It enjoys a high reputation in the world. Overseas Chinese and China expatriates make a living overseas, and the most common industry is catering. There should be a China restaurant in China, and the food in China can be said to be "eaten" by the world. This phenomenon was keenly observed by the revolutionary pioneer Dr. Sun Yat-sen as early as the beginning of this century. Dr. Sun Yat-sen said in his book "General Plan for the Founding of the People's Republic of China": "After the evolution of modern civilization in China, everything fell behind, but the progress of diet was not as good as that of other countries." Dr. Sun Yat-sen's statement is very correct. In fact, as Dr. Sun Yat-sen said, Chinese civilization was shattered by western civilization in modern times, and people of insight had to feel their pulse. However, China restaurants are completely different. They can actually land in Europe and America, spread all over the world and be invincible. Today, there are China restaurants in almost every corner of the world. This sharp contrast has attracted academic attention, but there is no more convincing explanation. We believe that it is not an isolated and accidental phenomenon that China's restaurants can spread all over the world, and the reason is inextricably linked with China's food culture. Therefore, discussing some characteristics of China's food culture will help us to explain this phenomenon.
When it comes to China's food culture, many people will praise China's recipes and the color, fragrance, taste and shape of Chinese food. However, if we want to discuss food culture from a comparative perspective, we can operate by grasping the essence of China food culture. No comparison, no approval. Here, the author thinks that the more feasible way is to explore China's food culture from the perspective of food lifestyle. In fact, China's food culture actually refers to China people's food lifestyle. If we want to talk about China's food culture, we must involve China culture, and the relationship between them is extremely close. Therefore, it is necessary for us to explain some characteristics of China culture first.
What kind of culture is China culture? It is necessary to know the geographical environment of China's early culture, because the earlier it is, the greater the environmental constraints on culture. China is located in the southeast of the Asian continent, with vast deserts, grasslands and Gobi in the northwest and vast sea in the southeast. Although the land in the Yellow River Basin, the main hotbed of China culture, is very fertile, other environments are harsh, windy and rainy, and living conditions are not good. After the emergence of civilization, the culture at that time showed a strong tendency of realism, with a strong ethical and moral color. Because what this society needs is humility and less desire, and when a society needs something, it is often the time when it lacks something. China culture showed the characteristics of precocity from the beginning. Marx once thought that Chinese civilization was a precocious baby, and her development process had obvious advanced characteristics. On the other hand, western civilization is completely different. Childhood of Western Culture Greek civilization was written into the history of civilization with its unique wave-warm atmosphere. Marx once thought that Greek civilization was a normal baby. In the process of development, the living soil of China culture gradually dried up and became unsuitable for agricultural production. Because soil and other factors are very unfavorable to agricultural production, the actual suffering can not produce cultural romance, so Chinese civilization runs through with its strong moral and abstinence characteristics. In the pre-Qin period, hundred schools of thought heckled each other and tried to achieve the same goal, with the aim of establishing an ideal world without struggle. But this is just an ideal. During the Warring States period, disputes among countries continued. Compared with their strength, Qin finally ruled the country by encouraging military exploits and rewarding farming, which is the aspiration of the people. The struggle between the world and how people live is also a historical choice. Only after reunification will there be no such situation as "how many people are kings and how many people are emperors". ? (Cao)
In the pre-Qin period, the Chu state in the south of China also showed romantic thoughts, but it was quickly enveloped and submerged by the realistic thoughts in the north. After Qin Shihuang unified China, all the books were in the same language, and the history after that was the history of the emperor's reunification. In order to maintain this unified situation, the feudal society in China allowed the king to have supreme authority, but at the same time gave him many feudal ethics constraints; China has the earliest civil service system in the world-the imperial examination system; In the history of China, there was an upright official named upright official, who was sung and worshipped as soon as he appeared. Therefore, although China has no religion in a strict sense, some of its characteristics are similar to religion, and it also has its own gods; If this phenomenon is also regarded as religion, then Chinese religion is extreme idealism in the realistic sense. The extreme idealism in the history of China also came into being, and it also had gods, but the gods it created were all incarnations of real people, and real people could not act as ideal gods. Therefore, in the history of China, until today, there