The distinction between classical Shu cooking and Central Plains and Jiangnan cooking appeared in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and Wei and Jin Dynasties.

After the establishment of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Sichuan's economy and culture continued to develop, and its cooking culture began to show its own characteristics. The "kitchen figurines" in the tombs of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Zhongxian County introduced in the second section illustrate the mature scene of Shu cooking, in which the appearance of dumplings should attract our attention in particular. Dumpling should be understood as a variant of wonton. In the Han Dynasty, wonton was called "Zuihun", which was a kind of cake, or soup cake. "Steamed cakes, soup cakes, scorpion cakes, pith cakes, golden cakes and soggy cakes" have been mentioned in Liu Xi's Interpretation of Names in the Eastern Han Dynasty, but we can't accurately understand the meaning of soup cakes. We only know that wonton or dumplings should be made from wheat bran-removed flour, which requires high quality flour processing. Therefore, we can speculate that the agricultural processing technology in Sichuan is the same as that in the Central Plains at the latest in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Steamed bread, or "mantou", as a kind of instant pasta, should be one of the so-called "steamed cakes" in the above-mentioned sentence of Interpretation of Names. It appeared at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, but why was it attributed to Zhuge Liang's invention in Shu Han? In addition to the celebrity effect, it may also be because Mantou, a man in Sichuan, pioneered the addition of meat stuffing, and it is slightly like a human head in shape, which is different from Liu Xishi's steamed cakes. Wei Wu's Four Seasons Food System, written by a person who may be named Cao Cao in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, talked about the cooking of Bashu at that time, saying: "Pixian fish, with yellow scales and red tails, can be used as sauce when it comes out of rice fields"; It is said that the yellow croaker "has a large number and a hundred kilograms, and its bones are soft and edible." He also mentioned "steamed catfish", which shows that there was a dish of steamed catfish in Bashu at that time. In any case, it shows that the cooking level in Bashu area has been improved considerably in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms Period, and it was known to the Central Plains that it was "happy with honey", and later in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, it was determined by Chang Qu's "respecting taste and good spicy flavor" again.

During the Three Kingdoms period, Chengdu, as the capital of one of the three countries, stepped onto the political stage of China. The second immigration movement promoted the continued development of Shu's economy and culture. During this period, Liu Chan, the late ruler, made great efforts to "broaden his vocal music", which was correspondingly reflected in the high-level food level. At this time, Chengdu has become "both beautiful and worshipful", "the outside is well-connected, and the inside is opposite, which is more connected than the house." A prosperous national metropolis. In the Western Jin Dynasty, Zuo Si praised Shu Du Fu, which was written by people in Shu Zhong in Luoyang according to documents and inquiries. The so-called "konjac cornus, melon and taro area, sugarcane and ginger, sunny and fragrant." Therefore, there is a banquet in Chengdu with "four dishes, four dishes, and a clear ticket". Zhang Zai, a poet in the Western Jin Dynasty, also talked about the richness of food in the capital of Shu in his poem "Dengcheng Baitulou": "Ding Shi can enter at any time. Hundreds of harmony are wonderful and different. " What deserves our attention is that the cooking style of "respecting taste and good spicy flavor" conflicts with the spirit of "adjusting husband and five flavors". From this, we conclude that the classical Sichuan cuisine in Wei and Jin Dynasties has different characteristics from that in the Western Han Dynasty, so we think that the distinction between classical Sichuan cuisine and other cuisines in the whole country should be at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty and Wei and Jin Dynasties, not at the time of Qin and Han Dynasties. The prosperity of Bashu food culture in Sui, Tang and Five Dynasties:

The war in Shu area at the end of Western Jin Dynasty led to the eastward migration of a large number of people in Shu area, which destroyed the economy and culture to a certain extent. In Sui and Tang Dynasties, the establishment of a unified empire made production resume and the economy developed unprecedentedly. The great economic recovery and cultural enrichment under the affluent life began after the Sui Dynasty occupied the Shu area. Yang Xiu, the King of Yue who moved to seal Chengdu in the Sui Dynasty, built a large-scale project in Chengdu and expanded the walls of Chengdu, indicating that the population of Shu area increased when China was unified by the Sui Dynasty, and the scale of Chengdu city was no longer enough to live in during the Shu and Han Dynasties. Yang Xiu's "gradual luxury" has played an exemplary role in Chengdu's diet leisure culture. Later, since the Anshi Rebellion, Shu became the backyard of the Tang Dynasty, and Chengdu was renamed as "Nanjing" for a short time. Later, in the middle and late Tang Dynasties, Chengdu expanded its city twice through Wei Gao and Gao Pian, becoming a large city of considerable scale. During the turmoil in the middle and late Tang Dynasty, Sichuan has always been a place where aristocratic families and famous literati took refuge, which created conditions for cultural exchanges, including the improvement of food standards.

