Shixian ancient town
There are more than 100 kinds of representative dishes of salt dishes. Here are just a few of them: fireside beef, boiled beef, chrysanthemum beef, steamed fish with Zhao Hua powder, hibiscus fillets, Jing Wong mullet roe, shredded pork with winter bamboo shoots, buttered butter tea, and Ba people's cooking stoves. Only a few salt dishes can be seen above, and there are still many dishes that need to be found, excavated and restored.
In Sichuan cuisine series, many fine products and treasures are related to the development of well salt. According to Sichuan Scenery, the famous Sichuan dish "Boiled Beef" was born in Zigong Salt Industry. As early as the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Zigong Salt Field used cattle as a power car to pull brine. With the increase of salt wells and car bodies, there were more and more cows, which remained at around 30 thousand all the year round during Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty. With the sick and retired cattle needing to be slaughtered, there are more and more beef foods in Zigong Salt Field, which are more and more delicious, including boiled beef, fireside beef, chrysanthemum beef hotpot, hot yellow throat, ox head and oxtail soup. Boiled beef has become a very popular dish in Sichuan cuisine.
Fire whip beef is a special food in Zigong. In other places, there are similar "Deng Ying beef", but Huobianzi beef is good at its own unique characteristics. Its swordsmanship is wonderful, as thin as paper, with long fragrance and excellent taste, which is very suitable for eating with wine. It is famous all over the country for its fine selection of materials, unique production method and delicious taste. The raw material of fireside beef can only be the so-called "drilling beef" of cattle hind legs. When making, use a very sharp thin-edged knife to cut beef into pieces many feet long and seven or eight inches wide; In this way, the smell of fireside beef baked with cow dung cake is obvious. Later, it was grilled with charcoal, and the smell was gone, and it didn't taste as good as before. So it was baked with cow dung cake, which was kept secret at that time. Outsiders rarely know.
There is also a strange level in the food culture accumulation formed by Zigong salt dishes, which is the food of salt merchants. These salt merchants with deep pockets are as delicious as the imperial court in terms of their food; Ostentation and extravagance, not inferior to the government. Although they are not tired of eating fine food, they are not satisfied with the seafood and delicacies they have eaten for a long time, so they dig their brains and change their patterns. The more they eat, the more strange they are, and the more refined they are. It seems that they cannot be rich without it.
Salt merchants taste strange, and there is nothing unusual. Some so-called side dishes eaten by salt merchants are also extremely elegant. For example, a small dish of frog bellies needs hundreds of frogs to cut open their bellies and fry them with lard and sesame oil. In particular, we need to pay attention to the heat to make it fresh and crisp. A small dish of fried cowpea is actually hollowing out cowpea, mixing egg white and seasoning with finely cut minced meat, and then frying with sesame oil. To stir-fry mung bean sprouts, the chef needs to pick them with a needle, let the minced meat pour in bit by bit, and then stir-fry them into dishes. Even if you eat water spinach, you only need two tender leaves the size of a sparrow's tongue at the top. A few kilograms of water spinach can be made into a dish, fried with sesame oil and cooked in chicken soup, which is the so-called "crow's mouth".
A salt merchant has a dish, and a salt worker earns food for half a year. These extremely rich salt merchants, with their strange, strange and elegant dishes, are rare among local rich gentry.