Since the Yuan Dynasty made Beiping its capital, from the Ming and Qing Dynasties to the early years of the Republic of China, the imperial capital of more than 600 years has been a place where people's talents and talents gather. In terms of drinking, it is really a feast, a delicious food and a collection of national achievements. However, if a foreigner comes to Sri Lanka for the first time and asks Beiping people which restaurant is the authentic Beiping restaurant, even the old Beiping classical children can't point it out, and they can't say it!

Most people in Beiping have frugal habits, but they are satisfied with their diet. They can eat white rice and flour every day. If you really want to change your appetite, there are restaurants in every province, so you won't care which restaurant is really Beiping.

According to the tastes of compatriots in various provinces in China, sweet in the south, salty in the north, spicy in the east and sour in the west are generally good. Southerners live on rice. If they don't eat rice for three meals and eat pasta for the next meal, they will feel full, as if they are not full. Northerners have always lived on pasta and miscellaneous grains. If every meal is white rice, they will feel very weak all day, and they want to eat a pancake and eat a steamed bread, just like eating.

Since Beiping people take pasta as their staple food, they will naturally change their patterns on pasta. Although Beiping's pasta can't catch up with Shanxi's skillful hands to make sixty or seventy kinds, there are more than a dozen kinds of snacks made from pasta that can be used as staple food at ordinary times. Let's start with jiaozi. Northerners have a saying: "Comfortable but lying down, delicious but jiaozi." Jiaozi is a reward, and jiaozi is also eaten on holidays (Beiping in jiaozi Banner is also called boiled cake). Anyone who doesn't have a smile on his face says he is unhappy to see the cake cooked. So, what is the weight of jiaozi in the minds of men, women and children?

People in Beiping pay attention to their own dough when they eat jiaozi. They roll themselves or press their own skins, and five agents can press together. The pressed dumpling skin is not only round, but also very symmetrical in thickness. At present, the machine is soft on the outside and hard on the inside, which is slippery but not moist. When cooked, it will expand by a third. No wonder it tastes strong in the mouth. This is totally different from having sex. Dumpling stuffing can be divided into raw and cooked stuffing and vegetarian stuffing. Whether jiaozi is delicious or not, the thickness of dumpling skin is of course the first, but the taste of jiaozi depends on the means of mixing and frying stuffing.

Most people like to eat raw stuffing, but now they are mixed and packaged, and they don't like cooked stuffing very much. Generally speaking, there are only three kinds of cooked stuffing: three fresh, shrimp, winter bamboo shoots and minced meat (the frozen fish dumplings sold in supermarkets now are Shandong dumplings, which were rare in Peiping in those years). Take raw stuffing as an example. Meat is mainly pigs, cattle and sheep. As for vegetables, almost all kinds of vegetables can be used as stuffing, even radish seedlings and pickles are used as dumpling stuffing, which is unexpected to foreigners. Although the stuffing of dumplings is all-encompassing, Beiping people pay attention to style and counting, and can't mess around casually. For example, beef stuffing must be accompanied by green onions, and mutton stuffing likes to be accompanied by melon, gourd and shrimp with leeks. If you screw it up, it will not only lose its quality, but also be delicious. There are also two ways to make jiaozi bags: one is to pinch, the other is to squeeze, and there is slow and fast. Therefore, most people who eat jiaozi at home pay attention to kneading, which is both good-looking and delicious. Jiaozi has to be crowded, because there are many customers to deal with, and there is no time to squeeze. Of course, the hastily squeezed jiaozi is not very popular, and its thickness is uneven, but it doesn't matter to squeeze out 180 pieces of jiaozi cauldron wide soup, which won't be broken. Pinch jiaozi is different, pay attention to a pot can't be too much, and it depends on the situation to order water once or twice to get out of the pot!

Jiaozi must be dipped in vinegar. In Chinese mainland, Shanxi rice vinegar and Zhenjiang balsamic vinegar are the best choices for eating jiaozi. If you don't avoid onion and garlic, it will be more beautiful to wrap jiaozi with garlic cloves dipped in vinegar. Since I came to Taiwan Province Province, some dumplings seem to be taught by a master. When jiaozi dipped in chemical white vinegar and cold water, it happened that more vinegar and less water really made people sweat. I found a bottle of black vinegar on the table and found it was industrial research balsamic vinegar when I ate it in my mouth. It's almost spicy soy sauce, even more unbearable than chemical vinegar mixed with cold water. Maybe the taste of vinegar is not right, so some jiaozi pour some ground sesame oil on a plate of high-static soy sauce to please customers, regardless of the salty taste of the stuffing? I dare not say what my compatriots from other provinces think, but people in Beiping think it's sugar-coated haws dipped in marinated shrimp-eating 280 yuan.

