Our earliest ancestors who ate crabs may not be people, but monkeys (apes). Crabs live in the land-water ecotone and are highly coincident with primates. Omnivorous or carnivorous eating habits make it accumulate rich protein and fat; The protein of arthropods is simple in structure, and it is easily decomposed and absorbed by the digestive system even if eaten raw. Small size, non-toxic, weak self-defense, compared with large mammals, reptiles and fish, it is also much easier to catch.
So in the wild, primates have always been the natural enemies of crabs. Other creatures don't keep their mouths shut, but in front of primates, they can easily do it with tools such as stones and fire. Even today, there are still a large number of crab-eating macaques living in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. From this point of view, crab is a gift from the earth to human beings, and it is the most suitable food to be taken seriously at the table.
People all over the world love crabs, with few exceptions.
Americans, Mexicans and Cubans along the Gulf Coast use mustard sauce to drench stone crab pliers, which are sweet, tender and delicious. Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore in Southeast Asia cook green crabs or Xu crabs with Chili and curry, which is rich in flavor. Northern Europe, Alaska, Chile, Australia and New Zealand with high latitudes in the northern and southern hemispheres like to use local materials and ice the king crab legs, which are full of chewiness; Canada and the United States on the west coast of North America are rich in rare crabs, which are fat and full after cooking. Eating bread crabs in western Europe, as the name implies, is as thick as bread and very enjoyable to bite; Japanese pine leaf crab is actually a kind of snow crab, which is usually half sashimi and half cooked in Japanese stock. It is extremely delicious. ...
Of course, eating crabs will never happen in China, a big food country.
Of the more than 4,000 known crabs in the world, China produces nearly one fifth.
In addition, the clever China people have evolved the richest and most diverse techniques in cooking crabs.
No.: 1
one
Let's not talk about crab shells found in prehistoric sites such as Liangzhu culture and Songze culture. The earliest written record of eating crabs in China came from, which recorded the "Qingzhou Crab" in Zhou's diet.
Qingzhou is today's Shandong Peninsula; Xu is the meat paste of crabs smashed by hammers.
According to the analysis of Zhou Li in the Han Dynasty, crabs have become refined food on the table of nobles at the latest 2000 years ago.
By the time the Book of Qi Yao Min was written in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, crabs had been cooked in various ways, such as steaming, frying, Lamian Noodles and drunkenness. In particular, a method of pickling crabs with sugar is introduced. This kind of sugar crab, in the following hundreds of years, led the mainstream way of eating crabs in China. It is worth mentioning that Jia Sixie, the author of Qi Yao Min Shu, is also from Qingzhou. It can be seen that Shandong Peninsula has been the main producing area of crabs for more than 500 years from the Han Dynasty to the Southern and Northern Dynasties. There, sea crabs are undoubtedly the mainstream, not freshwater crabs.
But this situation has quietly changed in the south.
Liu Yiqing, a southerner of Jia Sixie's contemporaries, recorded the poem "Holding a glass in his left hand and a crab claw in his right hand, patting his belly all his life" in Shi Shuo Xin Yu.
This kind of oleander drinking, slightly drunk and happy, soon became the imitation object of the literati and celebrities of the dynasty. Since then, crabs have risen from simple food to interpreters of life attitudes. In the following 1800 years, almost all scholars in China invariably regarded eating crabs as an elegant fashion.
The "eight crabs" that ancient people ate crabs.
It is worth mentioning that Liu Yiqing is a native of Zhenjiang, Jiangsu; Shi Shuo Xin Yu mainly describes the anecdotes of literati in Jiankang, Wu Jun and Yangzhou, the political centers of the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties.
These places are the core producing areas of freshwater crabs in China.
It can be said that the tastes and preferences of scholars for thousands of years have created the unparalleled lofty position of hairy crabs in the crab industry in China.
No: 2
two
Since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the exquisite cooking methods of sugar crabs and rotten crabs in the north began to go south, and began to combine with lake crab in the south to grow new delicacies. In Sui Shu, according to records, Emperor Yang Di was lucky in Jiangdu, and the local people brought him the story of sugar crab. Every time before Emperor Yang-ti eats sugar crabs, he asks his attendants to carefully clean the crab shells and paste them with golden dragon and phoenix clouds, which is euphemistically called "Golden Dragon and Phoenix Crab", showing the emperor's love for it.
