Chapter 57 Nostalgia hidden in the taste buds

——Reading the ancient Qing Dynasty Li Yong Chinese people place great emphasis on food, but for the Chinese, gluttonous people who only want to satisfy their appetites are looked down upon.Our ancestors could understand the way of government from eating. Lao Tzu said: "Governing a big country is like cooking small fish", and the prime minister is the job of "reconciling the cauldron". Just a pot of soup simmering.The well-known gourmet Gu Qingsheng has won the master's way of "never tire of food". From the theoretical level to the practical operation, he has a lot of experience in food, and he also hates vulgar food and impetuous food.He said: "The eating culture of an era can more or less reflect the general mentality of this era. Eating expensive and rare animals can probably reflect impetuous and frivolous social thoughts. If you carefully guess the true heart of a person who is eager to eat swan meat, It must be filled with low self-esteem and unstoppable swollen desires."

After reading Gu Qingsheng's ink-scented food book, in addition to admiring the author's unique perception and insights into the food in different regions of my majestic China, I can also appreciate the lingering nostalgia beyond the food, just as he did in An article "White Pepper" said: "White Pepper is a kind of nostalgia."This kind of nostalgia hidden in the taste buds is a kind of "big nostalgia", not Zhang Han's nostalgia for returning home because of the beauty of the perch in his hometown. This kind of nostalgia is caused by the food in his hometown. , this kind of nostalgia is endless in the writings of Chinese literati, all the way to Lu Xun and Zhicousins.And what permeates in it is a rural cultural person wandering in the metropolis, who opens his mouth to industrialization to devour the original, meticulous, and differentiated beauty of rural food, and replaces it with a fast-food style food that pursues luxury, luxury or the same. The style shows a kind of mourning, worry and even resistance.

I noticed that Lao Gu is not like some writers who write about food, too much from eating to a mysterious and profound "philosophy of life". Similarly, the name "eggplant" has no eggplant flavor in fact, and the old-fashioned pen touches more on the historical accumulation of food in various parts of China, and the humanistic spirit and residents' disposition of a certain region contained in it.So we see that in addition to writing about the joy of watching dragon boat races in his hometown and eating zongzi, and the fragrance of wild vegetables growing freely in the mountains and fields of his hometown, he writes from north to south, ink splashes east and west, writes about Cantonese stewed soup, the delicacy of Shanghai cuisine, and Zhejiang. Human freshness.

The most authentic dishes are often cooked by unknown village women in the most rustic way. Once they are processed and passed on to the elegant halls, they will definitely lose their local taste, just like the folk songs collected by folk songs in Jinjing. After the performance, the wild beauty is always replaced by elegance.Therefore, instead of using his taste buds to taste food, Gu Qingsheng should use his legs to measure the food map of China. ——Only in the deep mountains, there are authentic delicacies that have not been polluted by industrial civilization. In the "measurement" and "tasting" of the ancient Qing Dynasty, he got a glimpse of the broadness and tolerance of Chinese culture from the food, and I thought this was the reason why he took the title of this book. Chinese food is light in the south and salty in the north, sweet in the east and spicy in the west , related to regional history, culture, products, climate, etc. As Gu Qingsheng said, the five thousand years of Chinese civilization is actually a history of food. A large chapter of "Zhou Li" is about food etiquette.Chinese food, some are vigorous, some are fine, some are hot, and some are slow.Gourmets get the beauty of enjoyment from the diversity of diets in different places.Su Dongpo was born in Sichuan, the hometown of food. He missed the food of his hometown all his life, but he always appreciated the food with an open mind. He became a delicacy; when he knew Hangzhou was the happiest time in his life, he fell in love with the fish in the West Lake; when he was demoted to Lingnan, he "eat three hundred lychees a day, and he would never give up to be a Lingnan native"; even when he was old and abandoned, he was exiled to Hainan Island, fell in love with the local oysters, and said humorously: "Be careful not to say it every time you quit Guozi (that is, his son Su Guo), lest the gentlemen in the north hear it and fight for what Dongpo did. I am so beautiful." For Dongpo, not only is "hometown is where the heart is at ease", but also "hometown is where the stomach is at ease." Gu Qingsheng, who wandered from the south of the Yangtze River to the north, also knows how to appreciate the delicacies of different regions. There is the wind of Dongpo.

In Beijing, which is becoming more and more prosperous, I saw that the dishes in different places had to be improved to cater to the people of the capital. I saw children flocking to McDonald's to eat chicken wings made from the same recipe around the world. I saw a wide variety of quick-frozen dishes favored by housewives in supermarkets. Food, as a countryman who also strayed into the metropolis, I was really worried. A few years later, Gu Qingsheng's writings became a series of food history books, but the food was cooked too quickly.