the pot is full of small green ideas. ) turn", it tastes fragrant.

Since I was a child, the only thing brought from the fields is barley flour, dark yellow flour, probably dry-roasted, made into a thick paste with boiling water and sugar, and has a burnt aroma, which is far better than Quaker oatmeal.Lotus root powder is incomparable, and it is only suitable for sickness.I don't know if the field where "sticky sticky transfer" came from was sold, or the family didn't get it, or this thing has been lost.The fields are probably all in Anhui. I only know that some of them are prefectures. This philosophical and poetic place name is easy to remember.He has never seen or heard of Barley Face since then.

The CCP’s propaganda report on the Korean War wrote that soldiers went to battle with empty stomachs, and when they were hungry, they took a handful of “fried noodles” in their pockets and delivered them to their mouths. It was like fried rice, which could be eaten with boiling water.Fried rice is also the "puffed rice" (puffed rice) in the various "breakfast grains" in the United States, although the method of preparation is different. "Breakfast cereals" only need to add milk, which is easier than cooking oatmeal, and it is also suitable for Westerners' habit of drinking cold milk, so it has become one of the largest industries.Our fried rice and barley noodles - "fried noodles" can't be said if you haven't eaten it - it's a pity to let it run its course.

It was the first time I saw a large sheet of seaweed, about three feet square when opened, a piece of thin and delicate deep purple paper, a little shiny, like silk with large ripples and dark flowers, with slight creases, I cried out in surprise Come on, I think it is one of the masterpieces of the Chinese.Seaweed soup contains iodine, which is beneficial to the human body and is the easiest fast food, but it seems that few people eat it in recent years. I heard my aunt say, "In the past, the old lady of the Prime Minister's Mansion looked at it, and she just looked at it." The relatives and servants all called Li Hongzhang's eldest daughter-in-law "the old lady of the Prime Minister's Mansion" or "the second old lady"-the eldest house is Li Jingfang, the adopted nephew. .I haven't watched it for many years. Except for the bowl of mung bean soup that saved Kuang Chaoren's life, I just remember that the menu of each table meal is very plain. It is the most common dish in Jiangnan Huazhong in modern times. The pig's head, which is "stewed to pulp with a piece of firewood", is not far apart in time, but has a primitive sense of terror.A special feature of the food on the table is the goose, which has "rouge goose breast", which must be pickled - the sauced duck is also red.Yingchun's "nose is greasy goose fat" and "skin like curdled fat" generally refer to lard.It seems that Cao Xueqin's family used goose oil for cooking, not just the "pine-crumb goose oil roll".There is a goose in the bride price.Uncle Tong's wife thought it was too funny for the groom to hug a goose and "gaagaga".Mr. An argued that it was the ancient ceremony of "Dianyan (wild goose)"-of course, it was the ancient men who hunted geese and dedicated them to the woman's marriage proposal.It seems that the goose meat and goose oil in it is still a relic of ancient times. Goose is not eaten in "The Golden Ping" and "Water Margin", presumably because it is in the north and has been deeply influenced by the Hu people who invaded in the past. Some customs of the Han people have not been preserved.There are also more geese and ducks in the water towns of the south of the Yangtze River.

The West now only eats foie gras sausages. In the past, geese were more common than chickens and ducks on the table.Roast goose for Christmas dinner has been gradually replaced by American turkey since the 19th century. I ate mustard goose egg flower soup in the middle school dormitory, because the goose eggs are big and relatively cheap.It seems to be a bit fishy, ​​and even the spicy mustard can't hide it.I ate scrambled eggs made of egg powder again in the university dormitory. It was a bit loose like cotton wool, but a bit sticky and heavy, and there was no peculiar smell.Recently read the autobiography of Joe Sorrentino, a delinquent teenager in the poor neighborhoods of New York who converted to school and later became a judge.He ate scrambled eggs with egg powder in the cafeteria of the prison, but he couldn't swallow them. The guards forced him to eat them. He vomited and was beaten.I think this strong young man is too weak in spleen and stomach. Even if I have a bad mouth, I once ate chicken soup when I was eight or nine years old and said, "It smells like medicine, and it tastes strange."Everyone in the family said nothing.My mother was worried and asked someone to ask the cook.The cook said that the chicken was bought two or three days ago and raised in the yard. Seeing that it looked downcast as if it was sick, he gave it "Ertian oil", such as panacea oil and eucalyptus oil.My mother didn't say anything.I buried my face in the rice bowl, and I was so proud that I was so proud that it was the greatest honor in my life.

