Diet in the Song Dynasty: Changing between elegance and vulgarity

Under the influence of the court diet, mutton became a symbol of being expensive and delicious in the Song Dynasty, and it also made Kanpan spread at folk public and private banquets. But in real detail, it was not the court but the people who really influenced the diet in Song Dynasty.

In the history of China, there is such a dynasty that inherited the beauty of food for thousands of years and started the top eight Chinese cuisines, but it was able to leave the humor of market food advertisements in rigid manners, and it also had a legend that a cookbook was expensive in Luoyang. This is the food culture of the Song Dynasty. It is like a popular tea-fighting game in the Song Dynasty, sometimes dignified in the temple, sometimes passed on to the pawns, and it is memorable between elegance and vulgarity.

The palace that doesn't eat pork

As the flag of the times, the diet of the court is nothing more than that of the past dynasties. In Song Dynasty, the court changed the style that the Tang court diet "red camel-humps are brought them from jade broilers, and sweet fish is ordered them on crystal trays" was more exaggerated than reality, leaving not only the exact details of the royal banquet court dishes, but also the raw materials and practices that have been passed down to this day. There is an interesting custom circulating from those records full of rich life breath. In the Song Dynasty, the imperial palace "stopped using mutton" and "did not serve pork" in principle. According to records, the first dish that Song Taizu hosted for Qian Chu, the monarch of Wu Yueguo, was "Xuan Fu", which was made of mutton. Renzong, on the other hand, forbade the court to "burn sheep" when it was hungry in the middle of the night, so mutton was the supreme food consumption of the court in the Song Dynasty. At that time, the mutton produced in Fengyi County, Shaanxi Province was called "tender and tender first". When I was in Song Zhenzong, I bought it in Shaanxi. With the succession of the dynasty, the custom of eating mutton as the main meat in the court of the Song Dynasty increased. Roughly in Song Renzong and Yingzong, the imperial court bought tens of thousands of Qidan sheep from Hebei Quechang. In the imperial chef's account book of the Shenzong era, it was even more "frightening" to record "434,463 kilograms of mutton, 19 lambs and 4,131 pork" in a year. Although a small amount of pork expenditure was recorded here, most of the pork was on the list of "watching dishes" and side dishes.

The eating habit of the Imperial Palace in the Northern Song Dynasty was passed down even in the Southern Song Dynasty, where Hangzhou was the capital. Song Gaozong proudly said that mutton was the main food in the palace, and pork was not used. Even when filial piety came to the Southern Song Dynasty, the queen "ate in the palace and provided a sheep every day". Because it is located in the south, there are not many sheep, and the rest of the food is replaced by fish, shrimp and aquatic products with special skills in the south, not pork.

Looking at the dishes before a hundred delicacies

In the records of the royal banquet in the notes of the Song Dynasty, it is not difficult to find the names of dishes such as "Embroidered Eight Fruits", "Lexian Dried Fruit Forked Bag" and "Lujin Fragrant Medicine". These fancy dishes are not for tasting. They only belong to the "watching dishes" at the banquet. For example, the "Embroidered Eight-fruit Base" is to pile up fragrant round, real orange, pomegranate, orange, goose pear, milk pear and flower papaya with various precious utensils. The "Golden Fragrance Medicine" consists of ten boxes of spices, namely, brain flower, licorice flower, cinnabar round seed, woody clove, water dragon brain, gentleman, sand-shrinking flower, official osmanthus flower, atractylodes rhizome ginseng and olive flower. These stacked famous dishes of fruits and spices are only used to stimulate appetite or freshen the air with their beautiful colors and exquisite furnishings before eating. In the Song Dynasty, they were called "watching vegetables", "watching fruits" and "watching food". The specific origin of watching dishes can't be verified, but in the Tang Dynasty, the imperial banquet "Shaowei Banquet" appeared, and the rich and prosperous Song Dynasty carried forward this custom and officially became a custom in banquets and daily diets. In the royal banquet in the Tang Dynasty, the dishes in the "vegetarian steaming department" were made of vegetarian dishes and steamed noodles into a group of Penglai fairy-like singers and dancers, with 71 pieces of * * *, which can be described as huge and spectacular. However, Song's dishes are more meticulous. The specific practice of watching dishes at royal banquets is beyond examination, but from the perspective of the fruits of the people and princes, we can see the details of the leopard. Such as carved flowers and honey fried, which the citizens of the capital city of Tokyo like. Among them, carving is a pattern food carved with melons in the Tokyo food market, that is, "medicinal melons". Not only Tokyo, but also the catering markets in various cities have launched their own masterpieces, such as the winter melon in Pucheng-a three-foot long winter melon placed on the longevity shelf, engraved with rockery, turtle, crane, birthday girl and fairy, which is extremely exquisite.