The sugar crab here is obviously different from the sugar crab in Qi Yaomin's Book:
Spit out the sediment with fresh and intact live crabs.
Boil the syrup, let it cool, and put the live crab in the syrup overnight.
Add proper amount of mash and salt into a clean jar, take out the crabs in the sugar water and put them in the jar, and seal the jar mouth with soft mud.
In fact, cheap sugar-making technology was introduced into China from India or Arabia during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty.
Previously, people in China mainly ate maltose and honey, which was costly.
Therefore, the sugar-stained crab in Qi Yaomin's Book is actually very expensive to make. However, the sugar crab eaten by Emperor Yang Di consumed much less sugar, and its taste was not so sweet and greasy because of the participation of salt and fermented grains. I think it should be salty and sweet, with a bouquet of wine.
Wine and ginger mask the original fishy smell of freshwater crabs and highlight the freshness of the food itself. Obviously, this has the style of modern drunken crabs and steamed crabs dipped in ginger vinegar.
With the further maturity of sugar-making technology, by the middle of the Tang Dynasty, crabs were no longer exclusive to nobles, but more and more entered the lives of ordinary people. Poet Li Bai often patronizes Hu Ji's restaurant in Chang 'an. When he is tired of eating western-style beef and mutton, he will eat crabs. He said, "Shake the fan into the restaurant and hold the crab claws."
Smoking crab meat and drinking wine is naturally a kind of enjoyment. However, from the perspective of festivals, the weather in Chang 'an only needs to be "fanned" in summer. Crabs eaten in summer, whether sent to Chang 'an during the hot weather in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, or sugar crabs stored the year before last,
It shows that the popularization rate and anti-corrosion level of sugar crab have reached a considerable height at that time.
third place
After the Song and Yuan Dynasties, China's literati culture reached new heights again and again. Lake crab's status has also risen, and a large number of poems about crabs have appeared.
Su Shi said: "Wuzhong gluttony is worth laughing at, and one poem is worth two sharp balls." Laugh at yourself for trading poetry for crabs. Huang Tingjian said, "Trehalose crab fertilizer, Lao Jiang termite alcohol. Every time I hate my stomach and praise my teeth. " Eat crabs until you doubt your life. Why do you never get tired of eating?
Lu You said, "The crab yellow swirls and drools, and the wine is old at the beginning." Eating crabs cured all senile cataracts. Wait, the list goes on. Phrases such as "inlaid with gold", "fat paste" and "tender jade" that describe crab roe, crab paste and crab meat have even become high-frequency words in literati's poems and essays since the Song Dynasty.
In the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, Li Yu promoted eating lake crab to a worship similar to religious belief. He said that crabs are his life, and before lake crab went public, he had to prepare money to buy crabs every year, which he called "money life". but
When cooking crabs, you can't cook, fry, add seasoning or add side dishes. You can only eat it steamed and peeled.
By the Qing Dynasty, the price of lake crab had exceeded the sky-high price under the unremitting speculation of literati.
In A Dream of Red Mansions, on the one hand, it describes the scenes of the son and his wife steaming crabs, holding crabs, drinking and reciting poems, on the other hand, it writes that grandma Liu witnessed a lake crab banquet in the Grand View Garden, and the cost was "equal to the food and clothing of a poor family for a whole year".
Compared with the prices in lake crab today, in fact, the prices in the middle of Qing Dynasty were even more outrageous. We can see Cao Xueqin's inner contradiction: he envies the elegance of crabs, but hates flaunting lake crab's bad habits.
fourth
spend freely
The bad habit of eating crabs, which is developed by the literati, will always come to an end with a single price, single materials and single eating method. Also in the middle of Qing Dynasty,
In Yuan Mei's Suiyuan Food List, boiled crabs with salt water, crab soup, fried crab powder and pumpkin meat mixed with crabs have appeared.
Even steamed crabs with eggs in their shells.
These different diets.
What's more commendable is that there is a title devoted to seafood in the Suiyuan food list. Although there are no sea crabs, this is already
It subverts the ranking of aquatic products by China literati since the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and breaks the strangeness of China people's understanding of the ocean for hundreds of years.