When I was young, I often ate duck tongue and radish soup in Tianjin. I learned to bite a small flat bone at the root of the duck tongue and pull it out like a shoehorn.Compared with the big duck brains, ducks are really gossips, no wonder they have low voices and high-pitched "Ka Ka Ka Ka" so loudly.The duck tongue in the soup is pale white, very clear and tender.I have never seen such a dish in Shanghai. I have never seen roasted duck soup since I came to the south. I bought ready-made roasted duck stew soup. The soup is clear and delicious.The roasted duck is very small, and I don’t know if it’s the suckling duck or it shrunk during the roasting process. The pores on the ocher-yellow skin are enlarged, and the goose bumps stand out, forming small square paintings.The skin is especially delicious, the whole is a roast duck that has been washed out of fat, lean and purified.People in the north are good at eating duck, and Beijing roast duck is just one example.

Kidney soup is also commonly eaten in the north, where a pair of kidneys is cooked with tenderloin and radish.Tenderloin meat is also called "loin plum meat", which is probably Nanjing dialect. I have never understood why it is called "loin plum meat", and it is not moldy dried vegetable bacon.It was only after many years that I suddenly realized that it was "waist and brow meat".On both sides of the waist, the most fatal part of the wound is called the waist eye, and an inch or so above the waist eye is the "waist eyebrow".What a stroke of genius in language.

Before I entered middle school, there was a piano teacher gave a concert at her home, all her students played, seven big and eight small, for example, one of my cousins ​​who introduced me to it was either an old lady or a half-old lady. He is also qualified to perform in a self-rented auditorium, and he has made a name for himself.The one I was given to play was slow, with no melody at all, and without stepping on the pedals, it looked childish, and the Siping tune with distinct notes was very unpleasant.No one clapped their hands after playing, but I was relieved when I saw the White Russian female teacher nodded slightly.After a while, she served snacks, a row of low square tables put together, each covered with different white tablecloths, plates and plates were also mixed, some teacups and saucers were filled with all kinds of small buns, as if There are steamed, fried, boiled and roasted. There are so many varieties that I am embarrassed to take a closer look.When she pulled me over, maybe I felt aggrieved after being too nervous, and I felt awkward, and smiled and said after every dish: "I don't want to eat, thank you." She moaned and opened her blue eyes wide to express her astonishment With Disappointment, a blond ring fat MILF who speaks almost no English at all compensates with exaggerated expressions like a silent film actress.

A few years later, I read Lu Xun’s translation of Gogol’s Dead Souls. In the book, liars who bought a large number of dead serfs traveled all over old Russia, where they were entertained by gentry everywhere and ate all kinds of local specialties. Steamed stuffed buns filled with fish.I watched and kicked myself.In a 1926 short story "Baozi" translated by Lu Xun, it was written that after the Russian Revolution, a shabby lady settled down in a banquet, coquettishly talking socially, and eating steamed buns at the same time.In recent years, tourists who have visited the Soviet Union eat the usual sausage and caviar, and the dinner seems to have no special features.Everything in Soviet Russia is out of stock, and people are running around "foraging" to arrange shifts, so they don't necessarily have the leisure to make these labor-intensive pasta. Not far from my school, across from Zhaofeng Park, there is a Russian bakery called Tchakalian. Among the various small breads, there is a kind of small bread, which is hemispherical, with a little puff pastry on the top, and a half-inch bread embedded in the bottom. A wide cross holder, this cross is probably made of hard dough, with some cheese mixed in it, slightly salty, and it is delicate and delicious when eaten with not too sweet bread.When I heard the term "hot cross bun" in the United States, I thought it might be this kind of cross bun.I saw it later, and it turned out that it was a rough bun with a small cross drawn with white sugar, even if it was first baked, it was not a sweet pastry. Lao Dachang also has a kind of meat pancake called pierogie, which is golden yellow and soft in the shape of a bag.I didn't buy it because it was fried and indigestible.Many years later, I went to a