When it comes to eating noodles, people in Beiping didn't like eating machine noodles at first, but liked eating noodles (also called noodles). Some people say that the noodles cut by the machine are cooked and tasteless, so they like to eat noodles. When pulling the handle, you must sneak the noodles away with alkaline water before pulling. It takes brute force to throw it out. Most of the noodles made by housewives are rolled into noodles, then cut into strips and tossed around. It is said that only in this way can the noodles be pulled out, otherwise it is no different from machine slicing. The most common way for Beiping people to eat noodles at home is hot noodle soup, which is the so-called Shandong Guo Qiang noodles. All the ingredients are used to make wide soup and then cook noodles. This is very different from clear soup, chicken noodles, toppings and noodle soup in northern Jiangsu. The advantage of hot noodle soup is that all the flavor in the soup is mixed into the noodles, so people in Beiping don't need three dishes and five bowls to eat hot noodle soup. As long as there is a dish of kohlrabi, a dish of cucumber and hot noodle soup, you are already drunk and comfortable.

Slag river surface is also a daily way of eating in Beiping, which can be divided into "crossing water" and "not crossing water". On the surface of the water, the noodles are cooked, put into a basin, washed with cold water or hot water, and then put into a bowl to mix with fried sauce. Noodles are moist and slippery, and it is easier to mix evenly. But the water is picked directly from the pot to the bowl, and the sauce is not easy to mix, but it is mellow and fragrant, which makes us realize the real taste of the slag river noodles. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, almost all small restaurants in the north were selling noodles with slag sauce, diced meat or minced meat, and some diced tofu was added, which not only took away the original flavor, but also made it astringent and even added pepper. Not to mention how embarrassing it is to eat this kind of dregs.

People in Beiping eat noodles and sauced dishes every time there is something festive at home. There are two kinds of bittern: "Chuanzi bittern …" and "mixed bittern". Making Sichuan brine is relatively simple. Make soup with chicken soup or pork, beef and mutton first, and then pay attention. You can also hang soup with mushrooms. Then, cut the eggs into diced shrimps, diced meat, yellow flowers, fungus, capers, mushrooms and mushrooms, which is also called "Chuanlu". In addition to the above materials, "Chuanzilu" does not scramble eggs or dice. When thickening, throw the egg on the marinade, add oil with a small iron spoon, stir-fry the pepper on the fire and pour it on the marinade while it is hot. That's Kun Lu, the so-called "Lu Da Mian" in Taiwan Province Province. Adding eggplant is called eggplant marinade, and adding chicken slices, sea cucumber ham is three fresh marinades.

Speaking of pancakes, there are many patterns, which are branded in different furnaces and clanging. It is mentioned that the branch stove is also a specialty of Beiping, located in Zhaitang, west of Beijing. Beiping people use casserole to cook porridge (there is a joke in Beijing opera called "playing casserole", and witty people say that the son who sells casserole keeps talking). The fried soup is hung with fine sand, and pancakes are sold to Beiping by vendors in Zhaitang. The stove is like a round pot with a diameter of about 1.34 feet. Is to turn it over and buckle it on the briquette stove. The bottom is full of holes, and the flame just jumped into the holes, so the focus of the baked cake is very small. This kind of cake is crisp and loose, because it uses little oil, and it is refreshing but not greasy. Although northerners like pancakes, most friends in the south think they are dry and hard. In addition, home-cooked cakes, pancakes, scallion cakes and a nest of powder cakes are probably cooked in northern restaurants in Taiwan Province Province now, and they are all well done.

In addition, there are two kinds of cakes called chopped green onion cakes and sesame paste sugar cakes, which are cooked in almost every household in Chinese mainland, but they are not as delicious as those baked in a steamer. Steamer shop, also called noodle shop, not only sells all kinds of noodles, but also sells steamed bread the size of a flower roll. In the early years, this kind of shop mainly sold steamed food, and the funeral was held in Beiping. The food security for monks was also borne by the steamer shop, so it was also called the steamer shop, and later it was called the noodle shop. The difference between the scallion cake they baked and the scallion cake baked in restaurants now is that it is loose but not burnt, moist but not greasy, with or without food. Another sesame paste sugar cake is soft and sweet, and the honey stains are sweet. I think all the villagers in Beiping, Taiwan Province Province, can't help but think of water shield and bass when they think of what it's like to spread chopped green onion cakes and sesame paste sugar cakes in a steamer!

People in Beiping often eat the three most common staple foods listed above. As for other pasta practices, there are many varieties. Some are staple foods, and some are pure snacks. Let's introduce them one by one when we have a chance.