Head picture: swimming and swimming

"Cake" often appears as the exclusive noun of the same kind of food. But in Chinese, cake and cake are actually two completely different things.

The word "cake" appeared earlier, and there was a special explanation in the Interpretation of Names in the Eastern Han Dynasty: "It's awkward, and it's awkward." It means to combine wheat flour.

The word "Gao" appeared late, and it did not appear in Erya, Dialect and Shuowen. Until Jiyun in Song Dynasty, the definition of "Mi" appeared, that is, rice paste. In the later Kangxi Dictionary, the explanation of cake is "Huan"-food made by squeezing and kneading rice.

Literally speaking, both cakes and cakes represent the distinct trend of rice food culture and pasta culture in China, and they are examples of regional differences in diet. But in fact, with the development of diet in the Millennium, cakes and cakes are intertwined, influenced and transmuted, becoming an important category of China cuisine, and being endowed with the meaning of auspicious celebration and family reunion by China people in spirit.

No: 1 one

As the most important processed product of wheat, the history of cake is closely related to the spread of wheat.

This grain, which originated in West Asia, was introduced into the hinterland of the Central Plains through the Hexi Corridor about 2000 BC. This is obviously earlier than the origin of China characters, so wheat has also become one of the five grains in Zhou Li.

Wheat grains taste bad, and the best way to eat them is to grind them into flour and further process them. The East and the West thought of this point in unison. At the same time that the Arabs invented the waterwheel grinding and the Greeks invented the windmill grinding, China and India also appeared the use of livestock to pull and grind the noodles.

However, the same flour shows a completely different reprocessing style in different regions. People in China are good at cooking with water and steam, so "cake" originally means boiled dough, dough "soup cake" and steamed dough "kitchen cake".

Westerners are good at cooking with air and grease, and frying and baking have long been used for pasta. And because it is easy to carry, not perishable and full of flavor, it was introduced to China at the latest in the Han Dynasty. "The Book of Continued Han Dynasty" said: "The (Han) spiritual emperor loves Hu cakes." Hu cake is baked wheat cake, which is later called sesame cake.

For a long time, baked cakes have never become the mainstream in China, and the discriminatory word "Hu" has always been used as its description. Until the Tang Dynasty, Bai Juyi described the Anshi Rebellion, and Yang Guozhong bought cakes into a poem dedicated to Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty. He also used such a sentence: "The sesame cakes are like Kyoto, and the noodles are crispy and oily."

But at the same time, "cake" began to gradually extend another meaning. In Lu Yu's Tea Classic, it is the first time to use "cake tea" to describe dried and pressed into oblate tea. After that, silver cakes, cotton cakes and orange cakes, which have nothing to do with wheat flour, appeared more and more. Cake is increasingly becoming a term for shape, texture, rather than material.

After the Song Dynasty, steamed and boiled pasta gradually parted ways with "cake". In ancient books that record the scenery of the Song Dynasty, such as Dream of Liang Lu and Dream of Hua Lu in Tokyo, a large number of epoch-making food terms such as "bamboo shoots splashed with meat noodles", "three fresh noodles", "steamed bread" and "meat buns" appeared. However, "steamed cake", "cooking cake" and "soup cake" only exist in official books and are almost extinct in folk literature.

I'm afraid that the plot of "Wu Dalang selling kitchen cakes" in Jin Ping Mei and Water Margin in Ming and Qing Dynasties was just an own goal of the author who wanted to restore the previous generation's context, but made a mistake in the year.

No:2 er

Cake, just from the font, is very different from cake. The combination of rice and lamb, the former represents the material and the latter represents the shape and color.

Obviously, the earliest cakes had and only had rice as the main material.

Although rice native to China is not as widely adaptable as wheat, it is rich in amylopectin, so it can obtain high water content and soft waxy taste without grinding and cooking directly. This is nothing compared with wheat in any case.

Since the Song Dynasty, due to the large-scale development of land suitable for rice cultivation in the south, rice has experienced explosive growth. It subverted the pattern of "rice in the south and millet in the north" before the Tang Dynasty, and became the staple food that dominated the dining table of China people.

With the increase in output, the demand for changing the pattern of eating also came into being. Rice paste, rice flour, glutinous rice and glutinous rice balls all appeared in the notes of scholars after the Ming Dynasty. Of course, it also includes rice cakes that are soft and sticky.

Therefore, from the original intention of inventing food, cake is the icing on the cake, while cake is the remolding of still water.