This is certainly related to the rapid development of food preservation technology and the improvement of transportation infrastructure in Qianlong dynasty in the18th century, which made seafood enter the dining tables of more people in China, but it is also related to the gradual knocking on the door of China by western powers.
Since then, Portunus pelagicus, a swimming crab in the eastern waters of China, a blue crab in the southeastern waters, and a crab in the Taiwan Province Strait and the western Pacific Ocean, have returned to the mainstream stage of China's diet after thousands of years. By the way,
Preserved in a few ancient underdeveloped areas, such as southern Zhejiang, eastern Fujian and Chaoshan, ancient eating methods such as raw pickled crabs and sturgeon rice have also recovered elegance.
This is not a historical coincidence, but the necessity for a nation to regain its heart as the sea.
Fifth place
five
Another metaphorical detail is that while the western powers bombarded the gate of China with abundant shipping profits, sea crabs returned to the dining table of China people.
Lake crab, who dominated China's food pedigree for more than 1000 years, also quietly climbed the battleship on the Yangtze River.
They hid at the bottom of the cabin in the dark, quietly and without passports, and embarked on a long road to Europe. In the next 100 years, the hairy crabs in China have gone through selection, hybridization, breeding and flooding of water system, and have lost their original appearance. However, people were surprised to find that lake crab suddenly became a German invasive creature.
These distant relatives of China hairy crabs have the appearance of green back, golden hair and white belly, and still retain the descriptions of high-quality lake crab in ancient books of Ming and Qing Dynasties.
Although the taste may not be better than Yangcheng Lake, the impeccable face value still attracts the favor of Chinese people.
Germans don't eat freshwater creatures, and most of lake crab, which has no natural enemies, is directly killed as fertilizer or put into a crusher as duck feed. However, after witnessing the eating habits of overseas Chinese, they began to use their brains. Some white people even bought it and baked it in the oven with a try. Anyway, crab shells are terrible, and they are not afraid of being burnt by excessive fire. This shows that,
Humans always have a similar talent for eating crabs.
The pleasure brought by crab meat, crab roe and crab paste is incomparable to any other food.
Let's see how people all over China take care of all kinds of crabs.
Panjin, Liaoning: Crabs and rice are cooked together.
| Jiangnan hairy crabs produced in Northeast China |
Due to the lack of literature, no one can tell that the river crab originated in Panjin today. This crab, like Jiangnan hairy crab, is rooted in the history of black land, which may be traced back to the agricultural development period in Northeast China. /kloc-After the middle of the 0/9th century, the Qing government was weak and gradually gave up the border ban on Northeast China. Korean immigrants entered the northeast in large numbers and began to grow rice. Panjin, as the nearest swamp area to Yalu River, became the earliest paddy field to be developed.
This almost repeats the history of northern immigrants entering the Yangtze River Delta and developing marshland into paddy fields during the Eastern Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties. Coincidentally, Panjin is adjacent to the Bohai Sea, and the Daliao River flows into the sea through this area. This is very similar to the Yangtze River Delta, adapting to the growth of migratory organisms.
Perhaps, Panjin's first lake crab entered as an invasive species in Taihu Lake Basin, but the local people gave it enough tolerance and even consciously raised it in rice fields.
Crabs catch pests for rice, loosen soil and provide organic fertilizer with feces;
And rice also provides rich bait for crabs. This * * * life made Panjin become the Jiangnan outside the customs as early as the Japanese occupation period.
In the 1960 s, Liaoning people took it
"Dozen roe deer, fish and crab climb rice pot."
To describe the wealth of Panjin. Like southern hairy crabs, Panjin hairy crabs are best eaten by steaming and boiling. Northerners are not good at cooking aquatic products. Only Panjin river crabs, steamed and dipped in ginger vinegar juice, can get the real taste. When southerners come to Panjin, locals treat their guests like this, which is enough to make them feel at home.
Perhaps it refers to the tradition that northerners eat jiaozi's "original soup becomes original food". In Panjin, crab rice is often cooked in the same pot, and the rice is cooked in the lower drawer and steamed in the upper drawer. When the crabs are fragrant, the rice will be cooked. The rice with crab is called crab rice by local people, and it is considered that the rice has crab flavor. In fact, its aroma and taste are mostly absorbed by the crab flavor in the same pot.