Turkish family to eat in Japan, and I ate their homemade piroji, which was very good.Turkey and Russia belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church in the Eastern Roman era, and were originally inextricably linked culturally. When I returned to Hong Kong in the 1960s, I suddenly saw a sign on a secluded side street with the words Tchakalian written on it, without a Chinese shop name.I was pleasantly surprised, but when I walked over, I saw that the window of Xishai was empty. Of course it was too hot to store things, but there were only a few loaves of bread with two pointed ends and oblate Russian black complexion in the glass counter inside.The store clerks are the same as the old Dachang in the past, and they are all local Chinese.I bought a Russian black bread, at least their own stuff, can't go wrong.When I went back, I found that Chen Deqi was as hard as iron, like a big round stone, and nothing could be cut. It reminded me of "Xiao Lin Guang Ji" (the ascetic monk who boiled stones to cure hunger?) I was so anxious that the little monk was sweating." After finally cutting it open, there was a five or six inch long light yellow straight hair, which was obviously handmade by a young and middle-aged Slavic man, and it was verified that he was correct, but it was already over the orange. For trifoliate. There is a Blue Bird Café near the Star Ferry Pier in Central, Hong Kong. When I was in college, I would buy half a dozen scones every time I went to town, a kind of triangular flatbread—from the mid-term English schoonbrot, the second word is abbreviated Go, meaning fine bread.Sikong is also a place name in Scotland. I don’t know if it got its name from this local product.The Scottish king sat on the "Stone of Sikong" when he was crowned, and now this stone has been moved to Westminster Abbey and placed under the chair where the king of England was crowned.Scotland produces whiskey and is also a nation with talent in food.They have a dish that is a joke, haggis, chopped lamb heart and liver cooked in lamb belly with lamb oatmeal, but that may be because of the prejudice against eating offal in the West.Using sheep tripe as a natural cup should be an economical and delicious dish in a barren, cold and mountainous island country.I don't know how it compares to Dou E's sheep tripe soup? This "Sikong" is indeed worthy of its name. It is finer than a cake, the flour particles are smaller, and it tastes more "noodles", but it is light and not sweet.You can't buy it in the US.The last time I went back to Hong Kong, fortunately, the Blue Bird Cafe is still there, and the low-rise building has not been demolished.Once you enter the door, it is still the familiar semi-circular glass counter, but there is no "Sikong".Still not giving up, I went upstairs again.I haven't been to the upstairs before. It turns out that the place is very big. The whole floor is a large space, and there are many dark booths. It is the time for afternoon tea.It is not a black light cafe, but the old bungalow has insufficient light, and the lights are not lit during the day.There was a little glass counter at the top of the stairs, filled with what looked like little wax cakes.In the semi-darkness, there was a cacophony of voices, all Shanghainese talking about business.Although the local accent was pleasing to my ears, I immediately panicked like a bereaved dog. I pretended to find someone to have a quick glance, and hurried downstairs. Hong Kong could not buy "Sikong", showing the fading of British influence.But a small grocery store at the intersection near my apartment has "Devonshire (Devonshire) cream", which is a specialty in southwestern England. It is so thick that it becomes a ball and cannot be poured. It's all branded coffee.There is no "Sikong" in the United States, but there are "English muffins". The eastern ones are better. The style and taste are a bit like wine glutinous rice cakes, but they are cut into two pieces and spread with butter. ——Some Jiuniang cakes have bean paste fillings, but the original taste of Jiuniang is completely lost. ——In British literature, it is common to eat wheaten for afternoon tea. The climate is cold and rainy. Eating hot wheaten with dripping butter by the fireplace is a kind of enjoyment on a rainy afternoon. Once, when I was looking at a shop window on the street in Toronto, I suddenly saw a long-lost sausage roll—in fact, there was no sausage, but a small puff pastry tube stuffed with meat—I couldn’t help but think of my father taking me to Feta Cafe to buy small rolls when I was a child. Cakes, let me pick them myself, he always buys sausage rolls himself.In