No:3 San

If we say that the origin of cake and cake is two irrelevant drops of ink. After dropping into the huge vat of China diet, they began to blend one after another, and finally they did not distinguish each other.

In the middle of the Qing Dynasty, the food named "rice cake" first appeared in Guangdong, and it was introduced into the Guiliu area of Wuzhou in the northeast of Guangxi and the Quanxia Putian area in the southeast of Fujian in a short period of time.

In fact, this kind of rice cake is to hammer rice into a thin and large cake-shaped sheet, and use cooking methods such as frying and drying to reduce the water content in rice starch and imitate the fragrant and crisp taste similar to that of wheat products.

Similarly, in the south of the Yangtze River in the middle and early Qing Dynasty, there were cakes mixed with wheat flour. As a place where the north and the south blend, people in Wuyu District are well versed in the blending of flour and rice flour, laying the foundation with glutinous rice flour, preventing glutinous rice flour from sticking to teeth, and flour increasing the chewiness of gluten.

Therefore, the traditional Suzhou-style cake group is not blindly soft and glutinous, but pursues the balance between soft and refreshing with subtle proportions. If it is to be compared, it is quite similar to Dafu made of glutinous rice flour and corn flour in Japanese style and fruit.

Because of the deep integration of cake and cake, the cake industry also rose in the Qing Dynasty. Beijing (Suzhou) Daoxiang Village, Nanjing Lianhu Cake Group, Suzhou Huang Tianyuan, Hangzhou Wuweihe, Ningbo native Zhao Dayou, Fuzhou Zuixianlou, Guangzhou Lianxianglou ... these time-honored cake shops are all products of that era.

These cake shops will make all kinds of cakes and cakes together and put them together for customers to choose from. Moreover, each family has its own online celebrity products, such as the double-brewed dumplings in Huang Tianyuan, the salt and pepper shortcakes with five flavors, and the lotus seed cake in Lianxianglou, which promoted the food fashion of that era and became a grand map of China moon cakes and other holiday cakes.

No:4 si

Unlike Japanese food which advocates lightness and original flavor, China people have an innate preference for the taste brought by deep processing. The eggplant in A Dream of Red Mansions, the boiled cabbage in Sichuan cuisine, the tofu in Shandong cuisine, and the three shrimp noodles in Jiangnan snacks are all vivid interpretations of this preference-the variety of ingredients and the complexity of production cost far exceed the value of the food itself.

Pastries made of cheap wheat and rice through complicated processes are of course among China people's favorites and worships. The most direct expression of this worship is to make cakes a part of the traditional holiday ceremony.

Spring cakes and rice cakes will be eaten during the Spring Festival, Yuanxiao will be eaten during the Lantern Festival, onion cakes will be eaten on February 2, green gizzards will be eaten in Tomb-Sweeping Day, fried dumplings, cakes and zongzi will be eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival, proper fruit will be eaten in Chinese Valentine's Day, Chongyang cake will be eaten during the Double Ninth Festival, and sesame seeds, glutinous rice cakes will be eaten during the winter solstice ...

As for family events such as weddings, funerals, housewarming and birthday celebrations, the presence of cakes is indispensable.

Among them, the cakes used in Mid-Autumn Festival, that is, moon cakes, are the epitome of Chinese cakes.

Aside from the complicated stuffing selection and baking process, the traditional Chinese moon cakes can't escape from three categories.

One is to roll the pastry and water-oil skin in a complicated way, and bake them to get a layer-by-layer crisp. When you touch the crumbs, you can bite the crispy cakes that are full of slag. Because it is not easy to transport for a long distance, and it is easy to deteriorate, this kind of shortbread is often confined to a certain area. After meeting the local specialty fillings, its name changed to Su-style moon cakes, Hui-style moon cakes, Qin-style moon cakes, Ningbo moon cakes and Chaoshan Fang cakes ...

In fact, except the choice of fillings is different from some production details, they are all born by one mother.

The second is to make oil skin by fully mixing oil and flour, and bake it to be porous and loose, which is similar to the texture of western-style baked cakes and biscuits. This is the most traditional and extensive pastry practice, and it is only reserved in areas where ancient land is inconvenient, such as Quzhou and Wenzhou in Zhejiang, Minhou in Fujian and so on. Among them, the most famous one is Yunnan leg moon cake.

The third kind is based on the above-mentioned oil cake, adding syrup and alkali. Syrup can color the crust, make the baked product with a beautiful brown-red color, and extend the shelf life. Alkali can modify the protein (gluten) in flour, and at the same time, it can enhance the gluten strength, make the crust thinner and carry more fillings.