have been endless movements of creating gods. In other words, the religion of China people is polytheism, not monotheism. God of Wealth, God of Medicine, God of Kitchen and Mazu are all worshipped as gods. There are two other characteristics of China culture: one is the absolute pursuit of application, and at the same time, everything that is not practical is put an end to. From the history of science and technology in China, we can see that all practical technologies in history, such as agricultural science and technology and medicine, are well developed, but some related non-practical things can't be developed. Mohist's knowledge of optics and geometry in the pre-Qin period failed to develop after Confucianism dominated in the Han Dynasty. There are no basic disciplines such as physics, chemistry and biology in China. Of course, in the process of the emperor's pursuit of immortality, alchemy is also very developed, which does contain chemical knowledge. China's handicraft industry is very developed, but modern machine industrial production such as steam engine was not invented by China. Before the15th century, most of the inventions in the world were made by China people, but modern science, which needed a series of experimental means after modern times, failed to be made in China. China culture showed unique kindness characteristics. The core of Confucius' thought is "the benevolent loves others". Because of kindness, China people carry out the system of multi-child inheritance, which on the one hand can divide the property, on the other hand limits the long-distance migration, which is of great significance to the resettlement of China people. This inheritance system restricts the development of business, so the idea of having more children and more happiness comes into being. The concept of many children and many blessings has increased the population of the society, resulting in more children and many blessings. Social and demographic pressure has always existed. As long as the productive forces of society can support as many people, there will be as many people.
Many characteristics of China's food culture are embodied in the food culture, which directly affects the development of China's food culture. First of all, because of population pressure and other reasons, China people's diet began in the pre-Qin period, that is, food was the main food, with less meat and more food, supplemented by vegetables. This is a typical dietary structure. Among them, rice is the staple food, while vegetables are for the next meal, that is, to help rice swallow. Why should I help you swallow it? That's because the staple food is not delicious, and there must be a substance to help people eat it. Of course, vegetables and salt have something in common, but they are different from salt. The primary purpose of promoting China cooking this time is to decorate the diet and make the unpalatable food exquisite; Secondly, due to the pursuit of shirts in China culture and the developed handicraft industry in China, the food processing technology in cooking is second to none in the world, which embodies the characteristics of shirts in China culture. All these make China's food culture have the following characteristics. First, China's cooking technology is developed, and many things that westerners think can't be eaten become appetizing at first sight through the work of chefs in China. Second, China people have a wide range of recipes, and they are eating everything they can, without any taboos; Third, China has a lot of works about famine relief, in order to prepare wild vegetables to satisfy hunger in famine years; Fourthly, China people regard the pursuit of food as the greatest pleasure in life, and eating becomes the first demand. Because China people can't follow one's inclinations in diet, there are poems as evidence:
It's too late to patrol the red sun for days, and you will know the truth in your stomach.
It is not difficult to live a full life, only when the weather is favorable.
Therefore, eating is difficult to wear for a long time, so eating occupies a special position in China people's lives, and evidence emerges endlessly.
In addition, we can analyze some characteristics of western food culture, which may deepen our understanding of China food culture. In the western diet, animal husbandry was the mainstay at first, and the proportion of meat in the diet has always been high. In modern times, the proportion of cultivation has increased, but the proportion of meat in the diet is still higher than that of China people. Because meat is naturally delicious, there is no need for westerners to decorate their diet. The natural delicacy of internal food limits the development of cooking. When Europeans show off their wealth, they often show it with food tools, such as the number and luxury of various utensils. In addition, I don't pursue eating things that are easy to satisfy in life as the supreme happiness in life. Westerners' pursuit of life is exactly the same as a saying of China, which can be highly summarized as "full of warmth and lust". They pursue love more. Western culture embodies a kind of "love culture", while China culture embodies a kind of "eating culture".
However, we should also point out that many features of China's diet are invisible in the daily life of ordinary people. Palace diet and shop diet can better and more comprehensively show these characteristics. People's holiday diets, such as the Spring Festival, may partly show these characteristics, but after all, the Spring Festival is a flash in the pan in 365 days of the year.