a moment of nostalgia, I bought four of them. The small oil-soaked paper bags were placed on the customs counter. The customs officer looked unwilling, especially because I didn't buy anything else and there was no tax to pay.There are no sausage rolls in the United States, and Canada is the Commonwealth, but the craftsmanship is not as good as that of the famous chefs in Shanghai Feida Cafe.It was inconvenient for me to take it out to eat on the plane. When I returned to the United States, it was too oily and too spicy. How could I occasionally eat one of my father’s sausage rolls. Next door to our house in Shanghai was the Chesslin Cafe, which was newly moved to Tianjin during the war. Every day, bread was made at dawn, and the alarm of smell was raised. The softest alarm clock is like making noise at the wrong time, waking people up in vain, making people helpless like annoying spring scenery.Having this "familiar" neighbor is really a kind of harassment. Only his family has a kind of square-corner German bread. The outer skin is quite thick and crisp, and the center is slightly moist.My aunt said it was free to eat without the butter.There is only one kind of German brown bread common in the United States (west phalianrye), which is also square and very heavy, only three or four inches long per pound.I don’t know, but because it’s too small, it doesn’t look affordable, it doesn’t sell well, maybe there is no preservative added, and it’s pre-cut into thin slices, so it almost always dries hard. In the past, Chinese cuisine only had vegetarian food with MSG, but now it is more common, just for the sake of trickery.In the past, the United States used too much MSG in restaurants in Chinatown, which is harmful to the human body.There is probably a lot of MSG in their best-selling canned soup, which makes the mouth dry, like mild poisoning.American canned soup and noodles are medicinal licorice, which is indispensable in almost any soup, which is equivalent to eating noodles.I happen to dislike noodle soup the least, and think that "wide soup and narrow noodles" should be so narrow that there is only a little noodle flavor left, which makes the soup clearer and thicker.Before leaving the mainland, because I wanted to write a novel about the West Lake, I had been there when I was a child, and I needed to see it again, so I joined a tour group organized by China Travel Agency, and the travel agency would arrange the route on my behalf, so I didn’t have to apply for it myself.The tour guide in Hangzhou arranged for everyone to go to the Louwailou to eat crab noodles. At that time, this old-fashioned restaurant was not yet "facing the public" like Shanghai's restaurants.His crab noodles are indeed delicious, but I still ate the toppings and put down the chopsticks when the soup was dried out. I also felt that it was a bit sinful to continue to embalm things like this in mainland China.Someone at the table glanced at me, and I shivered, thinking that luckily this is a temporary group, and if I can't leave, I'm not afraid that the old account will be turned over when it is liquidated in the future. After I got out, I went to Japan. There was only one Shanghai tailor in the second-class cabin on the freighter, the most typical one, a Shanghai native, with a cat face with thick hair, a frail middle-aged figure, middle-aged, and wearing a gray woolen robe. .I met him on the deck, and I nodded to him and asked him that he opened a shop in Tokyo and often went to Hong Kong to buy clothes.He smiled sullenly, like a cat that just swallowed a canary, and said, "I always wait for this boat." This shipping company has several small freighters running this route. This one is the smallest and carries fewer passengers, so there is no extra meal. The first class eats at the captain’s table, and the second class eats at the crew’s table. Three meals a day Stir-fried vegetables and pork slices with broad rice noodles are drier and less greasy than ordinary fried noodles.Although the vegetables and meat are small, they are all fresh.Second-class cooks obviously don't know how to cook second dishes, and they couldn't get tired of eating them even for ten days during the ten-day voyage.Three or four crew members went to Japan from Thailand via Hong Kong for more than ten days, and it seems that they did not lose their appetite.It was many years later that I saw the terms "fried rice noodles" and "fried rice noodles". What about in America?Unless you know how to cook, otherwise it is assimilation, hamburgers, hot dogs, donuts are so sweet?That's what they call junkfood (waste food).I also like to eat hamburgers, but