The largest zongzi, Darou Zongzi, is produced in Nanning, Guangxi, each weighing about two kilograms. It is filled with fat pork and mung beans, and it is fragrant, soft, waxy, moist and not greasy.
The smallest zongzi is found in Shanghai City God Temple, Green Wave Gallery and Lake Pavilion. About an inch long, shaped like a pillow, with ham as stuffing, small and fresh; The lake pavilion thinks that tea and food are wonderful.
The most famous zongzi in China are all produced in the land of fish and rice in Hangjiahu, northern Zhejiang: fresh meat zongzi from Wufangzhai, Jiaxing, is supplied all the year round. Four pieces are sandwiched with chopsticks, and each piece looks delicious, fragrant and moist, crisp and tender, and fat and waxy but not greasy. The oldest rice dumplings in Huzhou are good at washing sand and sweet rice dumplings, and it is not uncommon to fill them with red bean paste and diced pork. What is rare is that red bean paste is washed sand-boiled and shelled, and then fried with sugar, cooked lard and rose juice until it is dark and bright. This kind of bean paste tastes fragrant, moist, fine and smooth-the bean paste in Beijing market is more like Japan, and it is only ground by machine and added with sugar. It is dry but not slippery, and its fragrance is light and coarse, so there is no word "moist".
Jujube zongzi, which has always looked down on Beijing, is not only tasteless, but also spits out the core when it is eaten. If jujube is cooked or worms are born, the taste will become very strange and frustrating. A few days ago, I found that the zongzi in Zigui, Hubei Province, Qu Yuan's hometown, was actually the same kind of goods. Beijing zongzi seemed to be "justified" at once, which was very strange.
Zongzi is the festival food of the Dragon Boat Festival. Chinese people all over the world, whether local, China, Taiwan Province, Hongkong or overseas Chinatown, will traditionally prepare all kinds of zongzi before the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.
But do you know that Zongzi has a long history? In the book Shuo Wen Jie Zi written by Xu Shen in the Han Dynasty, there is a record of "Zongzi", which is a kind of food wrapped in reed leaves.
However, in ancient times, zongzi was called corn millet.
After the Ming and Qing Dynasties, rice dumplings were mostly wrapped in glutinous rice, so they were called rice dumplings instead of corn millet.
Because of different regions, there are great differences in materials and even in the shape of "wrapping". For example, in the early days, people used horns to worship the sky, so in the Han and Jin Dynasties, zongzi were mostly made into horns as one of the products for ancestor worship. In addition, there are generally regular triangles, regular quadrangles, pointed triangles, squares, long shapes and so on.
And the taste of zongzi varies from place to place. In the Tang Dynasty, there were many zongzi shops on Chang 'an Avenue, with a variety of nut fillings.
The name of the brown seed has also undergone many changes. According to the local customs of the Western Jin Dynasty, millet, chestnut and jujube are wrapped in leaves during the Dragon Boat Festival, which is called the barrel dumpling, also called the horn millet. In Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica in the Ming Dynasty, it was clearly stated that millet was wrapped in leaves and cooked into food in the shape of sharp corners or palm leaves, so it was called "angular millet" or "zongzi".