There is no good or bad culture, and there is no good or bad food culture. The difference is only the difference in lifestyle or diet under different environmental conditions. But how to understand and analyze this difference is very important. The purpose of this book is to make an attempt based on this point, and it is not known whether it can be recognized by most readers. In most cases, I belong to the kind of "distant chef" who doesn't know how to cook, and I'm not a gourmet, but I know that "a meal and a bowl of porridge are hard to come by". In this sense, I will write down some of my views on China's food culture, hoping to get suggestions from local authorities.
[Edit this paragraph] Diet in Beijing
-Eight bowls in Beijing
kanazawa
Food is the most important thing for the people, and eating is the first need in life. Without food, no one can survive, whether China or foreigners. What to eat, how to eat, every country, every nation, every family, everyone has their own way of eating.
Diet is a kind of culture, and China cuisine is world-renowned. It is an indisputable fact that China's food is delicious and foreigners love it. China's food culture has a long history. For thousands of years, people have formed eight cuisines in China through continuous summarization, namely Shandong cuisine, Sichuan cuisine, Guangdong cuisine, Fujian cuisine, Jiangsu and Zhejiang cuisine, Hunan cuisine and Anhui cuisine.
Beijing is a world-famous ancient capital and historical and cultural city with a history of more than 3,000 years. Emperors of past dynasties established Beijing as their capital, which accumulated profound contents for Beijing culture. Food culture is one of the contents of various cultures, which is extensive and profound. Just like the formation and evolution of the eight Chinese cuisines, it has gone through a long historical process. Although Beijing cuisine is not among the eight major cuisines, it is one of the major local cuisines in China.
Beijing's special political position in history makes people living in Beijing complex and diverse, which is reflected in the diet. People from all walks of life have different tastes and diets. There are eight authentic cuisines, local snacks, roast and roast of Manchu, Mongolian, Hui and Korean nationalities, and foreign fast food imported from other places. Now the catering market is unprecedentedly prosperous. Everything can relieve hunger and hunger.
I've eaten everything I need to eat. What else is delicious? People want to know what old Beijingers eat. It can be said that there were not many really rich people in old Beijing before liberation. Princes and nobles eat delicacies, while ordinary people can fill their stomachs. In case of a wedding, just eat eight bowls.
What are the "eight bowls" in old Beijing? People under 60 have never seen it, and some have never heard of it, let alone eaten it. After eating all the "good restaurants" in Beijing, many modern people are nostalgic and miss the delicious food in old Beijing.
In fact, the "Eight Bowls" in old Beijing is an ordinary and affordable dish, that is, eight kinds of chicken, duck and fish are carefully cooked, and the delicious food on the table is held in traditional porcelain bowls. "Eight bowls", to put it bluntly, are Sanhuang chicken, yellow croaker, elbow, meatball, rice flour meat, braised pork, loose meat and ribs.
The "eight bowls" in old Beijing are indispensable delicacies in the life of old Beijingers. Birthdays, weddings, funerals and children's full moons are all indispensable. Because there were not so many restaurants and restaurants before liberation, most people were poor, so they always set up greenhouses at home and in the village to entertain relatives and friends. So in those days, the chef who did this kind of food business was called "the greenhouse runner".
Usually there are four dishes, four cold dishes, four hot dishes, eight dishes and eight bowls on the banquet table. Later, restaurant dishes gradually evolved into "four cold" or "six cold", eight hot dishes, ten hot dishes and twelve hot dishes. For the sake of beauty, the bowl was changed into a dish.
Although the "eight bowls" in old Beijing are popular among the people, they were once delicious in the court. According to legend, when Empress Dowager Cixi fled, everyone had a happy family occasion and tasted the folk "eight bowls". After returning to Beijing, I asked the chef to cook according to the folk custom and entertain the civil servants.
