Lead: The etiquette and customs of the Han Dynasty followed the "Zhou Li", and there was a set of strict regulations on the way of eating. In the Han Dynasty, banquets not only showed the grand banquet occasion of the middle class, but also showed the banquet customs at that time, including food processing, cooking methods, banquet procedures and etiquette.
First, the way food is processed and cooked.
Grain mainly refers to grain crops, the most important of which is cereals. In fact, the varieties of grain crops in the Han Dynasty have already exceeded the scope of "five grains". There is a saying of "nine grains" in the Book of Rites, Moon Order, Hanshu Shihuozhi and other books. The physical remains of some cash crops, such as wheat, sorghum and rice, have been unearthed in the tombs of the Han Dynasty.
(1) processing. After harvest, grain crops must undergo rough processing such as hulling and hulling, and then further fine processing such as grinding before they can be made into edible staple food. There is a scene reflecting grain processing in the stove map of the south stone pier in Weishan Island ditch: at the lower right of the portrait stone, a person peels the shell with a rice pestle. The kitchen plan of Zhucheng's front balcony, next to the kettle, is also a scene of a person cooking. Generally speaking, the processing scene of grain in stone reliefs is often close to the cooking scene of grain to illustrate the relationship between them.
(2) main cooking utensils and staple food. The main staple foods in the Han Dynasty were rice, cakes and porridge. The production method is mainly cooking. Take the stone relief of Songshan ancestral temple in Jiaxiang as an example. The left half of it depicts a scene of cooking food in a cauldron. Put Zan on the top of the kettle, put them on the stove together, and operate by one person. The main tools for cooking food in Han Dynasty were kettle, retort and retort. The kettle is equivalent to the current pot, which can be used to cook food, while the retort is equivalent to the current steamer, which can be used to steam food. Inspired by the grate, the bottom of the grate was hollowed out into prismatic, geometric and triangular perforated bottoms, which played the role of grate. Steamed food is mainly rice or cakes.
Rice is made by steaming peeled grains with water. Take the picture of the kitchen in the stone tomb in front of the balcony in Zhucheng, Shandong Province as an example. There are scenes reflecting the rice on the right and steamed rice or porridge on the left. Cake is steamed food after kneading wheat flour, which was collectively called "cake" in Han Dynasty. The stone reliefs in the Eastern Han Tomb in Baizhuang, Linyi seem to reflect the contents of the cake image. In the picture, there are two people holding things, which are similar in shape to cakes, and may be steamed cakes. This may be the evidence that steamed cakes have appeared in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Due to the gradual popularization of rotary grinding, the number of cakes in the Eastern Han Dynasty increased significantly, including Hu cakes, steamed cakes, soup cakes and soaked cakes. Cooked food is mainly porridge. Among the raw materials of porridge, cereals such as wheat, millet, beans and rice are the most common. The names of rice, porridge and soup are different, which may be because the concentration of porridge is different. According to Shi Shiming Diet, porridge is the thickest, mi is thicker porridge, and soup is cooked with cereal mixed with meat or vegetables.
(3) People's meat food in Han Dynasty can be divided into three categories: livestock, poultry and fish. There are many slaughter scenes in Han Dynasty stone reliefs, and all kinds of meat products are hung on food shelves, which comprehensively reflects that the diet structure of middle class such as manor owners in Han Dynasty is mainly meat. Many scenes of meat processing are reflected in the kitchen map of the stone tomb on the balcony in Zhucheng. You can see that the kitchen map is covered with all kinds of bacon, and the busy kitchen team below is huge. Personnel have a clear division of labor, perform their duties and do not interfere with each other. The whole activity is going on in an orderly way. There are many ways to cook meat. This paper mainly takes four kinds of meat as examples: barbecue, bacon, bacon and soup.
(1) Roasting is to remove the skin and hair of the meat, drill it into a string, barbecue it on the fire, and then add seasoning as a supplement. The barbecue scene is vividly reproduced on the kitchen map of the stone tomb in front of the balcony of Zhucheng. The image shows two people sitting in front of the oven and putting five strings of meat on the box. The person on the left turns the strings with one hand, the person on the right holds a fan to help the fire, and the left hand turns the strings. There are two pots next to the person next to you, and there are kebabs to roast in them. He is stringing diced meat together. Another example is the stone tomb in Qingshan Village, Xiazhen. One person kneels to roast mutton kebabs with an iron fork, the stone tomb in Wulibao, Linyi, and another person holds two mutton kebabs for barbecue. This cooking method of putting meat on toothpicks or iron skewers and baking it on the stove seems to be very popular in the Han Dynasty, because this burning scene has appeared on many stone relief kitchen drawings. In Shuowen, it is mentioned that "roast, cannon meat, from meat, catch fire". According to the dispatching records unearthed from Mawangdui Han Tomb, all kinds of poultry, livestock and animal offal can be roasted on skewers.