most of the patties are bread crumbs that have absorbed fat, which is harmful and not beneficial, so I have no choice but to wait until I pass by the Huangcunye store before eating, so I don’t have to blame myself. In the West, "eat meat in large pieces", unlike our shredded meat, the meat can be cut according to the strands, so as to prevent the meat from getting old.Although they are beaten with a special hammer, they also have a "tenderizer", which is made from a tropical melon, but it is a bit spicy and does not match the rustic flavor of steak, pork chops, roast beef, and corned beef.Since the Middle Ages, it has been hung by hanging, and game and slaughtered animals are hung up for many days, and the meat begins to rot, and the meat is naturally tender.So the meaning of high (high) is "smelly", and gamey (like wild game) is also "smelly".In the past 20 years, some female international students went to culinary school and went to their kitchens. When they saw the behind-the-scenes of Western food, they frowned and said: "Their meat is really not fresh." Until now, the famous novelist James Michener The famous Spanish travel note "Iberia" also recorded that a tourist ordered a dish of venom in a restaurant, thought it was rancid, poked the pieces of meat on the skeleton, and asked the waiter to take it away, saying: "It's so rotten that you don't need to cook it." But in a fully modernized country, where cold storage is common, freshness and sanitation are important, and the only way to get tender meat is to undercook it—raw meat is tender.Normally, the steak should be reddish inside, but the heat is not accurate, and it is not allowed to be cooked, and it often bleeds when it is cut into the plate, which makes us feel that they are drinking blood. Fat meat has not been sold in the United States in recent years. Farmers want their pigs to grow leaner. They train pigs to stand up to eat and raise them so that the muscles on the waist and legs can be developed. One can imagine the toughness.In the past, the most tender beef was the so-called "marbled" (marbled), lean and slightly fat, like the pattern of mica stone.If you want to be thinner now, you will naturally be older, and you have to add more raw food to the table, otherwise you won’t be able to chew it. The decline in the standard of Western food in recent years is of course the biggest reason for weight loss and heart disease prevention.The original tradition is to eat large pieces of meat, and one of its specialties is various thick sauces, all of which are extremely high in cholesterol.This is a mess of rules and regulations, no wonder it has degenerated.Coupled with the competition of other sensual pleasures, ranging from the proliferation of sex to the popularity of hang gliding and tide boarding, and even watching TV at worst.A few boxes of TV meals, or a pasta, the whole family can deal with a meal.The trendy ones are raw carrot juice and yogurt with a rancid taste.When President Nixon was in office, he boasted that he paid attention to health. He ate ketchup mixed with cottage cheese① and rubber-flavored skim milk residue.When I first arrived in New York in the mid-1950s, there was a Hascom pastry shop, which was probably run by a Dane. There was a meringue-sized cake called "Napoleon", with a layer of jam and a layer of cream sandwiched between it. I don't know if it was Napoleon's favorite food, or it was invented in his court.His second queen, Marie Louise, was an Austrian princess, and Austrian Vienna is famous for its cream puff pastry.Heyscon is a chain store, after all, it is not as good as Feida and Keshilin in Shanghai in the past.Feta's unique specialties are chestnut flour cakes and "cheese straws" - strips of salty meringue in the shape of a half-spiral.Last year, there was a book review in "Newsweek", which praised a book co-authored by a couple. In the book, they discovered the restaurants on the more remote roads in the United States.The book review specifically mentions it, which is rare.I have eaten in two old restaurants with no heavy decoration in Boston and Baltimore, and they are better than some brand-name French restaurants in New York.Baltimore is the hometown of the Duchess of Windsor, and both Boston and Boston are considered ancient cities.Both businesses were deserted, and one soon closed.Less than a year after I came to the United States, the chain of pastry shops in the Hispanic chain also closed.Butter was originally a taboo for weight loss.At the cocktail party at that time, some people ate raw carrot slices with their drinks. Recently, there was a town in Louisiana where the residents