The diet level of Bashu reached a new height in this period, which was reflected in the poems of the Tang Dynasty. For example, when Du Fu was in Kuifu, Sichuan Province, he wrote a poem "Cold Amoy of Sophora japonica Leaves": "Green and high Sophora japonica leaves, picking up Chinese kitchens. New noodles come near the market, and the juice is mixed with me. If you are over-cooked, you will have no worries about adding food. Everything is fresh and fresh, and the fragrant rice is also a reed. " "Cold Tao" is a kind of cold noodles, which had its embryonic form as early as the Northern and Southern Dynasties. It became the seasonal diet of court banquets in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and Du Fu was able to eat cold Tao in Kuifu, indicating that the delicacies in the banquet of the capital had spread to Sichuan folk. Du Fu once appreciated the cooking technique of "the scorpion wields a frost knife left and right, and the squid is golden and the snow is high" in Mianzhou, Sichuan. The prosperity of Bashu economy and the exchange of commodities have given full support to the regional food culture. In Chengdu Qu, Zhang Ji described that "there are many restaurants near the bridge in Wan Li, and the tourists love to stay at their home" and Yong Tao described that "it is more like Chang 'an to cook wine since Chengdu." Li Shangyin's sentence that "fine wine can be sent to the old in Chengdu, but the furnace is still Zhuo Wenjun" describes the richness of Sichuan's diet at that time.

Especially in the Five Dynasties after the third migration, the economy and culture of Shu reached another climax. This is because the number of people with high cultural quality who migrated to Sichuan exceeded the previous two times, making Bashu one of the two areas where the people of the Central Plains took refuge at that time.

Qing Yi Lu says: "Meng Shu is still eating, and he has a hundred volumes of Food Canon, and he has given Fei sheep. Its method: use red yeast cook the meat, tightly roll the stone town, go deep into the wine bone, and cut it as thin as paper. " From Qi Min Yao Shu, we can see that only steamed pigs are used to cook meat directly with wine. The method of making Fei sheep seems to carry forward this method, and modern Dongpo meat also inherits this method, and pork is treated with wine. From Mrs. Hua Rui's palace poems, we know that there were various ways of catering at that time, and there was a "boat banquet". With a volume of up to 1 volumes, The Book of Food should be the most extensive cookbook from the Sui and Tang Dynasties to the Five Dynasties. Although it only reflects the cooking skills of the royal chef, it can spy out the colorful cooking culture of Bashu in the Five Dynasties. Today, we don't know the specific content of the lost Edible Canon of Meng Shu. We can only spy out the novelty of the banquet types and the exquisiteness and originality of the eating style of senior people in Sichuan at that time from Mrs. Hua Rui's palace words. During the Song Dynasty, classical Sichuan cuisine became an independent cuisine in China:

Sichuan continued to maintain economic and cultural prosperity in the Song Dynasty. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the feast in Chengdu was very popular. During Renzong's reign in the Northern Song Dynasty, Song Qi knew about Chengdu, and even more colorful banquet activities were carried out. Song Qi is the first person to introduce the exotic local products and some cooking skills in Sichuan in detail to areas outside Sichuan. Later, Su Shi was the first to creatively carry forward Sichuan cooking to the Central Plains, Jiangnan and Lingnan regions. We can find out about Su Shi's cooking practice from many of his poems, ci poems and notes of Song people.

An amateur cooking enthusiast, Lu You, a native of Zhejiang, has been an official in Sichuan for a long time and has a strong interest in Sichuan cuisine. Tang 'an's glutinous rice, Xinjin's leek yellow, Pengshan's roasted turtle, Chengdu's steamed chicken and Xindu's vegetables all left an unforgettable impression on him, and he still remembers it after many years away from Shu. In his later years, he sang an emotional poem "Give back the taste of Wu" in the play of vegetable food (note 44). In the poem "Play after a meal", he said: "Buy bones at the east gate, and add some orange sauce. Steamed chicken is the most famous, and the beauty is not counted. " "Bo" means "pig" and "Bo bone" is pork chop. Pork ribs are cooked or dipped in sour sauce mixed with spices such as orange sauce. In addition, the poem praised Sichuan chives, zongzi, turtle soup and other foods. There are more than 5 poems about Sichuan cuisine in Lu You's "Jian Nan Poetry Draft", and his works let us observe the splendor of folk food in Sichuan from another angle.

