With the arrival of summer, as a special product of South China, fiery red litchi is also full of streets and lanes. From Du Mu's famous sentence "The world of mortals rides a princess and laughs, no one knows it is litchi" to Su Dongpo's famous sentence "300 litchi a day, so I will grow up to be a Lingnan person", litchi enjoys numerous reputations, and its sweet litchi is deeply loved by people. Li Shizhen introduced litchi in Compendium of Materia Medica: "Eating litchi regularly can nourish the brain and strengthen the body, cure carbuncle and furuncle, stimulate appetite and strengthen the spleen. Drying can replenish vitality and is a tonic for the old, the weak and the sick. Dog meat is also called "fragrant meat" or "broken sheep" in some areas of China. Dog meat is not only high in protein, but also has obvious effects on enhancing human disease resistance, cell vitality and organ function. Eating dog meat can strengthen people's physique. Chinese medicine believes that dog meat has the function of warming and tonifying kidney yang, and is effective for patients with kidney yang deficiency, impotence and premature ejaculation.
For China, dog meat has been in the menu for a long time, which is also a kind of food culture. Li Shizhen, a great medical scientist in Ming Dynasty, recorded in Compendium of Materia Medica that eating dog meat has the effects of "calming the five internal organs, intellectual fit, benefiting qi, tonifying kidney, nourishing stomach, warming waist and knees, strengthening tendons, nourishing five strains and seven injuries, nourishing blood vessels and strengthening lower energizer". Dog meat is regarded as a delicious food by many people, and it is also regarded as a nourishing medicine beneficial to health. In addition, dog meat tastes mellow, so it is favored by people. There is a custom of eating dog meat in winter all over China. There are many proverbs about dog meat, such as "Eat dog meat without bedding", "Dog meat rolls three times, the gods can't stand it", "Dog meat smells like Buddha jumps over the wall", "Dogs have no way to go on the summer solstice", "Fish give birth to dogs on the summer solstice, and there are several feasts every year" and so on. The charm of dog meat is evident!
Dog meat and litchi, two seemingly unrelated foods that are easy to get angry in TCM theory, were brought together on the hot summer solstice, and a "food festival" was born. Northerners "eat watermelons with stoves" in winter, while Yulin people "eat hot pot with bare arms" in summer. Yulin is known as "dog meat litchi summer solstice dish". The solstice in summer is an important festival in Yulin, and this time is also the golden season for fresh litchi to go on the market. In this early summer festival, at night, the dog meat stalls in the urban-rural fringe and streets are packed, full of people and extremely hot. People sit around the hot pot at the dining table, eating dog meat and tasting fresh litchi, or soaking litchi in wine and drinking litchi wine, chatting while eating, punching cards and guessing codes, and being in high spirits. Interested people will hold a banquet all night, which is called the "carnival" in Yulin. That kind of fun and carefree, that kind of incisively and vividly is unparalleled, which is also a "unique skill" of Yulin. In Guangxi and even the whole country, there is no famous bodhisattva in the south. Even on this day, people from Wuzhou, Guigang, Nanning and other places around us drove specially to attend this "feast" of Yulin people. The scene is spectacular.
It can be eaten raw or soaked in wine. Especially like Yulin people, litchi soaked in wine with dog meat is both fragrant and delicious, and the sweetness of litchi is even more irresistible.