Cooking methods, starting from the "Eight Treasures" in the Zhou Dynasty, have been seen in writing, but most of them are limited to oral communication. Although there will be some written "recipes", they are mostly limited to family heirlooms. By the Northern and Southern Dynasties, this situation began to change.

During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, many officials devoted themselves to cooking, and some people were favored because of their superb cooking skills, and even promoted their officials to knighthood, which was a moment of glory. Jia Sixie, a former satrap of Levin (now Huantai East) in the Northern Wei Dynasty, is a famous agronomist in history and a rare person who is good at cooking. The first set of drinking spectrum compiled by him has been included in the great book Qi Min Yao Shu written by himself. The writing of this book undoubtedly refers to some diet works at that time. It is a very precious document. Jia's genius lies in his juxtaposition of cooking with the production techniques of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and fishery related to the national economy and people's livelihood as a great skill for the people. If this is not the case, I am afraid that this part of the content of drinking is difficult to pass down. Jia Sixie contributed to the spread of China's food culture. Before the Sui and Tang Dynasties, he was the only one who wrote this book.

Qi Min Yao Shu has written koji-making and wine-making, sauce-making, vinegar-making, fermented soybean-making, curdling, preserved wax-making, soup-making, baking, cake-making, rice-making and other cooking techniques, and the skills required for diet are very complete.

koji-making and wine-making have strict operating specifications, especially high requirements for cleanliness. Success will not come easily, and people often pray for the help of the gods with pious hearts, which makes the whole brewing process full of mystery. If a "Divine Comedy" is to be made, the boys in Tsing Yi must draw water before sunrise, and all the cakes must be boys and children. The baked cookies are placed in the house one by one, and a channel is set aside. The children who made the songs stand on the channel, and five of them want to pretend to be the king of songs. Then, the host offered a wine-preserved soup cake to the king of Qu, and he had to read "Zhuqu Wen" three times in a row, which was nothing more than repeatedly saying something like asking the gods to bless the success of Qu creation. The steamed wine and rice prepared for brewing should not be eaten by people and animals, or even seen by chickens and dogs, and they are extremely clean.

Sauce, vinegar, fermented soybean and horseshoe crab are all important condiments since Qin and Han Dynasties. Qi Min Yao Shu describes in detail the important condiments and their making methods since Qin and Han Dynasties. Sauces include bean paste, meat paste, fish paste, wheat paste, elm paste, shrimp paste, fish sausage paste, mustard seed paste, etc. Vinegars include big vinegar, glutinous rice vinegar, barley vinegar, sesame seed vinegar, chaff vinegar, water bitter wine, dark plum bitter wine, honey bitter wine and so on (bitter wine is another name for vinegar). Take brewing barley vinegar as an example, it is stipulated that it must be made on July 7, and if it is not free on July 7, you have to put away the water on this day and wait until the fifteenth, but it is difficult to make vinegar on the other two days. When making vinegar, we should pay special attention not to let people's hair fall into the urn, otherwise it will spoil the vinegar. But as long as the hair is taken out, the vinegar will get better.

Preserved fish-grasshopper wax is fish meat preserved by different methods. "Qi Min Yao Shu" records the methods of making tortoises wrapped in lotus leaves, Changsha Pufu, summer moon fish, dried fish, pork, preserved five flavors, preserved white in summer, and salted fish. Take the tortoises wrapped in lotus leaves as an example. The preparation method is as follows: the fish pieces are washed, sprinkled with salt, mixed with rice flour, thickly wrapped with lotus leaves, and cooked in two or three days. It is delicious and has a unique flavor. The grasshopper fish is salted fish. When it is eaten, the salt is washed away, and it can be steamed, boiled or fried in sauce. Compared with fresh fish, it has more flavor.

