According to the records of Guanglu Temple in Nanjing, Zhu Yuanzhang's diet in June of the seventeenth year of Hongwu was as follows: breakfast: mutton fried, goose meat dragged, pork fried with yellow vegetables, vegetarian dishes with clear juice, steamed pig's feet, fried fresh fish, cooked meat, glutinous rice noodles and braised chicken. Total 12 channels.
Lunch: Shrimp with Chili vinegar, roasted goose, roasted sheep's head and feet, goose dam, salted mustard lamb tripe board, garlic vinegar white blood soup, five-flavor steamed chicken, yuan sauce sheep bone, spicy vinegar kidney flower, steamed fresh fish, five-flavor steamed gluten, sheep crystal horn, silk goose powder soup, three-fresh soup, bean chess noodles, chopped mutton with pepper, fragrant rice, etc. There are 24 lanes.
As for the content of dinner, there is no record in the history books.
With so many dishes, the emperor is too extravagant. Can he finish it? The truth is that everything in the early Ming Dynasty was in ruins, from the emperor to the people, frugality was the main thing, which was nothing compared with the delicacies in the late Ming Dynasty. However, since it was eaten by the emperor, of course, the grain supervisor has a few more tricks, and one more dish has one more choice. For example, Emperor Chongzhen's diet is too rich, but the types of porridge are only: steamed fragrant rice, steamed glutinous rice, steamed millet, rice porridge, coix seed porridge, western cold rice porridge, cold rice porridge, millet porridge, pine nuts and red dates porridge. There are other cakes, meat, vegetables and seafood on the table. You can serve whatever you want. The court food is too rich. Are there any other dishes? Of course. Let's start with staple food, dishes, seafood, soup and drinks.
During the Wanli period, Huang Yi recorded in the Pearl of Things that there are many kinds of court pasta, which are almost the same as now, such as steamed bread, flower rolls, cakes, flower pies, noodles and so on. , just like the pastry market. There are exquisite shapes, steamed rolls, Christina rolls and butterfly rolls. There are many kinds of cakes, such as steamed cakes, bean cakes, sand cakes, sugar cakes, sesame cakes and salt and pepper cakes. Flower pies can be used as snacks or as desserts. Chrysanthemum cake, sunflower cake, hibiscus cake, pomegranate cake and lotus seed cake are mashed into stuffing and made into cakes. Noodles include noodles, egg noodles, white noodles and so on. In short, pasta is rich enough.
Did the Ming emperors also like fancy rice? There are not many historical records, but a kind of "cool breeze rice" is put forward separately. Just listening to the name makes you feel very artistic, right? This is a kind of rice roasted in the scorching sun to cool off the summer heat: it is mixed with crystal rice, longan powder, borneol powder and milk, put into a gold extraction tank, then hung in an ice pool for thorough cooling, and cooked cold rice by conduction. We all know that pasta is the main food in the north and rice is the main food in the south. Judy, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, began to live in Beijing, and his staple food gradually became pasta.
There are many kinds of meat for meals, both ordinary poultry and exotic animals. Goose, for example, was a very precious food in Ming dynasty, and it was generally not very delicious. According to "Chao Yu Meat", there are many ways to eat it: burning, steaming and pickling, and there are nearly ten ways to eat it. There is also a dish called "Boiled Chicken with Cannon Dragon", which is actually made of horse meat and chicken. Horse meat represents dragon and chicken represents phoenix. According to Liu Ruoyu, the eunuch in the palace, the dishes in the first month are: spicy live rabbit, weasel beyond the Great Wall, live shrimp under the ice, cold-cut sheep tail, fried sheep belly, pig enema, sleeves, oil kidneys and so on. Emperor Chongzhen also had the habit of eating donkey meat.
Strange, why didn't you mention beef? Cattle had a high status in ancient China, and the ceremony of "too prison" was to use cattle, pigs and sheep as the ceremony of "less prison", which was lower than that of cattle. Cattle, as the most important tool for farming, can't be slaughtered casually, otherwise it will violate the law. The early Ming Dynasty was no exception, and even the emperor's imperial meals did not mention beef. But with the development of commodity economy, cattle can be slaughtered gradually. It is not clear when the Ming emperor first ate beef. However, at least during the reign of Emperor Wanli, beef was very popular in Beijing.
As for vegetables, Song Qifeng recorded in Shuo Zi that when Emperor Chongzhen started to eat, some coarse dishes were traditionally set in the canteen, such as bitter vegetable roots, bitter vegetable leaves, dandelion, reed roots, asparagus and garlic moss. Therefore, "folk seasonal dishes and snacks have also been collected." But how to eat it is not clear. Is it steamed with dipping sauce or fried? There are not many records in history books. However, as now, the emperor's royal meals also choose some seasonal vegetables according to the seasons, and there are fresh foods every month, and they change with the seasons. Rich materials, many patterns.