Tianjin: Purple Crab Hotpot
The big taste in the small crab
Purple crab is actually a subspecies of hairy crab, as big as a silver dollar and as small as a copper coin.
According to the aesthetic standards of Nanhu crab, this mini-player is actually not on the stage. However, there is a shortage of crabs in the north, especially in winter, and crab roe is the most abundant. Through the thin crab cover, it presents a layer of purple, with outstanding flavor and artistic conception. Nature is regarded as the top grade, and it will not hesitate to break the ice. In the high-end Tianjin restaurant, the "seven-star purple crab" is sold in winter, which is actually purple crab steamed with egg soup, and the crabs are arranged in the shape of seven stars. Although custard will play a certain role in heat preservation, and the juice oozing out when steaming purple crabs will make custard more fresh and sweet, in general, this is not an innovative or unique taste.
More importantly, it will chop the purple crab into small pieces, steam it and pour it with sweet and sour sauce, which is the best dish in Tianjin in winter: sour sand purple crab. However, the most enjoyable way to eat is the purple crab mixed hot pot that ordinary people in Jingu can cook. Tianjin people call assorted hot pot "pot". Clear soup for pots, in which tofu, cabbage, sea cucumber and abalone are rich and thrifty, and each household uses different materials. However, there are four things known as the four treasures of winter in Tianjin-whitebait, purple crab, iron finch and leek.
Iron finch is a migratory bird that lives in high latitudes. It is bigger than a sparrow and smaller than a pigeon. Sparrows' heads and breasts are usually soft and smooth, and the rest of the shelves are thrown into assorted pots to hang fresh soup. Cook the whole purple crab in a pot. Crabs are small and delicious, and they will be cooked in a few minutes. The soup seeps into the crab meat and is extremely soft and tender. You can also drink soup after eating crabs.
The soup in the purple crab assorted pot has a wonderful sweetness without losing the Cantonese side furnace.
Laizhou, Shandong Province: Big Crab with Scallion Oil
| When Shandong cuisine meets the taste of Shanghai |
People in Laizhou call the swimming crab "Big Crab", but people who have been to the local gluttony will think that the word "Big" is worthy of the name.
The large temperature difference between day and night, the large amount of nutrients brought by the Yellow River into the sea and the environment of the natural cold water fishing ground in Bohai Bay all bring extremely superior environment for the growth of Portunus.
In the seafood market in Laizhou, the largest swimming crab weighs one and a half pounds, which is unmatched by the swimming crab in Lianyungang and the swimming crab in Zhoushan.
Facing the swimming crab, chef Jiaodong also showed his rough and unrestrained cooking skills. Onion oil drenching is the most worthwhile way for Laizhou crabs. No need to cut, no need to dismantle, the whole crab is steamed; Take another pot and boil the oil until it smokes; Finally, remove the crab cover, spread with minced onion and ginger, and pour hot oil while it is hot. Bang, the big crab with scallion oil full of Shandong cuisine flavor is the best reward for autumn.
Chengdu, Sichuan: Spicy Crab
Treatment of Crabs after Entering Inland |
For the central and western regions of China that love spicy food, spicy crabs are not unique to Sichuan, but are found in Hunan, Jiangxi and Guizhou. And there is a growing momentum sweeping the catering rivers and lakes. In the eyes of people in the southeast coastal areas with weak taste, it is always a waste of time to treat crabs with spicy food. However, from the historical perspective of food development, the widely accepted aesthetics may represent the trend of future taste development. Among many spicy crabs, Sichuan cuisine is the most elegant and classic.
The selection of Sichuan spicy crab is eclectic, but one thing is that the crab meat is thick. Lake crab is small, and the crab meat is thin. When used in spicy stir-fry dishes, the seasoning often fully penetrates into the meat, and there is no longer crab flavor, so you can't eat enough. It is best to fry the giant bread crab in hot oil until it is broken, then add Chili powder, Chili slices, garlic and finally sprinkle a handful of celery. This spicy crab oil is rich in flavor. Another bottle of cold beer is the best scenery on a summer night in central Sichuan.
Huangshan, Anhui: drunken crabs in Huizhou
| The originator of Jiangnan drunken crab |
Jiangsu and Zhejiang have a tradition of making drunken crabs in autumn.
The drunken crab in Yangzhuang won the game with a little sweetness;
The drunken crab in Shanghai is salty and delicious with soy sauce.
