Chapter 31 Chapter 31

Last year, I went to the Maojia restaurant in Hepingli, Beijing several times, and several times were invited by foreign journalists. By the way, I thought that these "Gaozui", who have eaten world-class meals, also like the local dishes of Shaoshan Chong, China, as if a trend. The dishes in the Maojia restaurant are indeed completely local dishes.Braised pork in brown sauce, crucian carp with watercress, deep-fried loach, stewed chicken with chestnut, stinky fermented bean curd, steamed bacon with black bean sauce—in short, they are all rural dishes, even the name has not changed.According to the Maojia Restaurant, these dishes were Chairman Mao's favorites.With these words, the simple country dishes have another layer of cultural added value.However, I really like to eat it because it is a country dish and awakens my childhood dreams.

You can eat anything in Beijing, Japanese and Korean cuisine, French steak, Italian pizza, American McDonald's KFC home chicken, German hamburger - our own Manchurian banquet, Cantonese cuisine, Shandong cuisine, Sichuan cuisine, Hunan cuisine, Shanghai cuisine, Yunnan cuisine, Chaozhou cuisine , Huaiyang cuisine, Xinjiang barbecue - it can be said like this: you can taste the world's delicacies without leaving the city of Beijing (Why do we go all the way to the capital? It's for a feast, believe it or not).However, "the world's famous dishes gather in one city, and the same city's famous dishes are unique in their hometown", is it true that the food is back to basics?

You should be proud of Shaoshan people, you can eat famous food all over the world without moving your feet. From this, I think that eating carefully is not a patent in the city. Thinking about when I was young in the countryside, I ate all kinds of delicacies that cannot be erased from my memories. When I was young, I liked to eat one dish, which was the cured bird.I think people in the city can hardly eat cured bird. When I was young, I lived in the Zhangmu Brigade of Yangfen Commune in Suichuan County, Jiangxi Province, which is now called Zhangmuxi.Behind my house, there are five camphor trees and bitter millet trees that are as thick as several people can hug, and some birds always love to fall on them.Because I love to eat waxed birds, I often go to the back of the house to check if there are any birds falling on the tree. When I see a bird falling on the tree, I will call my uncle back to get the bird after running for several miles. hit it down.My uncle Gu Yifeng has a very good bird gun, it is black and shiny, my uncle closed one eye and fired the gun, and the bird no matter how high it perched will fall down, so I called the dog to take it away. It came back from the thorn forest under the old tree.The bird needs to shed its feathers while it’s hot, and the shedding is very clean. The body is dissected, the crops are picked, and it is salted. A circle, hung on the bamboo fork at the door to dry.Dried, cut into small pieces, stir-fried with chili shreds, served with green onion and ginger, and topped with pepper oil, the taste is really good.The chili shreds can only use the white chili shreds. The so-called white chili peppers are picked green chili peppers in summer, boiled in boiling water, and dried in the sun. Its color is white.The white pepper still has a green taste but is not very spicy. It is very fragrant when fried in the oil pan.Zanthoxylum bungeanum oil is made from fresh peppers picked from old peppery trees that are decades old and grow by the well, and soaked in tea oil for one year.This prickly ash oil tastes pure.Of course, not all cured birds are the same. For example, cranes have a slight fishy smell, and birds that eat water creatures such as hens also have fishy smell, and pepper oil cannot completely remove the fishy smell.Like hawks—especially owls, it smells a little like ants.The best flavors are turtledoves, yellow hard-billed (wax-billed), and pulsatilla birds. The really good ones are the turtledoves.The meat is fragrant and slightly sweet.I haven't eaten this meat bird since I left my hometown. It is really hard to buy.However, when I was in my hometown, I also ate rats. I covered the very fat rats caught in iron clips with red firewood ash for a few hours, and then rubbed them lightly, and the rat skin faded away, showing a pink and tender skin. The body was disemboweled and viscera removed, the head, tail and feet were also removed, salted and dried in the sun.The same method is used for cured rats, with shredded chili peppers, scallions, ginger and pepper oil. The taste is similar to cured birds, but there is a lingering light earthy smell, and the meat is rougher, but the taste is also unique. It is a delicious meal. up.

Villagers are very particular about eating fish. Take carp as an example, buy or catch a carp and raise it in clean water for more than six days in a clay pot.To kill the carp, remove the scales, pick the gills, dissect the belly, cut several sections crosswise, and slap the carp several times before the blood flows, so that the tendons of the carp can be slapped out and removed.The villagers said that if the carp's tendons are not pulled out, it will be too fishy to eat.But do not wash off the blood of the fish, as the fish loses its umami taste.There are many seasonings for making fish, such as Yuxiangzi, mint, onion, ginger, garlic and chili pepper, pepper oil is indispensable, of course, a little rice vinegar (the method of this rice vinegar is to put glutinous rice wine into a boiling water bottle and hang it on the stove Several years, the best is hanging for decades, and some are buried in the soil for ten years), all of the above are indispensable.When I was young, I also liked to eat fish, so I always dreamed that I had a heron and a bamboo raft, so I could always catch fish.

