Empress Dowager Cixi takes Empress Dowager Cixi as an example. Every meal must meet the standard of 108 dishes. Even if the Emperor is as big as Japanese sumo wrestlers and has an amazing appetite, a person can't eat so many dishes anyway.
Four meals a day because of the different eating habits of the emperor, "four meals a day" became the exclusive banquet of the royal family. In the ancient Zhou Dynasty, in addition to four meals a day, the king of Zhou also added "night meals". During the Han and Tang Dynasties, the emperor still practiced the system of "four meals a day".
Evaluation, as the emperor's professional package, seems grand, but it can't stand scrutiny. All the food eaten by the emperors of the Qing Dynasty was kept in Dining Base.
An egg story was recorded in Raymond's Notes on the South Pavilion in the late Qing Dynasty. Emperor Guangxu likes to eat eggs. He eats four eggs every day. However, he doesn't know the real price of eggs. The price given to the emperor by the Ministry of Internal Affairs is 34 taels of silver. Guangxu once asked his teacher Weng Tonghe, "Eggs are delicious, but can you afford such an expensive thing?" It can be seen that the corruption of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was serious at that time.
Imperial cuisine, which sounds like a glittering word, implies power, luxury, richness and delicacy. Later generations naturally made many imitation meals and court dishes, with glittering signs and high prices. Numerous associations and stories are also derived from this.
However, if we really look through the classics and carefully look at the food eaten by emperors in past dynasties, it is nothing more than sadness in abundance and helplessness in human nature in abundance.
The dishes of imperial cuisine are generally meat and seafood, including noodles, rice and soup, and there are many cooking methods such as frying, frying and steaming. In the imperial diet of the Ming Dynasty, besides common livestock products such as pigs, geese and chickens, poultry such as quails and pigeons and donkey meat were also included in the diet list.
For example, on 1 1 day of the first month of 1784, Gan Long had dinner in the same paradise. The menu includes: braised duck hotpot with wine, fried cabbage hotpot with fat chicken oil, fresh hotpot with red and white bird's nest duck, shredded chicken with fat bird's nest, fried duck in pot with duck loin and mushrooms, fried chicken with winter bamboo shoots, scrambled eggs, steamed fat chicken with deer tail, stuffed duck with hundred fruits, steamed buns with elephant eyes, stuffed duck and stuffed buns.
If you give me this meal, I may go crazy when I see ducks in the future, and I will be so fat that there is no food to match. Moreover, it can be seen that even the imperial meal of Qianlong is not as rich as the later generations, such as a pool of eggs.
The emperor is also an ordinary person, and eating every day is not extravagant. As far as the imperial cuisine in Qing Dynasty is concerned, it was definitely better than the civilian life at that time. According to some scholars' statistics, farmers in the south of the Yangtze River use meat (animal meat) more than ten times a year, which means that most people didn't have animal meat on their daily tables at that time, only eggs or fish, which is quite good. The emperor can eat meat every day, which is an extraordinary treatment. However, this treatment is much worse than today.