(2) Bacon refers to the dried meat after the animals are divided and pickled with seasonings such as salt and ginger. In many kitchen drawings of Han Dynasty stone reliefs, there are scenes of hanging various kinds of meat, for example, there is meat on the top of the left lattice of the south stone reliefs in Weishan Island, and there is a row of meat on the top of the kitchen drawings of Zhucheng stone reliefs. These meats are processed with wax or cured meat after preliminary treatment, and then hung up to dry. This processing method makes these meat products difficult to deteriorate and can be stored for a longer time. Most of the kitchen paintings in Jiaxiang Songshan are hung on the upper left, while in the stone reliefs found in Xiazhen, the meat used for waxing or curing is hung on a wooden bracket, which is located on the lower right of the stone reliefs. According to the records of Zhou Li Tianguan La Ren, A Brief Analysis of Yuefu. ..... wax, do small things. " According to this, it can be seen that large livestock animals such as cattle and pigs are cut into strips or blocks, and small poultry animals such as chickens and ducks are made into a whole. The main raw materials of preserved meat are livestock, poultry or fish. The "dried fish" or "dried fish" mentioned in the literature may be processed by Laba method.
(3) Eating means cutting up the meat and eating it raw. There is also a certain "Yi" scene description in the stone kitchen map in front of the balcony in Zhucheng, Shandong Province. In the upper part of the picture, there are three people kneeling and probably cutting meat. On the upper right, there is a person kneeling in front of Chang, holding the fish with one hand and cutting the fish with the other. There is a description of "raw meat is raw meat" in the Biography of Han Dong Fang Shuo, which shows that raw meat should be a raw meat processing method in Han Dynasty. At that time, people ate raw meat slices, and the specific way to eat them was to dip them raw. Fish paste, also known as "sashimi", has existed in China since ancient times and is not unique to Japan.
(4) Soup is boiled broth. In the kitchen picture of the stone tomb in Qingshan Village, Xiazhen, a woman in a long skirt in the upper right corner, kneeling on the ground, is cooking broth with a kettle. Soup existed in the pre-Qin period. After the Han Dynasty, there were more kinds of soups and richer materials. However, the quality and taste of boiled soup vary greatly from class to class. The seasoning methods adopted by the upper class are very particular, while the working people in the lower class can only pick common vegetables such as bean sprouts, sunflower and elm leaves to make soup, and the materials used are also very simple.
Second, the banquet etiquette
Among the stone reliefs representing feasts, the stone reliefs of Qingshan Village in Xiazhen clearly show that two men with swords are kneeling in the hall, and there are two attendants outside the hall. The box in front of the hall is a wall with scenes of drumming, music and dancing. Two people on the left play drums and one on the right plays drums. There are four people watching music and dancing on the left side of the box. In the kitchen plan of Tengzhou Mountain Villa, the scene of welcoming guests is depicted, and one person kneels to greet three guests, showing the banquet etiquette in Han Dynasty. When the guests of the banquet in Han Dynasty arrive, the host will go out to meet them, even bow to meet them. The use of seats in the Han Dynasty also reflected the etiquette system. For example, if there is only one guest at home, the host will sit opposite the guest. If there are many guests, the host sits in the middle, and the guests sit on the left and right sides of the host in two columns. In the late Western Han Dynasty, with the appearance of food containers, the food containers were put on the food containers before eating, and then the food containers were directly brought to the table in front of the guests for them to eat. Everyday use is mostly a few small boxes. In order to show respect in the family, we should hold the container of food high and invite distinguished people to eat. According to the Records of Liang Hongchuan in the Later Han Dynasty, Meng Guang, Hongliang's wife, presented food to her husband as a token of her respect. She "dare not look up in front of Hong Qian, take Qi Mei as an example", because the case has to be accepted, so she has to be light and flexible.
