Before the fresh-keeping technology appeared, people thought of many ways to prolong the food consumption cycle, some of them were stored in the cellar, others were used for ice storage, but most of them invariably went to one way-salting. Pickling vegetables with light snow and meat with heavy snow, and pickling food in the twelfth lunar month have become a common understanding of the whole country.

First, the temperature is low in winter and food is not easy to rot; The second is to store fish in winter and have a bumper harvest year. Pickled salted fish is not fresh today, but its unique flavor still attracts a wave of heavy-mouthed people and becomes an artifact for cooking.

Nothing can stop Jiangxi people from pursuing heavy mouth, but compared with Hunan next door, Jiangxi's heavy mouth is much lower-key. Salty and spicy are essential seasonings for life. Without salt, it is tasteless, spicy and soulless. Salty and spicy dishes have long been deeply embedded in Jiangxi cuisine, from banquets to snacks, even pickled oil-soaked fish have not been spared.

fish soaked in oil, as the name implies, is fish soaked in oil. Different from the famous dish in Guangzhou, oil-soaked fish refers to oil-soaked salted fish in Hengfeng area, Jiangxi Province, and it is a kind of local leisure food like distiller's grains fish in Poyang Lake. The similarity between oil-soaked fish and distiller's grains fish is as high as 9%, which is almost the same from the production method. The difference of the remaining 1% lies in the materials used. Compared with the fish with distiller's grains, the oil-soaked fish has less distiller's grains and more pungent.

Grass carp, as one of the four major fish in China, mostly grows in fresh water. When it grows to 4 or 5 Jin, it will naturally become people's dishes. To make oil-soaked fish, Hengfeng people generally prefer grass carp, and 5 or 6 kg of big grass carp meat is the best material.

Clean fresh grass carp, remove the head and tail, and apply a thick salt layer on the whole body of the fish, and add ginger and cooking wine to remove fishy smell. After salting for a period of time, put it in the sun for two or three days, dry it until 6 or 7 minutes, and keep a little humidity to make the fish more elastic.

cut the fish into pieces, steam in a pot and cool for a while. Then pour the oil out of the pan, cut the fish into pieces and put them in the oil pan, fry them until the surface is slightly yellow, and then take them out quickly. Next is the main event, making oil for soaking fish.

It is best to use vegetable oil for soaking fish. Chop ginger and garlic, add chili (preferably dried chili), salt, vinegar and other seasonings, and stir-fry in a pan to make it fragrant. Finally, put the fish into the prepared hot oil, wait for cooling, can and seal it, and wait for time to taste it.