Of course, the chefs in the princes' mansion are the ones with higher level. They use bayberry, wax gourd, kumquat, fresh ginger, tender bamboo shoots, etc. to carve sweet and sour plum balls, sweet honey wax gourd fish, slightly spicy and sweet flower ginger, and also carve flowers, large flowers and square flowers on kumquat, orange and papaya, and lotus leaves on green plums.

it's worth mentioning that the food in these royal banquets is either conventional or fruit and spices. It has been recorded in Dream of China in Tokyo that during the imperial banquet, the envoys and courtiers of various countries were "divided into ring cakes, oil cakes and jujube towers to watch the dishes, followed by fruits", while in front of the envoys of Liao countries, "only sheep, chickens, geese and bone cooked meat were seen as dishes, all of which were tied with small ropes, and one dish of onion, leek and garlic vinegar was born", because the eating custom of Liao countries was crude and the most noble gift was cooked meat. In the Southern Song Dynasty, because of the sweet taste, there were more and more candied fruits and candied fruits on the plate. This popularity of watching dishes is the ancestor of craft dishes today.

the sound of advertisements between the markets

although the dietary fashion in the song dynasty was based on the likes and dislikes of the court, it was never the court that led the fashion trend, but it was the folk dietary culture. During the Song Dynasty, the catering and leisure industry in cities was extremely developed, which made the kings between the imperial cities look forward to the lights in the city in the middle of the night. First of all, this is attributed to the economic prosperity in the Song Dynasty. Except that restaurants were no longer confined in the middle of the market as in the Tang Dynasty, the people in the Song Dynasty officially started the three-meal system in the ancient history of China. Before that, according to etiquette, the emperor had four meals a day, the princes had three meals a day and the civilians had two meals. In the Western Han Dynasty, the imperial edict to the exiled king of Huainan specifically pointed out that "three meals a day should be reduced to two meals". As for this common people, it is a custom to eat from two meals to three meals, which not only proves that the rigid dietary etiquette rules of the court are ineffective in restraining the people, but also reflects the prosperity of the Song Dynasty without the praise of historians.

The three-meal system directly promoted the prosperity of the catering industry, which also brought the competition between restaurants in the market. Besides competing for beauty in various dishes and tableware, advertising, holiday promotion and environmental promotion at that time had become the three major promotion methods of catering shops. The catering advertising industry took shape in the early Song Dynasty. Generally, famous restaurants such as Fan Lou and Baifanlou will spend a lot of money to ask people to write poems to increase the reputation of their restaurants. And some unknown small shops will also advertise special signs such as "Sun Mutton" and "Li Family Wine". In "Chicken Ribs", there is even a record of a peddler who sells ring cakes on the street, trying his best to come up with the slogan: "I am the one who suffers." As a result, when he also peddled in front of Yaohua Palace, where the Empress Meng of Zhezong was abolished, it attracted the attention of the chief of Kaifeng House, suspecting that he used this to satirize the emperor's incompetence after the abolition, so he was arrested and interrogated. It was only after the trial that he learned that he was only trying to sell his own cakes, so he was beaten and released after 111. After that, the vendor changed his tune and shouted "Let me put it down and have a rest". This story, which was passed down as a joke for a while, vividly described the catering customs of the Song Dynasty, where restaurants were flying with flags and peddling incessantly.

celebrity romance and diet

Of course, the most direct record of any folk diet custom is the contemporary literati. The literati in Song Dynasty spared no effort to popularize and spread the custom of drinking wind and eating food at that time. The diet works in Song Dynasty can be roughly divided into three categories: food classics, tea science and wine science, among which not only the number and types have been greatly increased, but also the status of diet works in books has been greatly improved through the compilation of literati. For example, in the Song Dynasty, Zheng Qiao's Tongzhi Yiwenlue, which only studied the classics, listed the classics as a separate category, and * * * included a catalogue of 41 works with 361 volumes.