Middle-class manor owners in Han Dynasty usually accompanied by dances and hundreds of plays during banquets, which played an important role in enriching banquets. For example, the stone relief of Han Li in Dong 'an, Qufu depicts the image of Geji performing at a banquet. In the portrait of Chengguan in Zoucheng, Shandong Province, there are two people who are good at dancing with long sleeves in the middle of the picture. The two people on the left seem to be dancing swords, and the two people on the right are playing drums. Then they sit opposite each other as backup singers, which also shows the music and dance performances in the banquet activities. It is recorded in Shuoyuan Fanzhi that "the bells and drums can't help flowing" and in Book of Rites Wang Zhi that "the son of heaven eats it and enjoys it every day" all indicate that music and dance are an indispensable part of banquets in Han Dynasty. Courtesy meeting, no wine. -"Han Shu"
Entertainment activities in the Han Dynasty also included games such as throwing pots and Liu Bo, and there was a scene of Liu Bo in the middle of the stone relief in South Weishan Island. Liubo is an ancient board game, which was most popular from the Spring and Autumn Period to the Han Dynasty, and then gradually lost. Pot throwing is a kind of game and entertainment activity with the nature of competition. People stand at a certain distance, use a small pot with a small diameter and a small mouth as an arrow target, shoot short arrows into the mouth of the pot, and the person who puts them in wins. Banquet is not only the embodiment of people's concept of enjoyment at that time, but also a social way and means, and a symbol and concentrated expression of social culture in Han Dynasty.
Third, the comparison of food culture between regions.
Not only in Shandong, but also in northern Jiangsu, western Henan, northwestern Shaanxi, Zhejiang and Sichuan. Different geographical environments have created different regional characteristics, and it is precisely because of the differences in environment that the stone reliefs in different regions show different characteristics. Compared with the stone reliefs in other areas, the stone reliefs in northern Shaanxi are similar in content description, but they also have significant regional characteristics. Located in the south of the Great Wall, west of the Yellow River, east of Ziwuling and north of Qiao Shan, northern Shaanxi is a sensitive area of agricultural ecological environment in China. The Han Dynasty was in the warm period after the end of Dali Ice Age, and good hydrological conditions made the northern region suitable for developing agricultural economy. Before Qin and Han Dynasties, northern Shaanxi was dominated by animal husbandry, and after Qin and Han Dynasties, it basically became a semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral area. Before 89 A.D., northern Shaanxi was always a war-torn area between Han Dynasty and Xiongnu and other ethnic minorities, with constant conflicts, and the residents were mainly ethnic minorities. Later, as a frontier area, the imperial court sent troops to guard the border and carried out many large-scale immigrants, so the immigrants once became the main residents of northern Shaanxi, which made the northern Shaanxi region form a unique culture dominated by Han culture and supplemented by nomadic culture. The above factors have also gradually developed agriculture in northern Shaanxi.
Although there are many contents in the Han Dynasty stone reliefs in northern Shaanxi that show farming, there are also some stone reliefs that show grazing scenes, such as the horizontal stone reliefs of the Han Tomb in Baijiashan, the horizontal stone reliefs of the Han Tomb in Yanjiacha and the horizontal stone reliefs of the East Wall of the King's Tomb in Kuande County. The Han Tomb in the front and back rooms of Sishilipu is located in the third column of the grazing map on the side of the tomb gate. There are a pair of cows and sheep grazing on the grassland in the middle, and there are elk, deer, rabbits and other animals in the distance. The whole relief stone shows the scene of cattle and sheep in northern Shaanxi in Han Dynasty. The grazing map of Yanjiacha Han Tomb in Suide reflects a larger herd. On the left side of the picture are sheep marching side by side, followed by two cows, five horses, chickens and other poultry in the middle, an archer, cows and a whip herder. These stone reliefs artistically depict the prosperity of the Six Livestock School in northern Shaanxi in the Han Dynasty, which is consistent with the grand occasion of "a thousand cattle and ten thousand sheep" recorded in historical books. However, Shandong is rich in water resources. Compared with the stone reliefs in northern Shaanxi, there is no fish scene in northern Shaanxi. In the stone relief in Weishan Island, there is a scene of a boat fishing, and in the stone relief in Zoucheng, there is also a mythical scene showing three fish pulling a cart.
Summary:
By studying the stone reliefs of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Shandong Province, we have a better understanding of the social customs and folk customs of the Eastern Han Dynasty. From the perspective of diet alone, through the comparison of ancient and modern eating habits, many similarities of folk customs are found. China's civilization comes down in one continuous line from ancient times to the present, and the blood of Chinese culture runs through all fields, not only diet, but also social life.