The "eight bowls" in old Beijing were once lost, and few people can cook them until now, so people are also unpalatable. However, I heard that the "Impression of Old Beijing" recently located in Wanping Theater of Lugouqiao sought the secret recipe of making "Eight Bowls" in order to promote the folk food culture, and finally found an elderly chef who could make "Eight Bowls" of old Beijing. The old man presented the recipe for making eight bowls. According to this oral formula, through repeated trial production, it finally succeeded. After the launch of Impression of Old Beijing, the eight bowls of old Beijing are said to be full of praise, and authentic old Beijing-style dishes are finally revealed to the world. At present, many new varieties of "Eight Bowls" in Impression of Old Beijing are developed and innovated on the basis of traditional production. According to the taste of modern people, eight bowls of seafood, eight bowls of beef and mutton, eight bowls of venison, eight bowls of poultry and eight bowls of imported goods were introduced one after another. When consumers come to "Impression of Old Beijing", they can not only eat the economical "eight bowls", but also watch the wonderful stunt performance of "Old Tianqiao Acrobatic Art Troupe", which really makes people linger.
[Edit this paragraph] Muslim food
Zhang baoshen
Beijing is a multi-ethnic city in China, among which there are more than 200,000 Muslims of all ethnic groups who believe in Islam. Beijing's long history and culture and the charm of a modern metropolis have attracted more and more people from all walks of life in Islamic countries to visit, visit and travel, and international exchanges have become increasingly frequent. Especially in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, more than 40 athletes from Islamic countries will participate, and Muslims from more than 65,438+000 countries and regions will also visit Beijing. This undoubtedly provides unprecedented development opportunities and higher requirements for the halal catering industry in Beijing.
Muslim food in Beijing has a long history and unique flavor, which is an important part of Beijing's food culture. The origin of Muslim food in Beijing is synchronized with the introduction of Islam into Beijing, with a history of thousands of years. In the court cookbook Diet in the Yuan Dynasty, there are records of Qingzhen cuisine. A widely circulated encyclopedia of life in the Yuan Dynasty, The Complete Collection of Household Necessities, has a special chapter on "Huizhou cuisine", which covers many varieties of Huizhou cuisine. There is also a lyric in the Yuan zaju "The Leopard and the Monk Return to Vulgarity": "The fat mutton sold by butcher Liu is a whole hoof ... Ma Huihui's biscuits are very big, and all the dishes are rotten with monosodium glutamate ..." This shows that it has become quite common in Beijing and halal food in the Yuan Dynasty.
During the Yongle period of the Ming Dynasty, "the prince swept the north" and made Beijing its capital. A large number of Muslims moved from the south to the north to settle in Beijing, which made the southern halal food production technology spread to Beijing and promoted the development of halal food in Beijing. From the Yuan and Ming Dynasties to the Qing Dynasty, after hundreds of years of development, the variety of halal food in Beijing has been very rich, and various dishes and snacks with unique flavor and good color and fragrance have been introduced into the palace and become imperial meals. Later, some of them spread outside the palace and became popular in the city, becoming famous halal food. "Flying like honey", "Sweet-scented osmanthus mutton", "Sesame tenderloin" and "salt-exploded powder pills" are still the specialties of Muslim hotels in Beijing, and were once the imperial meals of the Qing Dynasty.
Among the royal banquets in the Qing Dynasty, the Muslim all-sheep banquet is one of the court banquets after the Manchu-Han banquet. Yuan Mei, a poet in the Qianlong period, wrote in "Eating with the Garden": "There are 72 kinds of whole sheep method, and only 18 or 19 kinds can be eaten at a time. This is the skill of killing dragons, which is difficult for a chef to learn. Although a plate and a bowl are all mutton, they taste different. " The whole lamb feast is to cook dishes with different tastes and names with different parts of the whole lamb, either roasted or rinsed, or boiled or fried. It is necessary that all the names of dishes do not show the word "sheep" and are replaced by vivid aliases. 1968, Premier Zhou Enlai hosted a banquet in honor of visiting Pakistani guests, and invited Yang Yonghe, a famous Muslim chef of Youyishun, to prepare an all-sheep banquet and various Muslim dishes for the guests, which were well received by the guests. Today, the lamb feast in Muslim restaurants such as "Hongbinlou" is still a brand dish.
