White fish in Taihu Lake is mainly caught by nature, and can be caught in all seasons except the breeding season. The meat is very delicate, and there is a lot of fat under the scales. It looks like shad and is a very precious fish. The body is long and narrow, the bones are thin and scaly, and it looks a little silvery white.
White shrimp in Taihu Lake has a thin shell, tender meat and delicious taste. In the international market, it is regarded as a treasure of aquatic products, which is often in short supply. Shrimp, in particular, is often used as a seasoning for high-end dishes.
Whitebait in Taihu Lake is transparent, tender and nutritious, without scales, bones, spines, intestines, swim bladder and fishy smell. In ancient times, people called them jade fish because they looked like chopsticks made of jade.
Extended data
In folklore, the rare white fish can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn Period in wuyue. In the famous story of "Zhuan Xu stabbing Liao", the assassin Zhuan Xu used it to hide the fish intestine sword, which is a rare white fish in Taihu Lake. In the Sui Dynasty, the white fish not only became a tribute, but also the white fish roe became a tribute supervised by the emperor. It can be seen that the white fish went north and began in Gusu.
In the Qing Dynasty, Emperor Kangxi also had a soft spot for whitefish. According to Luo Song, Governor of Jiangsu Province during the reign of Kangxi in Qing Dynasty, on the afternoon of July 15, Kangxi and his party went boating all the way to visit Suzhou waterscape. When they met a fisherman's net and got white fish, they immediately ordered Xinu to buy it, and then they cooked the fish and drank it. After that, Taihu White Fish was immediately included in the annual tribute list.
White fish is also commonly known as "white herring". There is a classic saying in Suzhou called "Sichuan herring catches white fish", which is often used to describe getting twice the result with half the effort. Cephalotaxus japonicus is also one of the wild fish species in Taihu Lake. At present, most of the "oily fish" often supplied by farmhouses in Taihu Lake area are Japanese Cephalotaxus.
Sichuan minnows and white minnows are both pelagic fishes in Taihu Lake system. Silurus japonicus naturally likes to eat live, and Sichuan shad has always been the first choice. Therefore, when fishermen catch minnows, they often use Sichuan minnows as bait, and "fishing minnows with Sichuan minnows" has been sublimated into a way of life.
There are many cooking methods of white fish, such as steaming, stewing, pickling, smoking and frying, but steaming is the most common way, which is slightly different from other fish species.
First, it should be steamed thoroughly. This is because the skin of white fish is somewhat similar to that of shad and contains a lot of fish fat. It takes enough time for the fish fat in the skin to transform into juice and penetrate into the fish body, so as to eat a full and tender feeling. Secondly, pretreatment must be done before steaming, and it needs to be marinated for two or three hours, otherwise the umami taste of white fish will be greatly reduced.
Baidu Encyclopedia-Three Whites of Taihu Lake