Suzhou will use June yellow to make drunk crabs, which is probably the earliest drunk crabs that can be eaten every year, and many Soviet-style drunk crabs are drunk and ready to eat. The crab meat protein has not solidified yet, and it is translucent and gelatinous like drunken shrimp, with a long taste;
Hangzhou drunken crab has outstanding wine flavor, and dried osmanthus will be added to make crab meat have osmanthus fragrance, which is the best match between the two seasons.
But what most people in Jiangsu and Zhejiang don't know is that lake crab's drunken fashion in Jiangsu and Zhejiang probably originated from Huizhou in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, Qiantang River and Taihu Lake.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the traffic was inconvenient, but Huizhou people still poured into Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces to do business and sell things, and entered the imperial examination.
In order to ensure that the food brought to their hometown will not deteriorate on the way, Huizhou people have come up with various anti-corrosion measures.
Stinky mandarin fish and hairy tofu, including drunken crabs, all came from that period.
Huizhou certainly has many ready-made hairy crabs than Jiangsu and Zhejiang. But the clear water also fattens the hairy crabs in the river. Wash it, marinate it with white wine, ginger, garlic and salt, and then seal it. Can be stored for more than two months without deterioration. After opening, the crab claws are full of wine, which is a good table wine.
After the drunken crab spread to Jiangsu and Zhejiang,
Jiangnan literati who pay attention to the quality of life think that liquor tastes too strong, so they switch to mild yellow wine and add sugar, dried tangerine peel and pepper according to local tastes to enrich the taste of drunken crabs.
Over time, the original function of drunken crab seems to be weakened and ignored. Adding wine may be just to get rich wine aroma, kill bacteria and restore the elegance of raw pickled hand-washed crabs before Tang and Song Dynasties.
Suzhou, Jiangsu: fried rice cakes in June
| How to solve the problem in the days without hairy crabs |
June Yellow is actually an immature hairy crab. Crabs that should have been caught in September were sold as early as June and July before they grew up. It seems wasteful, but in fact, some people calculate that if one acre of pond can raise 1000 hairy crabs. However, if the breeding part of "June Yellow" can be planned in advance, 2,000 crab seedlings can be released. At this time, the crab larvae consume little water and nutrients, and can grow harmoniously and normally. When they grow into "June Yellow" in summer, some of them can be sold, and the rest can get more room to grow into adulthood.
Although there is no dense crab paste like hairy crabs, the rich crab yellow in June has begun to show the spirit of dominating the rivers and lakes. Obviously,
This shrewd calculation is likely to come from the minds of Jiangsu and Zhejiang people;
Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions, which are most suitable for the growth of lake crab, even gave birth to a good hotbed for the birth of June Yellow.
As the hometown of Taihu Crab and the location of Yangcheng Lake, Suzhou is naturally the most important producing area of June Yellow. In the eyes of Suzhou people, June yellow doesn't need to be taken seriously like hairy crabs. It is not the original steaming, boiling and other methods. Hairy crabs are expensive, sorry. However, the significance of June Yellow lies in satisfying one's appetite three months in advance, and applying some cooking techniques that are reluctant to start with hairy crabs to it.
These practices include, but are not limited to, spicy food, salt and pepper, soy sauce explosion and Zhajiang Noodles. But the most local feature of Suzhou is the fried rice cake in June. Suzhou cake group is the representative of Jiangnan cake, and Suzhou rice cake is famous for its soft and delicious taste. Stir-fry Suzhou rice cake with chopped June yellow, and add scallion, ginger slices, soy sauce and sugar.
The rice cake is fragrant and fresh in June.
Later, many restaurants learned the combination of fried rice cakes in June. Due to the seasonal restriction of June yellow, they switched to swimming crabs that can be bought all year round. It is widely circulated, and almost every family can cook it, but they forget the true face of this dish.
Hangzhou, Zhejiang: Crab stuffed oranges
| Millennium flavor of resurrection in ancient books |
Crab yellow is actually not a Hangzhou dish. More than 30 years ago, it was a legendary dish that only existed in ancient books. This ancient book, Old Wulin Stories, records the urban scenery of the Southern Song Dynasty.
Hangzhou, as the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, is bound to become a city where crabs are resurrected and oranges are brewed. Today, only two restaurants in Hangzhou can make the most authentic ancient crab stuffed oranges.
