[On the way to travelTaste buds taste charm】Yangzhou's light and bright dishes raise the "lion's head"

Introduction:The four basic elements of human beings are "food, clothing, housing and transportation". These four elements promote human progress and continue to cycle with the iteration of the process of human civilization. Today, the "travel" of life is superimposed on travel. Not only does it make me feel happy to see what I hear from all directions, but the taste buds on my tongue are also tasting the sour, sweet, bitter, salty and fresh food of life. taste. The dishes eaten during the journey shook history and humanity, so the series of dishes eaten during the journey was written into a document. It's called: "Taste on the Road of Travel".

Coordinates: Yangzhou, April 2015

Yangzhou is a small place. People in a small place are very generous. Some people may not be convinced. In fact, Yangzhou is so famous that it has not always been small. Before liberation, Shanghai was called the "Ten Miles Yangchang". A city had a ten-mile long street, which seemed to be very large. However, you should know that Yangzhou had the "Spring Breeze Ten Miles Yangzhou Road" as early as the Tang Dynasty.

Fireworks fall under Yangzhou in March, enjoying the beautiful scenery and sighing the delicious food.

When it comes to Yangzhou cuisine, what does the first thing that comes to mind?

Yangzhou big steamed buns? Lion head? Eel?

Yangzhou cuisine is famous all over the world and is one of the four major cuisines in the country. Yangzhou cuisine, also known as Huaiyang cuisine, has a history of 1600 years. The intersection of Yangzhou's canal and the Yangtze River has long been a hub for north-south transportation. Its hinterland is also a land of fish and rice, with abundant products. These superior conditions made Yangzhou a prosperous commercial center in history. As a result, local cooking skills were well developed and a unique flavor dish-Yangzhou cuisine was gradually formed.

Huaiyang cuisine is one of the most famous cuisine genres in China. It is known as the "Four Major Cuisines" along with Shandong cuisine, Sichuan cuisine and Cantonese cuisine.

After staying in Yangzhou for 1.5 days, local classmates accompanied us to visit the beautiful scenery of Yangzhou and taste Yangzhou cuisine. Please let me count them one by one. The names of the dishes can only be remembered based on my feelings and are not authentic.

The first dinner (April 23) was eaten at Jiangjiaqiao Dumpling and Noodle Shop, a famous local noodle shop.

1. Crab roe dumplings.

Crab yellow soup dumplings have a unique flavor of thin skin, rich soup, full filling and delicious taste. They are famous all over the country and around the world.

Legend has it that crab roe dumplings were made in the Three Kingdoms. In the later period of the Three Kingdoms, when Zhuge Liang was seriously ill, he remembered that the first ruler Liu Bei had left Wu shortly after the marriage recruitment in Wu, and Sun Shangxiang was forcibly retained by Sun Quan at his mother's family. Later, Sun and Liu each claimed to be emperors, and the two sides fought. Liu Bei was defeated and died of illness in Baidi City. When Mrs. Sun heard the news, she missed the relationship between her husband and wife, and was in pain. She climbed the Lingyun Pavilion on Beigu Mountain, looked west to offer sacrifices, and threw herself into the river. Because Zhuge Liang was busy on the expedition, he couldn't pay attention to offering sacrifices to the spirit. While he was still alive, he sent people to Wu to pay homage to fulfill his wish.

Zhuge Liang summoned Old Man Wu, who had followed Liu Bei to Wu, and asked him to go to Wu to pay homage to Lady Sun. Old Man Wu asked what items he would bring to the memorial ceremony, but Zhuge Liang said to use meat steamed buns to pay homage. When Old Man Wu heard this, he knew that this was a sacrifice made by the Prime Minister in the past when he crossed the Lu River. Instead of killing people, he used dough to wrap meat instead of human heads.

Old Man Wu listened to the instructions, bid farewell to the Prime Minister, took a boat to Jingkou, Wu, and told the local official that he had come to pay homage to Mrs. Sun. When the magistrate heard this, he dared not neglect him and arranged for Old Man Wu to stay in a posthouse.

After staying in, Old Man Wu found flour and rice, used a knife to chop the pork into pieces and mix it with the seasonings. I also remembered that when my wife was alive, she liked to eat crabs most, so she made some crabs and cooked them, peeled off the crab roe and crab meat, and stirred them in the pork filling to make the filling core.