collectively abstained from talking for a year. The governor awarded a bonus of 40,000 US dollars as an experiment to reduce the death rate of heart disease, hypertension, and urine.Some locals tell a joke that there is a law: "If it tastes good, spit it out." Now the food is so bad that the most popular word on the food signboard is oldfashioned (old style).Anyway, the past is better than the present.The newly produced "old-style" peanut butter does not have a fixative, and it settles down to form a cake with oily tops. It needs to be stirred vigorously, but it has a peanut flavor.It's a pity that it was short-lived and production has been stopped, of course because customers find it troublesome.Two years ago, I heard that the US Food and Drug Administration announced that eating too much peanut butter can cause cancer.Peanuts are harmless in themselves, and the added preservatives or fixatives are always carcinogenic.The old-fashioned peanut butter has no fixatives, and the signboard tells people to store it in the refrigerator, so it can be seen that there are no preservatives.It's really lazy to risk cancer just to be lazy. Americans' inferiority complex in eating is also manifested in their admiration for foreign countries, especially foreign countries that have not been influenced by the United States, such as Eastern European countries.Eating in Western Europe has become more or less Americanized. Even Paris enjoys fast food such as hamburgers and fried chicken.I made an exception to introduce a Polish restaurant on the local news program of NBC TV in Los Angeles. It is an old restaurant newly moved from Warsaw, and the proprietress is in charge of the kitchen.The two reporters, a man and a woman, blew and sang for several minutes, and they were not acting as advertisements. It was not allowed on TV, and it seemed that they were sincerely voluntary publicity. There is a Romanian supermarket near here. After all, the small country behind the Iron Curtain is closed and has preserved some traditions in life. Homemade bread alone is better than the ones on the market.Their homemade pastries are not flattering. There is a kind of deep-fried honey-soaked sticks, shaped like ancient Greek stone pillars with straight edges, and they are also hard.I can't help but think that Romanians are the descendants of Roman garrisons and native women, hence the name.I wonder if any of these sweets were eaten by the Romans, or are they all from the Muslim world?Under the rule of Turkey, the Balkan Peninsula has absorbed the Middle East. Most of the pastries are too spiced, and even the walnuts on top are spicy and too sweet.In Baikecai, there is an Iranian shop near the intersection, which is known as "the best pastry in the world".I bought a piece of mille-feuille cake with honey to try, it is very sweet.Since the Iran hostage-taking incident, the Iranian restaurants in the United States have been renamed "Middle Eastern restaurants", and there is a "Persian restaurant" nearby It has not been changed, probably because most people here do not know that Persia is Iran. This Romanian store also has frozen Siberian wontons, called "Permini", which have no ruffles, are flat and round, only have chess pieces, thin skins, and beef fillings. They are delicious, and they don't contain MSG like the Chinese wontons here. .Siberia originally bordered Manchuria and Mongolia.Siberian Eskimos moved east to Greenland, Canada.At the beginning of this century, the Greenland Eskimo woman in the photo was still combing the hair bun of the pottery figurines of the Han Dynasty, standing straight on the top of her head, which looked familiar to the Chinese. This supermarket also sells cooked food, including Yugoslavia, Romania, Germany, Italian ham, Arminian (in modern times it belongs to Soviet Russia, Iran, Turkey) sausages, etc., as well as some garlic and pepper bacon that has no English translation.The only advantage of Romanian ham is that it is light, and the color is as light as white meat.Germany's "Black Forest Ham" is dark red, more fragrant than the general and Danish canned ham here.However, it is clear that the West has never solved the problem of fat ham. It only relies on cutting thin and cutting off the fibers of the fat, but it still often spits out the scum.It’s like diced Chinese fat ham, steamed until it’s as transparent as a dark yellow crystal, but it’s still strong and doesn’t melt in your mouth. Maybe it’s the most important part of ham, not a tumor. ——There is a "farmer's market" not far from the Library of Congress in southeast Washington, and everything is better than other places, such as homemade "tub (tub) butter in the country." There are thick slices of bacon, which is a bit Like Chinese ham. The German sausages in the Romanian store were too sour, reminding me of a bottle of Polish bratwurst I bought, soaked in vinegar, and rinsed under the tap before eating, and it was still sour.Germany and Poland were originally neighbors.It also reminded me of the sour fish fillets in a restaurant in Dusseldorf in Mr. Yu Guangzhong's article "Northern Europe".The most representative German dish is sauerkraut (sour cabbage), so that the word kraut has become synonymous with Germans. Film critics call her thekraut. When Chinese travel abroad, it is certainly a loss to go straight to Chinese restaurants after getting off the plane. Some foreign dishes that are less popular also need to be a little wary. It can be roughly summarized as follows: Sour Germany, Poland; The wine is as sweet as syrup, as is the Morgan David wine on the market, and the kosher (according to food) chicken liver puree has a lot of sugar, but I also buy Israeli-made bitter chocolate in Cambridge-of course It's not bitter, but not too sweet; spicy, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and the former territories of the Turkish Empire in Eastern Europe.India and Pakistan are originally one, so they are also included, although they do not believe in Islam.As the blue Danube flows into Hungary, farmers on both sides eat a piece of black bread, a small pot of spicy stewed vegetables for lunch, and the famous Hungarian dish "goulash" (goulash) corned beef veal with vegetables-it is spicy.The "national dish" of Egypt is spicy simmered soybeans, sometimes with an egg on top, as a nutritious breakfast.Tourist hotels are not available. Spain was conquered by Muslim Moors in North Africa, and Mexico was conquered by Spain, so they all love chili.The south of France in the Middle Ages was greatly influenced by the Moors of Spain.The local famous dishes are mostly seafood, and most of them are filled with chili powder and chili sauce.Although the spicy taste is appetizing, I am afraid that it is still aneducated taste (the taste from the coach).In the desert of Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, there is a huge difference in temperature between day and night, and the daytime is extremely hot. People live by herding animals and live by water and grass. There is no cellar to refrigerate food.The spicy spices are not only antiseptic, but also cover up a little smell.The dishes in the hinterland of Africa are also inseparable from peppers. It is not known whether it is related to the tropical climate or influenced by Muslims in North Africa, East Africa, and West Africa. Some cans in this Romanian store have only Russian-like writing on them, which must be Romanian. The Balkans are all southern Slavs.One kind of can has a curved purple eggplant painted on it.Potted eggplants in the United States are always rotten, so I bought a tin of canned eggplants to try, it is not cheap-could it be eggplants stuffed with meat?It turned out to be eggplant puree, using soybean oil or rapeseed oil, with a strong smell.The little black spots inside are a spice seed.All the melons and vegetables are chopped into sauce, which is the same as in India. The Jewish bread "matso" is like a soda cracker and has more toughness. It is sandwiched with crucian carp (herring) and unripe cheese (cream cheese), which is also regarded as a delicacy by foreigners.If you don't have Marza, just plain bread is fine.However, this canned fish needs to be dripped with a few drops of lemon and bottled liquid garlic to remove the fishy smell-guarantee that there is no need to gargle with deodorant, because the garlic in the United States has no garlic smell.I have also heard Americans say that, of course, it is compared to European garlic; even if you have been to China, you cannot eat it at ordinary banquets. This shop has Arabic bread, which is also influenced by Islam.Stacks of pancakes were packed in cellophane bags, and each cake was covered with burnt black spots, just like pancakes in northern China.Bake it for two minutes after turning off the heat in the oven at the highest temperature. It also tastes like pancakes. It can be eaten with scrambled eggs and fried shredded pork with bean sprouts—if you have it.You have to go to Chinatown to buy bean sprouts.The frozen "fried noodles" sold in most supermarkets are actually slices of bean sprouts and water chestnuts, without noodles, but the roots of the bean sprouts are not picked clean, as if they have thorns. When I was in San Francisco, not far from Chinatown, I would sometimes go for a walk