This dish is made of crab roe, crab paste and crab meat from lake crab. It is fried with orange juice and finally steamed with orange. It is sweet and sour. Judging from the great history of the development of Crab Lake,
It inherited the sugar crab before Tang dynasty, and the steamed crab dipped in vinegar juice after seven yuan.
It is also the combination of northern fruits and southern aquatic products during the great integration of northern and southern cultures in the Song Dynasty.
Therefore, it is an absolute necessity to brew oranges with crabs, and the national crab geography is the one standing at the crossroads.
Nowadays, sitting in a high-class restaurant near the West Lake in Hangzhou, eating crab yellow oranges is still full of elegance. Experts say that crab roe has four layers of flavor. The first bite is the thick and delicious crab meat in the orange, which is salty and sweet. This is the first taste; Pick up the orange cover and squeeze the pulp out of the orange cover. You will find that the taste of food in oranges begins to become elegant gradually, which is the second taste; Don't rush to drink soup after eating. When the soft orange shell is steamed by hand, the remaining pulp will be partially separated and the pulp will drip out of the juice. The sweet and sour taste will be mixed with the crab-flavored soup in the orange shell to produce a third taste. Finally, put down the orange and rub your hands repeatedly, and your fingertips will smell the fragrance of the orange. This is the fourth floor "smelling incense".
Fuzhou, Fujian Province: Crispy cakes and eight-treasure rice.
| A feast of mountains and seas in the city |
Some people use the feast of mountains and seas to describe Fuzhou cuisine, where the ingredients of land and sea have the best collision. This sentence is especially accurate for crabs.
Perhaps Fuzhou is the only city that can make both freshwater crabs and sea crabs into local characteristics.
Pangxian is a small freshwater crab that lives in the impact plain of Minjiang River, and may be a close relative of Tianjin purple crab. Some people in Fuzhou eat raw pickled crabs, which are pickled with salt and shrimp oil. The black crab paste is extremely fresh and tender. But the most popular ones are crispy and sauce.
In fact, it is not difficult to do this. Chopped, marinated in white wine, and baked in an oil pan with Fuzhou's special red distiller's grains until crisp. Finally, add soy sauce, sugar and spiced powder, and stir well to make a crisp cake. This is an indispensable side dish on the table of Fuzhou people, especially porridge.
The crisp and salty taste complements the silk of rice porridge, which is much better than fermented bean curd kimchi.
But you don't need fried sauce. Mix the marinated sauce with red distiller's grains and grind it into sauce. This is the most important seasoning of Fuzhou cuisine. Whether cooking or dipping sauce, there is an important value that is not lost to soy sauce. If you say fat horn crisp and fat horn sauce, it is Fuzhou people who make fresh water crabs into patterns. Then eight-treasure sturgeon rice is the best taste of sea crabs cooked by Fuzhou people.
Sturgeon is the common name of Fuzhou blue crab. This kind of big guy with hard shell and thick meat is found in many places along the southeast coast, especially Sanmen in Taizhou, Zhejiang, Dongtou in Wenzhou and Lianjiang in Fuzhou, Fujian. But most of the blue crabs are steamed as top-grade dishes in the banquet.
Fuzhou people's imagination of blue crabs broke through the sky, and some even made soup with blue crabs and longan as supplements for women of all ages. There is a folk saying that "red sturgeon longan soup is more nutritious than ginseng."
However, Fuzhou people's most successful interpretation of the blue crab is the eight-treasure sturgeon rice. Although there is only one word difference with the eight-treasure rice, the taste of the eight-treasure sturgeon rice is completely different from the former. It is not complicated, but it is a waste of time. Eight kinds of vegetarian dishes, such as pork belly, duck, ham, shrimp, peanuts, duck gizzards, mushrooms and winter bamboo shoots, should be steamed with glutinous rice. Cover the diced green crab with rice and steam thoroughly. Finally, the crab shell is red and bright, the eight-treasure rice is rich in color and multi-layered, and the fresh juice of the blue crab is integrated into the rice.
This big dish alone constitutes almost all the yearning of Fuzhou people for holidays in the past.