There are many delicious things in my hometown in Gannan, so let me pick one that is not available elsewhere.The tea worm from my hometown is an exquisite dish.In autumn, pick the tea seeds from the camellia oleifera trees on the mountain, and pick out the tea worms from the tea seeds. The tea worms are white and fat, as if their whole body is covered with oil, so they are very tender.Stir-fry the tea worms in a rolling pan. When the surface is browned, add some shredded ginger, shredded chili pepper and powdered salt.This tea worm eats camellia oleifera seeds, but its whole body is full of oil. When it explodes to brown, it still emits oil all over its body, and it needs to be fragrant for half a mile.Afterwards, I also ate some insects. For example, I ate fried locusts in Shandong. The fried cicadas were very burnt and very fragrant, but they were still not as good as tea worms.When the tea worms are stir-fried until they are browned, the outside is crispy and fragrant, while the inside is as fresh and tender as butter, with a small puddle of sesame oil. This taste is really only found in my hometown.

I have also eaten a lot of delicious food in Hubei. I have to admit that the food in Hubei is not as good as my Gannan, but Hubei has its own specialties.I ate fish in Daye Lake and Liangzi Lake, and my boss asked me to get on a boat, row the boat into the lake, remove the nets to catch fish, kill the fish immediately, light a fire, scoop water from the lake and boil it in a pot. What kind of fish is said to be boiled in which kind of water, only a little salt is added, and nothing else is added. The fish soup is very fresh and sweet, and the fish is white and tender, but also slightly sweet.Liangzi Lake Wuchang fish is the authentic Wuchang fish, so after eating Wuchang fish like this in Liangzi Lake, there is no need to eat Wuchang fish in the future.Needless to say, the crabs in Liangzi Lake come to the shore at night, catch them one by one with a fishing lamp, set up three sticks by the lake, hang a small pot, boil the crabs, and dip them in the prepared onion, ginger and garlic. Soy sauce and vinegar, drinking the rice wine burned by the farmhouse on the moon, the situation is very refreshing.Liangzihu crabs mainly eat crab roe, especially fresh crab roe.

I learned to eat offal fish in Hubei.The best fish is crucian carp. Squeeze and wash the crucian carp intestines, mix with rice noodles, add tempeh, chili shreds, put it in a rice cooker and steam it. It tastes very fresh. The crucian carp intestines are slightly sweet. The bitter gall is broken, so it has a slightly bitter taste, which is unique.There is also a yellow dingo in Daye Lake, which is yellow in color and looks like a catfish. There is a thorn on the upper part of the body and on each side of the body. It is commonly known as the triangular thorn, and it is very painful.Kill the fish when it is alive, add potherb mustard sauerkraut and fresh water bamboo shoots (this bamboo is only as thick as a small thumb, and its bamboo shoots are only as thick as this, and they are smoked in the mountains in spring, and there will be nothing after spring), water bamboo shoots cut Cut into small pieces, put them in a pot and cook together, the cooked fish soup has a special taste.The so-called sauerkraut fish soup in Beijing is not fish soup at all, but fish bath water, compared with the soup made of yellow diced fish, potherb mustard, sauerkraut, water, and bamboo shoots.

I eat a kind of steamed fish with rice flour in Honghu Lake, Hubei Province. It tastes very good. I take the fat from the belly of carp weighing more than five catties in the wild lake, mix it with steamed meat powder and steam it. It is tender and fat but not greasy.The steamed eel with rice flour developed from this later has the same effect. It requires big eels, steamed with boneless powder, and it melts in the mouth when eaten, which is absolutely delicious. In fact, there are local dishes everywhere, and they all have unique flavors, such as stewed shiitake mushrooms from Shennongjia, stewed loach with tempeh from Hunan, preserved donkey meat from Shaanxi, beggar chicken from Jiangsu, distiller's fish from Sichuan, boiled mutton from highland barley from Qinghai and grilled sturgeon fish from Yunnan. Cross-bridge rice noodles, Guangdong cat meat stewed snake soup, northeast pork slices stewed with sour Chinese cabbage, if you taste it carefully, it really is an ordinary dish with an extraordinary taste.

One person eats one dish, this cannot be changed. People from any place, after eating all over the world, come to the conclusion that the taste in their hometown is the best.And the self-centeredness is the most fully expressed in the sense of taste.When I was in my hometown in Jiangxi, the villagers always liked to guess what Chairman Mao ate every day. They said: Chairman Mao, I can guarantee that he eats a bowl of fatty meat every day, oily fat, and no lean meat.At that time, my hometown liked to eat fatty meat, and the villagers had this idea.In the area of ​​Daye, people like to eat Fried Rice with Oil, Salt, Scallion and Egg. People in Daye town said: Chairman Mao eats Fried Rice with Oil, Salt, Scallion and Egg every day.From this point of view, regional food culture has its limitations, and people probably think: If I like this, then others must also like it.A few days ago, I accidentally read an article written by an old American, talking about drinking beverages, which can be related to the eating habits of China and the United States. The old American experts listed statistics and were very surprised: Chinese people consume Coca-Cola drinks The amount is less than one-tenth of the American per capita, and the Chinese drink too little Coke.Think about it, this old beauty is a little cute, right?Is it true that Americans drink Coca-Cola and Chinese must also like to drink it?How much tea and cold water do Chinese people drink?From this point of view, the above laws obviously have no national boundaries.It's just right - food is self-respect, and the whole world is the same cold or hot.