During the Republic of China, with the development of national industry and commerce, the halal catering industry in Beijing formed a mature market. There are dozens of Muslim restaurants in Qianmen area, such as Yuanxingtang, Liangyixuan, Tonghexuan, Tongyixuan, Xiyu Pavilion, Xisheng Pavilion, Qingyan Pavilion, Cuifangyuan Pavilion, Changyue Pavilion, Cohabitation Pavilion (Pie Week), Enyuanju (Fried Acne) and so on. In addition, there are Rui Hou Zhen in Zhongshan Park, Donglaishun in Dong 'an Market and Yishun in Xidan. 1930, the Muslim restaurant "Xilaishun" located at the bustling Xidan intersection opened, which immediately caused a sensation in Beijing. The reason is that the manager of Xilaishun Restaurant is Zhu Xiang, a famous Muslim chef in Beijing. Zhu Xiang, formerly known as Zhu Lianxiang, is a famous innovator of Qingzhen cuisine. Because of his superb cooking skills, he worked in the palace in the late Qing Dynasty. In the early years of the Republic of China, he went to restaurants such as "Liangyixuan" to guide cooking skills and brought out many outstanding disciples. Zhu Xiang is well informed and open-minded. On the innovation of pure cuisine, he boldly absorbed some skills of western food and China North and South cuisine, and created more than 100 kinds of new Muslim cuisines, such as "fried sheep tail", "raw roasted mutton", "fried Gansu chicken" and "fried belly", which created Muslim seafood cuisines and enjoyed a good reputation among peers and diners. Ma, a master of Peking Opera, is a Hui nationality. He often went to Xilaishun for banquets and meals, and forged a deep friendship with Zhu Xiang. As a result, many celebrities in the cultural and drama circles rushed to visit Xilaishun. After the peaceful liberation of Beijing, many important conferences such as Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Conference and Xinjiang Peaceful Liberation Conference held reception banquets here. Due to the innovative efforts of many Muslim chefs, such as Zhu Xiang, Muslim food in Beijing has become a unique and famous food in Beijing's food culture.
According to various published Beijing halal recipes, there are more than 500 kinds of halal dishes in Beijing. Many time-honored brands, such as beef and mutton with sauce in Yueshengzhai, sugar-roasted meat in Dashunzhai, pies in pie week, lamb chops with bean sauce, white water on sheep's head, tripe of fried chicken with deep-fried belly, and cakes cut by rice cake king, have enjoyed a good reputation at home and abroad after hundreds of years.
Recently, the second Muslim cooking service skill competition was held in Beijing. Nearly 300 contestants from more than 50 Muslim food enterprises participated in the competition to prepare for the Olympic Games. With the east wind of the 2008 Olympic Games, the halal catering industry in Beijing will surely develop rapidly.
United States of America
Looking back at American food history and habits, you will find many interesting things that you never knew. At the beginning of the tenth century, rich Americans liked to eat swans, ordinary people ate pork chops, steaks, chickens, ducks and mutton, and poor people only ate vegetables. At that time, the poor liked to eat a kind of "delicious cake", which was made of minced pork, raisins, green plums, sour wild fruits and camphor grass. Lobster, oyster, crab meat and mutton, which we think are treasures on the table, were considered unsightly at that time and could only be used as pig feed, but not for human consumption.
American food history and habits, you will find that there are many things you will never know. At the beginning of the tenth century, rich Americans liked cranes, ordinary people ate pork chops, steaks, chickens, ducks and mutton, and the poor only ate Zhu Lai. At that time, the poor liked to eat a kind of "delicious cake", which was made of minced pork, raisins, green plums, sour fruits and grass. Dragon lanterns, oysters, crab meat and mutton, which we now consider to be treasures on the table, were not considered popular at that time, but were only used for feeding and could not be eaten by people. At that time, when the owner went hunting, he returned with a full load, and often made the entrails of his prey into patties for his servants to eat, because this suburb was regarded as a "practical thing". By the 1 8th century, Americans still ate1meat and poultry, including geese, rabbits and roasted pine.