Chaoshan, Guangdong: raw pickled crabs
The power of poison
If the drunken crabs in Jiangsu and Zhejiang are highly imitated antiques to restore the Tang and Song customs, then the raw pickled crabs in Chaoshan are the real living fossils of China diet. Because of ancient traffic jams, many areas along the southeast coast have retained the tradition of eating raw portunus. For example, choking crabs in Ningbo, raw crabs in Wenzhou, but the finest is raw salted crabs in Chaoshan. because
Because many people want to eat it again after eating it once, it is called "poison".
The raw pickled crabs in Chaoshan are added with garlic, pepper, sesame oil, sugar, dried tangerine peel and coriander besides the necessary white wine, soy sauce and ginger slices. Although the curing time is not long, the saltwater environment in which sea crabs live is different from the fresh water environment of human body, which makes the safety of eating raw crabs higher than that of drunken crabs in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Chaoshan people like to eat white rice paste (rice porridge), and the side dish with porridge is called "miscellaneous salty". All kinds of raw salty seafood, including blood clams, shrimps, swimming crabs, oysters and thin shells, are the highest-grade miscellaneous salty.
Raw pickles taste great. Semi-solidified protein is tender and smooth when inhaled, and automatically slides into the throat. The salty crab paste stimulates the taste buds and makes people feel the sea breeze immediately. From then on, amber forever.
Guangzhou, Guangdong: Steamed Butter Crab
| Rich natural fried crab powder |
Butter crab is actually a kind of blue crab. It is not a subspecies of the blue crab, but
Some blue crab larvae, because they are too fat, accumulate too much ointment, unable to complete the process of re-shelling, and lack a round of developmental variants.
Only in the Pearl River Delta, which is extremely suitable for the growth of blue crabs, there is a high probability of such "childhood obesity" patients in the world of blue crabs. Incredibly, this mutant crab can survive. During the spawning season from June to August, they climb to the beach. Under the strong sunlight, the crab paste in its body breaks down into golden grease, and then permeates all parts of the body. The whole crab is covered with butter, the crab is orange-yellow, and even there are a little "oil beads" on the crab shell, so it is called butter crab.
So some people say:
June yellow is stunted and the butter crab is terminally ill.
As early as a few decades ago, butter crabs were mostly regarded as sick crabs and miscellaneous crabs, which were not worth cooking alone. They may be complained by diners that "the paste is scattered and the oil is leaking", so they can only choose to make fried crabs or porridge. However, after 1990s, Hong Kong gourmets, represented by Cai Lan, began to write articles praising the delicacy of butter crab, and the price went up all the way. Coupled with the good color of "rich to flowing oil", it hit the dreams of countless people in Guangdong and Hong Kong. Until today,
The sick crab of that year has become a symbolic totem like Nostoc flagelliforme.
As for the taste of butter crab, if the cream is full of fat and yellow meat, it will definitely give people great satisfaction.
When it comes to the taste of fried crab powder, it is basically the same.
Beihai, Guangxi: white-cut chicken dipped in crab sauce
| It's fishy and fresh, the smell of the South China Sea |
In essence, the sand crab juice in Beihai is actually the same thing as the crab sauce in Fuzhou-pickled crabs. The difference between them is that crabs are freshwater crabs, while sand crabs are seafood.
Clean this small crab by the sea, add garlic, ginger, white wine and sea water, mash and mix well. Sun in the tropical sun for a while, you will get juice, that is, sand crab juice. The taste of crab juice is salty and fishy, with the sweetness of seafood. For Guangxi people, this is an irresistible hometown flavor, just like stinky tofu in Changsha and bean juice in Beijing. Lovers love each other very much, and those who don't love dare not avoid it.
Crab juice is suitable for porridge and can also be used as a seasoning for cooking. Most restaurants in Beihai sell braised beans with crab roe, which is a famous local dish.
But the best way to eat it is to dip in boiled chicken instead of soy sauce. Smooth chicken rice and slightly gelatinous chicken skin bump into salty crab juice, which is the most delicious taste that can only be tasted on the South China Sea coast.
-End-
From the value of filling the stomach, the role of crabs is not great. But from the process of tasting and exploring the beauty of food, crabs are of great significance. Therefore, being kind to crabs on the dining table is an important sign to identify whether a person or a nation has enough interest in life. As Lin Yutang said in My Country and My People: "
We eat crabs out of love;
Out of necessity, we also eat bark and roots.
"