In the Ming Dynasty, Chenghai County Records recorded: "There are olives in the fruit, and the small and sharp ones are better." "Vegetables have mustard greens, so you can add salt."
Olives and mustard tuber leaves (commonly known as mustard tuber leaves) are carefully cooked into black olive vegetables, which can stimulate appetite and digestion, help digestion and increase appetite.
The traditional production technology of Chenghai olive vegetable is as follows: clean olives, soak them in clear water and rinse them, and filter off acid water; Then choose pickled pickles, chop them with a knife, put olives and mustard leaves in an iron pot, add peanut oil and proper amount of salt, cook them with slow fire until they are 80% cooked, add chopped red pepper, garlic, a little sesame seeds, peanut kernels and other auxiliary materials, mix well and cook for five minutes.
Olive dish is a unique flavor dish in Chaoshan area. It is made of olive glycol and full mustard leaves. Its exquisite production technology can be traced back to the Song and Ming Dynasties. After processing, it has the characteristics of "clear, fresh, cool, tender and smooth", which can be said to be a wonderful flower in well-known Chaozhou cuisine.
The production method of olive vegetables is exquisite, and it must go through eight procedures: first, choose green and rich fresh olives to remove their bitter taste, then stir-fry them repeatedly with mellow peanut oil and salt to make them fragrant, keep their precious olive oil components, add selected mustard leaves, control different heat, and slowly stir together to make olive juice and sesame oil gradually penetrate into them, making them gradually black and shiny. After more than ten hours of slow fire and spices, the smooth and refreshing olive vegetables are ready. Taste it, leave the fragrance in the tongue and intestines, chew it carefully, and leave the fragrance in the teeth and cheeks, which has a unique charm of "stepping on flowers and returning to horseshoe fragrance". Moreover, olive vegetable is rich in precious nutrients and vitamins of olive oil, which is a natural green and healthy food of Chaoshan pickles.
Olive vegetable is a famous Chaoshan miscellaneous pickles, which is not only loved by Chaoshan people at home and abroad, but also praised by many foreigners after eating it. Not only that, olives are also an important raw material of Chaozhou cuisine, just like pickles and pickles. When frying rice or steaming meat, it can produce an unspeakable oily taste. I've always wondered why the green tender olives, cooked with pickles, turn into black olives as bright as ink. Under what circumstances did you invent black food with such a unique flavor?
There is a folklore that created olive vegetables: every summer, after the raging typhoon, olive flowers will always fall all over the olive forest. Olive flowers are immature green olives. At this time, it is still far from the autumn and winter picking period. Olive fruit small color is tender and smooth, and its taste is sticky. A clever daughter-in-law was reluctant to let the olive flowers rot in the ground, so she took a basket home and cooked it. Because in the old society, every household had a pickle jar, and there were always some pickle tails (leaves) piled on the top of the jar. The clever daughter-in-law took out these pickle leftovers, washed them and chopped them up, put them in a raw iron pot (pot) and cooked them with olive flowers. Her original intention was just to use the waste and save it for later consumption. I didn't want a miracle to happen, so the olive vegetable was born!
From a technical point of view, the key link in the invention of black olive vegetables is boiling olive resin. However, the invention and application of this technology was mastered by the ancestors of Chaoshan people-Nanyue people at the latest in the Tang Dynasty. This is because olive is a fruit tree native to South Vietnam. In addition to eating olive fruit, South Vietnamese people are also familiar with the planting techniques of olive trees, and can comprehensively utilize the various values of olive trees.
Liu Yao, a native of the Tang Dynasty, recorded in the book Ling Biao Ji: "Olive branches are towering, and their sons are ripe in late autumn. Southerners value it and eat it raw. Although it tastes bitter and fragrant, it is better than chicken. There are savages, many children, steep, unable to climb the ladder. But if you carve an inch under their roots and put salt in it, all the children will fall down overnight. Peach gum and other creams are produced on branches, which are picked by southerners and fried with their skin leaves, which is called olive candy. Use the gap of the mud boat, buckle the glue paint when it is dry, and reinforce the ear when it is wet. " It is mentioned here that the branches and leaves of olive trees secrete a kind of milk fat, which will turn into black jelly after boiling, so it is called olive sugar.
Olive resin can be used not only as adhesive for ships, but also as spices or medicinal materials, with good quality. In Song Dynasty, Zhou Qufei mentioned a kind of "olive fragrance" in Answer to the Outside of the Ridge, saying that it was "made of olives, shaped like vinyl syrup, and had a unique meaning of clearing dust, which was better than Coptis chinensis and Liquidambar formosana".
The olive culture inherited by Chaoshan people from South Vietnamese people is first manifested in their hobby of olive fruit. Chewing olives is like drinking kungfu tea. Unless it is the right person, it is difficult to understand the taste. When recording olives in local chronicles, the most important thing is quality. For example, Jiaqing's Chenghai County Records said that olives are "beautiful if they are small, but slightly inferior if they are round." Guangxu's "Haiyang County Records" said: "Its species are bluish yellow. It's green, only yellow, and it's better to have three ridges at the tip. " The three-edged olive mentioned here originated from Lutang Town, Jinyu, Chaoyang. In 2005, a 500-year-old king of olive trees produced 158 kg of fruit, and got 527,000 yuan through auction, which set an amazing transaction record.
The second is the comprehensive utilization of olive trees. Olive trees are tall and straight, and the wood is relaxed and soft, so Zhang Dai's "Night Sailing Boat" says: "This wood can be used as a boat, but everything floats when it crosses." According to the ancients, the biggest feature of shipbuilding is that it doesn't need nails. With olive trees, the wood and adhesives needed for shipbuilding can be solved, and sailing becomes easy. So we say that not only the black olive vegetables of Chaoshan people may be related to olive sugar, but also the lifestyle such as sailing may be related to olive sugar. This may answer why the ancient Chaozhou Chamber of Commerce was so famous, and why the ancient waterway: "Wanli Shitang" started in Chaozhou and reached a foreign country through the South China Sea Islands.