The next day, some local officials and entourage held a memorial ceremony with Old Man Wu. After arriving at the Beigu Mountain River, Old Man Wu asked people to set up a incense table, light incense and candles, put forty-nine meat steamed buns on the stick, and take out the memorial written by the Prime Minister and read it out. Everyone looked at the bulging and patterned meat steamed buns and didn't know what they were. I saw Old Man Wu throwing these things into the river after reading the memorial rites.

After the memorial ceremony, everyone asked Old Man Wu. What was that just thrown into the river? Old Man Wu smiled and said mysteriously that this was Mrs. Sun's favorite food when she was alive. It was "crab roe hot buns." Old Man Wu lost a few teeth, and his words were a little irrelevant. Everyone thought the word "hot" was the word "soup", so they echoed in saying that it was "crab roe soup dumplings."

Crab roe soup dumplings are made from plump crab roe and white flour. They are the best among Yangzhou snacks. The filling of the steamed buns can be seen in yellow color, which really smells like hairy crabs.

2. Yangzhou fried rice.Before arriving in Yangzhou, I said that eating authentic Yangzhou fried rice was a must.

Yangzhou fried rice originated in Yangzhou and is a product of Chinese canal culture. Legend has it that it originated from the crushed gold rice, which Yang Su, Duke of Yue in the Sui Dynasty, loved to eat, namely egg fried rice. When Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty inspected Jiangdu (present-day Yangzhou), he also introduced egg fried rice to Yangzhou. Later, after successive chefs and altar masters gradually innovated, he gently integrated the Huaiyang cuisine with the characteristics of "rigorous selection of materials, exquisite production, meticulous processing, emphasis on color matching, and original flavor", and finally developed into one of the famous staple foods with Huaiyang flavor. Yangzhou-style restaurants in Europe, America, Japan, Hong Kong and other places have also listed this delicacy and are very popular.

Yangzhou fried rice integrates rice and dishes. The main ingredients include white rice, grass eggs, sea cucumber, dried scallops, chicken leg meat, ham, fresh lake shrimp, flower mushrooms, fresh bamboo shoots, green beans, etc. Yangzhou fried rice is rich in nutrients and has a long history. It is a wonderful flower in Huaiyang cuisine.

Please allow me to tell the truth, as a result, this Yangzhou fried rice didn't taste special and didn't look very good. It didn't seem to be as delicious as the one I fried myself.

3. Boil dried shredded silk."Dried shredded" refers to shredded dried tofu. A piece of 1 cm thick white dried square must be cut into 18 pieces of uniform thickness, and then cut horizontally into thin threads. The silk is as thin as hair. It is a very common dish. Use chicken soup to boil dried shredded rice, supplemented by shredded bamboo shoots, shredded chicken, fungus, shrimp, egg skins, vegetable gall, etc., and the taste is delicious. As the seasons change, the ingredients for boiling dried shredded silk also vary. The use of seasonal vegetables changes to produce various flavors.

4. wonton noodles。It looks great.

Early the next day (April 24), I drank morning tea at Fuchun Tea House.

When we arrived in Yangzhou, Fuchun Tea House had to go. It is said that Yangzhou people take pride in taking guests to Fuchun Tea House for morning tea. The refreshments are exquisite and meticulous, with many colors, making people dizzying and tasting them.

Eating tea in Fuchun is like drinking morning tea in Guangdong. It is a special form of eating breakfast. It is different from Guangzhou-style morning tea in that tea and snacks are drunk together, while morning tea in Guangdong is simply drinking tea and eating breakfast. There is a saying in Yangzhou: Pack water in the morning and wrap water in the evening. Wrap water in the bag means having morning tea.

The owner orderedShuangma crispy cakes, steamed buns plattered steamer (containing emerald steamed dumplings, dried vegetable buns, glutinous rice steamed dumplings, crab yellow steamed dumplings), poached egg noodles, and five grains porridge.

After breakfast, visit Slender West Lake and have dinner at "Chen Ji" at noon.