Poems and essays that incorporate food description into chanting are everywhere in the Song Dynasty. For example, Su Shi, a literary giant, wrote a large number of poems and essays in this field, such as Ode to Dongpo's Soup, Ode to Pork, Ode to Gourmet, Cooking Tea in the Courtyard, and Sending Tea to Jiang Kui. Of course, the advertising poem he wrote for the old woman who bought cakes was "The jade color is even when rubbed with hands, and the oil is tender and yellow." Sleeping in the spring at night knows the weight, and the beauty of the plaque is wrapped around the arm. " It is also a story that has been passed down through the ages.

In addition to preserving and writing food books and poems, these same romantic celebrities simply take part in food inventions. For example, Zheng Wenbao, whose calligraphy and poems are famous in the Northern Song Dynasty, created Yunying noodles, which are very popular. According to records, the method is to mix lotus root, lotus root, water chestnut, taro, chicken head, water chestnut, arrowhead and lily together, then steam them with lean meat, then blow them with wind to cool them, mash them in a stone mortar, add Sichuan sugar and honey to cook them, then mash them in the mortar to mix them evenly, and then take them out to make a ball and wait for cooling. This delicious dish was even included in the Song Dynasty cookbook.

Su Shi and Dongpo Meat are the most famous. When Su Shi was an assistant of Yong ying in Huangzhou, he tried to figure out the popular pork roasting method at that time and was able to create a new dish. Su Dongpo also wrote a doggerel to record the practice: "Huangzhou is good at pork, and the price is cheap." The rich refuse to eat, and the poor don't understand cooking. Slow fire, less water, when the fire is full, he is beautiful. Get up and play a bowl every day, so full that you can't care about it. " As mentioned earlier, mutton was recognized as a precious dish at that time, where the wind was flowing, so cheap pork made the rich people look down on it at that time. After the creation and recommendation of the great writers, it soon spread widely among the citizens in the Song Dynasty. This is the "Dongpo Meat" that has been passed down to this day.

At the same time, in the Song Dynasty, when the products were extremely abundant, and there were no taboos about religious diet, some exotic foods were included in the pursuit of novelty. For example, among the taxi drivers in the Song Dynasty, eating puffer fish became a fashion. Mei Shengyu, a celebrity, likes to invite friends and relatives to eat puffer fish at home. He wrote in "Pufferfish", "Spring buds are born in the spring, and flowers are flying on the spring shore. At this time, puffer fish is not expensive. " The puffer fish is highly toxic, and can only be cooked after detoxification. It is precisely at this time that Su Dongpo's humorous anecdote about eating puffer fish to the death. Because of the high price of puffer fish, gourmets actually invented the practice of fake puffer fish. Similar to this, in Shan Jia Qing Gong, it is also remembered that there is a production of "fake fried meat": the gourd and gluten are sliced, fried with oil after adding materials respectively, and then fried with onion, pepper oil and wine. The gourd and gluten are not only fried like meat, but also taste the same as meat. Later, fake puffer fish, fried puffer fish and fried fake puffer fish made in this way have appeared in restaurants as famous dishes. It can be imagined that it is precisely because the literati and gourmets summarized, wrote and spread all kinds of diets that the citizens of the Song Dynasty were able to know these novel foods. Moreover, the catering merchants were able to follow the wind and imitate seafood, thus forming a folk diet trend. These anecdotes are no longer enough to ramble about.

Today, although the prosperity of the Song Dynasty has already turned into the brilliance recorded between pages, the details are like walking on the streets of Henan, and the breakfast is a unified situation of mutton soup; The fashion of drinking tea can be seen from time to time, but it seems invisible that the dietary customs of the Song Dynasty have already entered the folk, and they have never lost after thousands of years!