The great achievement of Sichuan cuisine in the Song Dynasty was that its cooking began to be sent abroad, so that overseas Sichuanese and ordinary people who were not Sichuanese could eat local flavor food in special restaurants. This was the first time that Sichuan cuisine became an independent cooking system. This is the so-called "Sichuan rice" in the Northern Song Dynasty. These Sichuan restaurants mainly sell "noodles with meat, large noodles with meat, large and small dishes with meat, fried meat with meat, mixed fried events, and cooked rice." "Sichuan rice divides tea" in the Southern Song Dynasty. From the contents of the above two books, it can be found that Sichuan cuisine mainly deals with popular diets, especially pasta, which is the main component of noodles, with some fast food meat. Today's noodles in Shanghai and Hangzhou are probably the remains of Sichuan rice noodles, because we can't find the second place where noodles are recorded in Dream of Tokyo, according to the capital Jisheng. In fact, the southern restaurant and Sichuan rice tea after Nandu became synonymous with noodle shops, so the noodles of Kaifeng Sichuan Hotel in the Northern Song Dynasty are likely to become a fixed Jiangnan noodle after Nandu for 15 years. As we know, modern noodles are very different from modern Sichuan noodles. The specific seasoning characteristics of these dishes are not found, and their thick taste and spicy flavor are not found. From the explanation of Menglianglu, we know that the reason for the appearance of Sichuan rice is that in the Northern Song Dynasty, in order to take care of the tastes of the scholar-officials living in Bianjing, "it was said that it was inconvenient for them to eat in the north." One hundred and fifty years after Nandu, these Sichuan restaurants opened in Lin 'an with Nandu have "no distinction between north and south", which shows that these Sichuan-style pasta dishes were quite different from those cooked in the Central Plains.

In other words, only in the Northern Song Dynasty did Sichuan cuisine become an influential cuisine in China. We can conclude that the classical Sichuan cuisine began at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the turn of Wei and Jin Dynasties, and the finalization reached its peak at the same time in the Northern Song Dynasty. The finalization process took almost a thousand years. Decline and depression of Sichuan's food culture from Yuan Dynasty to the middle of Qing Dynasty:

Due to the invasion of Sichuan by Mongolian troops at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, Sichuan's economy and culture were severely devastated in the 51-year war. The population decreased from 12.9 million in the second year of Chunxi in the middle of Southern Song Dynasty (1175 AD) to 165, in the early Yuan Dynasty to the twenty-seventh year of Yuan Dynasty (129 AD), and a large number of people and clansmen fled to the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, making the Southern Song Dynasty. Although there were immigrants from Hunan, Hubei and Xiajiang areas to Sichuan in the early Ming Dynasty, most of these immigrants belonged to the lower class, and the number was very limited. It was not until the sixth year of Wanli in the late Ming Dynasty (1578 AD) that they recovered to 3.1 million, accounting for about .6 of the national population at that time. The invasion of Sichuan by Zhang Xianzhong troops in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties and the long-term fighting with the remnants of Ming and Qing armies further reduced the population of Sichuan to 5,. After the early Qing Dynasty, the Qing government organized a large-scale migration to Sichuan, and by the end of Qing Dynasty (1787 AD), the population reached its first peak of 8.57 million after 143 years of migration in the early Qing Dynasty, but it still could not reach the population in the mid-Southern Song Dynasty. Moreover, although there were a large number of immigrants before the mid-Qing Dynasty, their quality was not high, and almost all of them were low-level people who did not have permanent jobs in the local area, which was incomparable with the large number of elite talents who moved to Sichuan in the late Tang Dynasty and the late Northern Song Dynasty.