Most of the food in the palace is paid from other places, which creates a problem. With the traffic conditions at that time, the seafood and aquatic products shipped from the south were not fresh. For example, "Wan Ye Li Supplement" records that the shad in the south of the Yangtze River began to cook after being transported to Beijing, and the eunuch covered it up with other smells. The emperor gave it to cabinet ministers, but ministers often couldn't eat it. It was originally a delicious food, but it was inedible. On another occasion, the eunuch in the palace went to Nanjing to handle affairs and angrily asked the chef why he didn't serve fresh shad. The chef said every meal, which means you didn't see it? As a result, the eunuch looked at the shad carefully and said that the shape was similar, but why didn't it taste? July is a good season to eat shad, which is produced in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. Of course, eating in Nanjing is no problem. But Beijing is so far away, the heat is unbearable, and the seafood in the south has long stinked. It shows that the eunuchs in the palace are more eccentric on weekdays, and they are both curious and ignorant of "fresh" shad.
According to the season and place, you can eat oranges, Zhangzhou oranges, kumquat, Xishan apples, pomegranate and so on. There are many snacks, including all kinds of flower pies, candy, sugar cakes, tea with sugar, and some snacks with honey. Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first month is made of glutinous rice flour, stuffed with walnuts, sugar and roses, cooked with wine, or more exquisite than it is now.
There are many soups when serving, such as Peony Head Soup, Chicken Shortcake Soup, Mushroom Lantern Soup and Pork Longsong Soup. Some are cold drinks in summer, such as sour plum soup, grape soup and milk, and there is a special "Lu Ling drink" in which glutinous rice, old rice and millet are boiled in a pot to refine the condensed fog.
Dietotherapy and medicated diet were not new in Ming Dynasty. "Eating to Lose Weight" is about to come out. It was written by Hu Sihui, a famous doctor before Yuan Dynasty, and it is an advanced health-keeping cookbook. The circle of friends of literati in the Ming Dynasty was also popular for keeping in good health, sharing some fresh information from time to time. For example, Gao Lian became a big cow in the health care field by virtue of "Eight Records of Respect for Life". After talking so much delicious food, did the emperor eat healthily?
Modern nutrition experts believe that red meat such as beef and pork can supplement the protein of human body, but it is not advisable to eat more. The increase of fat is easy to cause fatty liver, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and so on. Usually cooking with less oil, salt and sugar is better. Generally speaking, steaming and cooking are healthier, and cooking with less oil is acceptable. The most unhealthy things are smoking, barbecue and frying, which are easy to produce carcinogens.
In the Ming Dynasty, the emperors had more meat and less dishes on each dish, and their cooking style was like that of Song Qifeng in Yan Shuo.
Steamed vegetables and boiled vegetables are not the mainstream of Ming Taizu's diet, and high-temperature baked food is particularly unhealthy. Besides, the emperors of the Ming Dynasty had a strong taste in food. Disgusting food is not delicious, so they must have more seasonings. Sesame oil, soy sauce, sweet noodle sauce and the like are all bought outside the palace at a high price. According to the Record of Proceedings, Ming Xizong's favorite food is grilled clams, fried shrimps, frog legs and dried bamboo shoots, and he also likes a dish. He cooked sea cucumber, mullet, shark tendon, fat chicken and pig's trotters into a dish, and the degree of greasy can be imagined. Eat watermelon in summer and put some salt on it! This food is unique enough, sweet and salty watermelon? Another example is Wang Yuchang's Poem of Chongzhen Palace, which mentions that Emperor Chongzhen and Empress fasted 10 days a month, and the food was too light and tasteless. Shang Shanjian also dealt with vegetarian dishes: plucking raw geese, removing intestines and other internal organs, stuffing vegetables, cooking them, taking them out immediately, washing them with wine and cooking them with sesame oil to make them pass the customs. If vegetarian dishes are made this way, then eating vegetables on weekdays will definitely be more greasy.
The question is, does everyone envy such an advanced imperial meal? For example, health experts-Jiangnan literati with exquisite and elegant life, not only do not envy, but also sneer at the emperor's food.
Lu Shusheng commented on Beijing cuisine in The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival:
Does that mean what this can taste? It's all spices. Xie once said that the "delicacies and delicacies" eaten by the emperor and Beijing officials were greasy and really rough. What was so dazzling? Gao Lian and Zhang Dai, healthy cows, have similar views. These Jiangnan literati advocate a light diet. Although it is a foodie, it is exquisite and healthy, and it is self-contained. On the other hand, it is the northern cuisine, which is heavy in taste and bold in style. Behind this is the improvement of the life interest of the literati class and the difference of food customs between the north and the south.
Therefore, generally speaking, the diet of Ming emperors was mainly pasta, with greasy eating habits and heavy taste, which was not a healthy way of eating. Do you still envy the emperor's royal meal?
References:
Qiu, the emperor's dining table: the court dining system in Ming Dynasty and related issues, Journal of National Taiwan University History, No.34, 65438+February 2004.
Chen Baoliang: Diet Life Fashion and Its New Trend in Ming Dynasty, Social Science Review, No.02, 2002.