A guide to court diet in Ming dynasty

Various staple foods and desserts

Although vegetarianism has gone out of shape, the staple food, dessert and fruit in the palace are still different and varied.

The most common staple foods are big steamed bread, small steamed bread, steamed mandarin duck rice, horse, beef, pork and mutton rice. In addition, there are many kinds of dessert cakes, such as big silver ingot, small silver ingot, black and white cake, manna cake and big oil cake. There are many seasonal delicacies in various festivals, such as "Twist", "Bao Fan Er" and "Smoked Insects".

"Twist" symbolizes the beginning of a new flavor throughout the year. The method is to take the ear of wheat, cook it, remove the awn shell and grind it into strips. "Bao Er Rice" is to chop refined fat, garlic and ginger into beans and mix rice, and then wrap them with lettuce leaves to eat, which is equivalent to meatballs. "Smoked insects" can only be eaten on the second day of the second lunar month every year. They are fried with millet flour and jujube cakes, or spread into pancakes with batter. When osmanthus flowers bloom, the palace also makes cakes with osmanthus and flour.

Many of these festivals and customs in the Ming Dynasty were preserved in the Qing Dynasty and even passed down to this day.

American ingredients that have not yet appeared.

Although there are many kinds of food in the Ming Dynasty, there are still some things that cannot be eaten!

For example, I want to eat three fresh potatoes, sorry, there were no peppers and potatoes at that time, so I could only make braised eggplant for you; Want to chew corn, sorry, this thing has never been seen by the Ming dynasty; There is no way to eat refreshing cold tomatoes, they are still in their hometown!

Don't be surprised, that's the truth. Corn, peanuts, tomatoes and peppers, which are very common today, were not available in the Ming Dynasty more than 500 years ago. It will be decades before they are introduced to China. In another hundred years, zucchini, potatoes, sweet potatoes, kidney beans and pineapples can also be served on people's tables. And the source of all this is far away in the United States on the other side of the ocean.

There are generally three paths for these crops to enter China: first, from India and Myanmar to Yunnan; second, from Central Asia along the Silk Road through the Hexi Corridor to the Central Plains; and third, from the sea to the southeast coastal areas of China. Among them, the third path has the largest incoming volume and the most far-reaching influence. Initially, the planting areas of these crops were limited to the southwest mountainous areas and the southeast coast. Later, people found that these ugly new plants are easy to plant, with high survival rate and high yield, especially in the barren north, which is of great significance to alleviate the famine caused by climate and seasonal conditions such as drought, lack of rain and lack of green crops, and reduce the death caused by hunger.

As a result, in the next two or three hundred years, the planting area of corn, sweet potato, potato and peanut has been expanding, almost all over the country. High-yield American crops have helped people in the out-of-season survive the famine, reproduce, feed hundreds of millions of people in China and promote the sustained population growth in China.