Because Guangdong is the most famous producing area of traditional alkali-coated moon cakes, most people call it Cantonese-style moon cakes. But in fact, it is produced in Guangxi and Shanxi, and because of its online value, easy transportation and natural preservation, Cantonese moon cakes have become the standard image of China moon cakes by the middle of the Republic of China at the latest.

The cakes made in this way can often reach the ratio of 1 5 or even higher. This is beyond the reach of other kinds of moon cakes. It is worth emphasizing that, strictly speaking, it is actually not a "cake" with a flat round shape and a crisp taste in the public sense, but a kind of "cake" because of its many fillings, thick body and soft taste.

No:5 Wu

After 1990s, due to the maturity of cold chain technology, preservation after long-distance transportation is no longer an obstacle. China people have many new ideas to imitate the shape and texture of Cantonese-style alkaline moon cakes.

Taiwan Province people, for example, put the "Taoshanpi" in Japanese peace fruit into the stuffing of traditional table-top souffle, and invented the table-top Taoshanpi egg yolk moon cake. Taoshan skin is a kind of delicate and soft cake skin made of white kidney bean paste mixed with milk and cream to replace flour skin.

Although the shortcomings of Taoshanpi are obvious: it is not resistant to collision and easy to deteriorate, in order to obtain a softer taste, this kind of thing that can be solved by instinct is not a problem.

Another example is the ice cream moon cakes that have become popular in recent years. In order to show the crystal clear effect, konjac starch is often used as the skin to wrap colorful fillings. Low-temperature freezing solidified the original soft taro skin, so that it also has a coating effect similar to that of alkali skin.

Similarly, there are frozen black and white chocolate skins.

From the classification of cakes, the "derived subspecies" of these Cantonese-style alkaline-skinned moon cakes are actually cakes, not cakes.

No:6 Lu

Looking at the thousand-year map of China's cake evolution, the changing trend can draw two beautiful arcs.

The cake with flat body, low water content and crisp and hard taste gradually rivaled the cake with fat body, high water content and soft and waxy taste from the absolute advantage at the beginning, and was gradually overtaken by the cake after modern times. Among them, there are not only the attribution of technological progress, but also the evolution of population flavor in China and the influence of the change of geographical pattern in China.

The upgrading of storage technology and transportation technology is the decisive factor for cakes to surpass cakes. In ancient times, water content was the enemy of food preservation, and all problems such as mildew, modification and corruption came from water in food. In the case of inconvenient transportation and insufficient transportation capacity, cakes with low water content naturally become the first choice for the general public.

At the same time, as the originator of Chinese civilization, the grain crops planted in the Central Plains also deeply influenced the evolution of cakes. From the earliest millet, to the later wheat, and then to the introduction of corn, potatoes and sweet potatoes in the New World after the Ming Dynasty, wheat flour in the Central Plains has experienced the impact of various staple foods, and its status has been repeatedly reduced.

But south of the Yangtze River, because of the unique climate and soil environment, rice has been firmly occupying the mainstream position of food crops. Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, Korean and Japanese immigrants entered the Northeast and began to grow rice, which made the cakes develop continuously and steadily. At the same time, after the Song Dynasty, the economic and political center moved southward, which also made rice products spread more widely in the upper class of society.

In addition, the biggest disadvantages of rice cakes, such as high water content and difficulty in transportation and storage, have also been supplemented by the increasingly developed road infrastructure construction and the emergence of various anti-corrosion technologies.

Most importantly, the tastes of China people have also evolved in the Millennium. After satisfying the demands of food and clothing, taste buds tend to change their tastes more carefully.

However, the variety of filling materials and the changeable texture of cakes meet the upgrade of the tip of the tongue. Moreover, compared with cakes, cakes are more tolerant of oil and sugar, which is also in line with the instinct of human beings to feel happy when they consume calories.

-END-

The old man in Zhitang said that the cakes in the north are "official tea" and those in the south are "fine cakes in Jiahu". This was said by a scholar who was born in Zhejiang and lived in Beiping and Nanjing. Of course, there is nothing wrong with it. However, from a more grand geographical point of view, it did not sum up the important pastry schools such as Su-style, Guangdong-style and Yunnan-style.

However, from another perspective, the words "official tea and food" and "fine point of Jiahu" sum up the ultimate taste of Chinese cakes, which can reach the temple banquet and enter the people's lives.