The first dish I ordered wasYangzhou Lion Head。Each cost 10 yuan, starting from three.

lion headIt is a famous traditional dish of the Han nationality in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. It belongs to Huaiyang cuisine, which has soft taste, fat but not greasy, and is rich in nutrients. Braised and steamed are popular.

The most well-known dish among Yang's dishes is "Lion Head". Meatballs made from pork are famous for their large, round, tender and fresh nature. They are appreciated by both elegance and vulgarity. They are suitable for women and children. Mr. Tang Keming, the imperial chef of the last emperor, believed that it was listed as one of the four famous dishes in Yangzhou in the Sui Dynasty, and was called sunflower meat at that time. Yang Wanli, a great poet of the Song Dynasty, wrote in a poem: "However, one piece is paired with two pincers. There are really Yangzhou geese in the world." Although he couldn't exactly refer to this dish, it was certain that after he tasted dishes including lion's head, he exaggerated vividly and expressed his feelings through the dish.

Even if lion heads are my favorite, I can only eat half of them. After all, it is meat.

braised tofu

stir-fried vegetarian eel:The main ingredients are fresh mushrooms; the ingredients are soy sauce, garlic, white sugar, vinegar, water starch, dry starch, pepper, salt, and edible oil. Spicy, crisp, delicious and delicious.

Sausage dried in front of the restaurant.

The dinner that day was the last meal I had in Yangzhou. It could be said to be the "last dinner". I ate Huaiyang cuisine (I wrote down the name of the dish based on my feeling).

Soak river shrimp in salt water,It is said that river shrimp is the dominant flower of Huaiyang cuisine.

Sweet and sour radish slices: The sour and sweet are just right, very crisp. The classmate introduced that to pickle radishes, you should mix vinegar and white sugar in proportion, boil them, cool them, and then pour them into sliced radishes. If the sweet and sour water does not boil, the radishes will easily go bad.

Yan Shui e。Among chickens, ducks and geese, Guangzhou people like chickens the most. Most of them are not interested in ducks and believe that ducks are toxic. There is a saying that when you go to Nanjing, you must eat salted ducks. When you go to Yangzhou, you only recognize salted geese. This is the consensus in Jiangsu Province. "Yangzhou Spring Ci" writes: "If you have land, you will only plant bamboo, and if you have no home, you will not raise geese." In the past, large families in the Jiangnan area generally used geese to protect their homes, which shows how high geese appear in local people's lives.

Yangzhou people have been in love with geese for a long time, dating back to more than a thousand years ago. There was a description of eating geese in Yangzhou in the Tang Dynasty. The "Suiyuan Food List" of the Qing Dynasty recorded a practice called "Yunlin Goose", which is quite similar to today's salted geese: mix honey and wine, spread evenly inside and outside, and then steam in a pot. The meat tastes crispy and delicious.

Whether they eat meat or grass, most people are willing to eat tender food, but Yangzhou people just want to find a unique way and don't love those who are not old. The essence of Yangzhou goose is also contained in this word "old".

Goose must choose old and strong ones. It is most suitable to use two or three years of scattered elderly gander geese. No matter how bad it is, one year or so can make do. Goose gets older, but compared to young geese, the meat quality is more uniform, has less fat content, and the taste is firm and refreshing. It exudes the charm of a mature male goose from top to bottom. The key point is that it will not bite its teeth, so it is more popular than young geese with fat meat.

Shrimp corn

Green pepper and shredded belly

Fish Head in Sauce

casserole chicken

stir-fried leeks

stir-fried amaranth

Yangzhou cuisine belongs to the Huaiyang cuisine. Its main characteristics are: strict selection of materials, fine cutting skills, prominent main ingredients, attention to the flavor, pay attention to fire, good at stewing, clear and mellow soup, strong but not greasy, light and tender, unique shape, salty to slightly sweet, light and delicious, moderate sweet and salty, suitable for north and south. Yangcai is characterized by being thin, light, delicious and decent. It is as atmospheric and cultural as Yangzhou people, and not as sweet and greasy as Wuxi cuisine and Su Bang cuisine.

I like the small town of Yangzhou so much that I want to go there quietly again.

[After many years, I would like to thank my old classmates again for their sincere, sincere and warm hospitality]

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