under such circumstances, the status of Sichuan's cooking culture in the whole country has also plummeted. We can't find any records of Sichuan restaurants opened in Beijing in the capital of the Song Dynasty in the known Ming and Qing dynasties, nor can we find many articles describing the characteristics of Sichuan cuisine from the Yuan Dynasty to the mid-Qing Dynasty. This is not surprising. When Zhang Han traveled west to Chengdu in the late Ming Dynasty, he saw a scene of depression, desolation and backwardness. It is speculated that the exquisite cooking culture has basically disappeared. By the middle of Qing Dynasty, the immigrants who flooded into Sichuan mainly came from Hunan, Shaanxi, Guangdong, Guangxi, Jiangxi, Fujian and other places. They occupied the richest areas in western Sichuan, southern Sichuan, eastern Sichuan and northern Sichuan, and pushed the remaining few indigenous people to the edge of the basin. Because most of these immigrants came from the lower classes, it was impossible to bring exquisite foreign cooking skills. At that time, Sichuan's economy was still brewing and taking off, which made Sichuan until Xianfeng and Tongzhi in Qing Dynasty.

The birth of modern Sichuan cuisine (1861-195):

During the Qianlong period of Qing Dynasty, Li Huanan, a native of Luojiang, Sichuan Province, who spent many years as an official, paid attention to collecting the cooking experience of chefs and housewives in his spare time. Later, his son, Li Diaoyuan, sorted out the cooking experience he had collected and engraved it as a book of food classics, Awakening the Garden Record. Awakening Garden Record is an important food book in the Qing Dynasty, which is different from the synopsis of similar books in the Qing Dynasty at the same time and before. It records the selection of cooking raw materials and cooking operation procedures in detail, which is of great help to the improvement of the skills of chefs and housewives in the future. We know that from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Song Dynasty, China's cooking practitioners mainly came from two aspects: 1) Palace chefs; 2) Home cooking, only after the Song Dynasty did the catering industry get involved in the development of cooking on a large scale, but until the late Qing Dynasty, the catering industry still failed to dominate the food trend in China. In the above two types of cooking division, the role of home chef in cooking development should far exceed that of palace chef. Kitchen can be divided into two categories: 1) specialized chefs or concubines employed or enslaved by wealthy people; 2) Middle feed, which means ordinary people, also includes some kitchen dishes run by mothers and wives in the families of thrifty officials and intellectuals. It should be said that China's cooking culture is a flower that grows on the fertile soil of daily activities of thousands of families, and the specialized chef is just a master after the professionalization of Chinese cooking. Since the catering industry flourished in the Song Dynasty, the cooking experience of the catering industry has always been inherited from mentoring, which determines that their loss rate is large and their influence is not great. From this height, we can understand the significance of ancient food classics, including the food classics and Qi Min Yao Shu, which were recorded by Ho Choi in the Northern Wei Dynasty. Therefore, the significance of Wake Up Garden Record in promoting cooking in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Sichuan is extraordinary.

At this time, Sichuan's economy is still on the eve of soaring, and its cooking skills are simple and crude. It is influenced by the low-level food style brought into Sichuan by immigrants from Huguang, Jiangxi and Shaanxi, and it is actually a mixture of flavors from all over the world, and its exquisiteness is represented by "eight bowls of meat" and "nine bowls". The so-called eight bowls and nine bowls of meat refer to: hodgepodge, braised pork, ginger chicken, stewed crisp meat, roasted bamboo shoots, steamed pork with rice flour, salted boiled pork with sand and steamed elbows. Among these nine dishes, what we see is mainly the style influenced by Shandong cuisine, which is actually the simplification of Manchu-Han banquet among the people, while the characteristics of classical Sichuan cuisine are only maintained in ginger chicken and meat with sand. The former makes full use of the spicy flavor of Sichuan ginger, while the latter highlights the sweetness, and the hemp taste in classical Sichuan cuisine is at least no longer prominent. This is the reason why Meng Wentong, a historian, believed that the early days of modern Sichuan cuisine were greatly influenced by Shandong cuisine. Li Jieren, a Sichuan native writer, provided readers with several lists of his ancestors' sacrifices in "Speaking of Funeral". A food purchase list in the 21st year of Daoguang (1829) listed all the food raw materials and seasonings purchased during funeral sacrifices and banquets, none of which were peppers or pepper products. Another banquet list in the first year of Tongzhi (1862) listed the dishes in detail, and none of them contained spicy dishes. Among them, the top one was "Jingpin"-Dazaban, which was a Beijing cuisine developed under the influence of Shandong cuisine, but in fact, they were the simplified version of Manchu-Han banquet among the people. Man-Han banquet is a flag bearer and Manchu official stationed in the garrison.