and buy some sour firm tofu—soften tofu was not available.One day, I saw a lot of purple-red amaranths displayed outside the shop, and I couldn't help but feel excited.But fried amaranth has no garlic, so it is not worth frying.The dried garlic, ginger and shriveled dates here have no garlic flavor.When I lived with my mother in Shanghai, every day I went to eat at my uncle's house across the street and brought a bowl of vegetables.When amaranth is in the market, I always hold a bowl of amaranth with black oil, purple red and dark green silk, and the fat white garlic cloves inside are dyed light pink.Crossing the street under the light of day is like holding a pot of common unknown western potted plants, small pink flowers, speckled with dark red moss green and the same jagged edges and large pointed leaves, Zhu Cui is scattered, but this flower is not fragrant, not warm Amaranth fragrance. Japanese cuisine is not good, but they are very particular about some ingredients, such as rice and tofu.In a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, I saw a plate of white and flat tofu, about five inches long and three inches wide, like raw tofu, and there was no hot pot to put it in.I scooped up a corner with a spoon and ate it just like that.If it is scalded with salt water, it is still bland, but it has a fresh smell, and it is thicker than soft tofu.In the end, I ate the whole piece by myself.I wanted to ask the waitress where they bought their tofu, thinking that I would not go to the Japanese Street to buy it, so forget it. In the Italian district of San Francisco, a friend took me to buy a box of ravioli with meat and vegetables. It is a quiet residential street, and the three-to-four-story house with gray and white cement shells is a shop called Ravioli Factory ( "Ravioli Factory").There is a small paper cup for pouring sauce, but I boil it in the pot and eat it, and bake it without adding sauce.The dishes are green and fragrant, just like shepherd's purse dumplings, but smaller.When I came to San Francisco after 1989, the address book was very vague, and I couldn't find it in the phone book. Maybe it was closed. Pecanpie, a famous southern dish in the United States, is made with lard, so it tastes like date cake, but it is more like steamed and roasted.There used to be an old mother in our family who could make jujube cake.In the past 30 years, there was a "fake (imperial) meal" restaurant in Shanghai. There were small steamed buns and jujube cakes. some. All prosperous areas in modern times have generally improved living standards, reduced labor, and too nutritious food, and there is a risk of stroke after the age of thirty.Chinese vegetable meat would have been the most ideal answer.I think the invention of stir-frying is a small milestone in the history of human evolution.Almost as long as you go to the vegetable market to pick up some broken rotten leaves, and when you come back, you can turn decay into magic.But I might not even know how to cook the two simplest dishes. Changbai wastes things and wastes time. If I don’t pay attention, the oil pan will catch fire. The cleaning cotton used to wash the oil pan hurts my hands the most.Already suffering from "detergen thands" (detergen thands), even the fingerprints are gone, it seems like a long-standing offender who has asked a doctor to wipe out the fingerprints. An American doctor advised me to eat fish fillet hot pot, and they also eat it at home, and they don’t need hot pot.但是普通超级市场根本没有生鱼，火锅里可用的新鲜蔬菜也只有做沙拉的生菜，极少营养价值。深绿色的菜叶如菠菜都是冷冻的。像他当然是开车上唐人街去买青菜。大白菜就没有叶绿素。 人懒，一不跑唐人街，二不去特大的超级市场，就是街口两家，也难得买熟食，不吃三明治就都太咸，三不靠港台亲友寄粮包——亲友自也是一丘之貉，懒得跑邮局，我也懒得在信上详细叮嘱，寄来也不合用，宁可凑合着。 久已有学者专家预期世界人口膨胀到一个地步，会闹严重的粮荒，在试验较经济的新食物，如海藻、蚯蚓。但是就连鱼粉，迄今也只喂鸡。近年来几次大灾荒，救济物资里也没有鱼粉、蛋粉，也许是怕挨骂，说不拿人当人，饲鸡的给人吃。海藻只有日本味噌汤中是旧有的。中国菜的海带全靠同锅的一点肉味，海带本身滑塌塌沉甸甸的，毫无植物的清气，我认为是失败的。 我母亲从前有亲戚带蛤蟆酥给她，总是非常高兴。那是一种半空心的脆饼，微甜，差不多有巴掌大，状近肥短的梯形，上面芝麻撒在苔绿底子上，绿阴阴的正是一只青蛙的印象派画像。那绿绒倒就是海藻粉。想必总是沿海省分的土产，也没包装，拿了来装在空饼干筒里。我从来没有在别处听见说过这样东西。过去民生艰苦，无法大鱼大肉，独多这种胆固醇低的精巧的食品，湮灭了实在太可惜了。尤其现在心脏病成了国际第一杀手，是比粮荒更迫切的危机。无疑的，豆制品是未来之潮。黄豆是最无害的蛋白质。就连瘦肉里面也有所谓“隐藏的脂肪”（hiddenfat）。鱼也有肥鱼瘦鱼之别。 前两年有个营养学家说：“鸡蛋唯一的功用是孵成鸡。”他的同行有的视为过激之论，但是许多医生都给鸡蛋采取配给制，一两天或一两个星期一只不等。真是有心脏病血压高，那就只好吃只大鸭蛋了。中外一致认为最滋补壮阳的生鸡蛋更含有毒素。 有人提倡汉堡里多搀黄豆泥，沾上牛肉味，吃不出分别来。就恐怕肉太少了不够味，多了，牛肉是肉类中胆固醇最高的。电视广告上常见的“汉堡助手”，我没见过盒面上列举的成分，不知道有没有豆泥，还是仍旧是面包屑。只看见超级市场有煎了吃的素腊肠，想必因为腊肠香料重，比较容易混得过美国现在流行素食，固然是胆固醇恐慌引起的“恐肉症”，认为吃素比肉食健康，一方面也是许多青年对禅宗有兴趣，佛教戒杀生，所以他们也对“吃动物的尸体”感到憎怖。中国人常常嘲笑我们的吃素人念念不忘荤腥；素鸡、素鹅、素鸭、素蛋、素火腿层出不穷，不但求形似，还求味似，也是靠材料丰富，有多样性，光是干燥的豆腐就有豆腐皮、豆腐干、腐竹百叶，大小油豆腐——小球与较松软吸水的三角形大喇叭管——质地性能各各不同。在豆制品上，中国是唯一的先进国。只要有兴趣，一定是中国人第一个发明味道可以乱真的素汉堡。譬如豆腐渣，浇上吃剩的红烧肉汤汁一炒，就是一碗好菜，可见它吸收肉味之敏感；累累结成细小的一球球，也比豆泥像碎肉。少搀上一点牛肉，至少是“花素汉堡。”