Qi Min Yao Shu starts from the section of "Soup-Soup Method", and all of them are specific cooking methods. Soup skin includes taro sour soup, duck soup, turtle soup, pig's trotters sour soup, sheep's trotters sour soup, rabbit soup, sour soup, flax soup, preserved leaf soup, chicken soup, Qiang boiled soup, perch soup, vinegar fermented goose and duck. Take the method of soft-shelled turtle as an example: first, put the soft-shelled turtle in boiling water, peel off its shell and internal organs, and cook it with 1 kg of mutton, 3 liters of onion, 5% of black bean, 5% of japonica rice, 5% of ginger, 1 inch of magnolia and 2 liters of wine, and then season it with salt and vinegar. In this section, Jia Sixie also remembered a strange way to cure the over-salty meat soup: take the dry soil foam in the rut, sieve it with cotton, bag the soil foam with double-layer cloth and silk, fasten the bag mouth, and sink it into the bottom of the pot, and the soup will be light for a while. This method is estimated to be effective. I wonder if anyone has tried it?

Steamed vegetables are a major category of Chinese food, and they had high steaming skills as early as the Shang and Zhou Dynasties. The steamed dishes recorded in Qi Min Yao Shu include steamed bear, steamed sheep, steamed dolphin, steamed goose, steamed chicken, steamed pig's head, steamed raw fish, steamed fish dishes with wool, steamed lotus root, etc. Generally, the method is to steam them directly in the steamer after adjusting the flavor.

other cooked dishes include five-tailed mackerel (chop suey soup), braised chicken, braised white meat, braised fish, fried fish with honey (sweet and sour fish), fried duck (stir-fried diced chicken) and so on. The practice of honey-fried fish is: take the crucian carp and put it net, but don't remove the scales; Half the vinegar and honey, and then add salted fish. After about a meal, the fish will be percolated out and fried in oil until it is red.

There is another cooking method with vinegar pulp as the main seasoning, which is called "fermented green", that is, sour meat. Some of this sour meat is cooked with vinegar juice, and some is poured with vinegar juice; Others are directly dipped in vinegar. For example, in the "white fermented glutinous rice" method, geese, ducks and chickens are boiled with white water, the bones are removed, and then they are put into a cup and poured with salt and vinegar gravy.

Roasting is the oldest method of eating meat, and it has been quite complete in Jia Sixie. Jia Sixie wrote down roast suckling pig, roast pork, roast pork, roast beef arm, roast sausage, roast jumping pill, stir-fry, stir-fry cake, stir-fry, stir-fry clam, stir-fry tortoise shell, stir-fry fish and so on. Roasted suckling pig was a famous dish in the Northern and Southern Dynasties. When it was roasted, it turned sharply and was coated with sake and lard. The color of the roasted pork was like real gold amber, and it disappeared at the entrance, like ice and snow. Grilled beef leg is roasted. First, roast one side of it, cut it when it is cooked, cut it and then roast it. Don't bake all around, otherwise it won't taste good. Grilled meat is a barbecue block, which can be used for sheep, cattle, roe deer and deer. The meat should be soaked in seasoning for a while before roasting, so that it can be cooked in one go. Sausage by enema is to pour the mutton with good taste into the intestines of sheep dish and roast it, then cut it and eat it, which is very delicious. Jumping balls are meatballs made of pork and mutton and cooked in broth. Both mashed and grilled are like kebabs. Eggs or white fish are mixed with goose foam and cooked on bamboo sticks. Baked cakes are made of minced fish or pork, flavored and made into cakes, which are slowly fried with low heat until they are red and cooked. Fan-roasting refers to roasting geese and roast ducks. Before roasting the whole goose and duck, the bones should be crushed, coated with seasoning and then roasted. After roasting, the bones should be removed and put on a plate.

The bad meat method and the braced meat method in meat are also worth mentioning. Bad meat can be used in four seasons. Use water and distiller's grains to make porridge, put salt on it, and put the roasted stick-roasted meat in the bad place and store it in the shade. It can not be bad for ten days in summer, and it is a good food with wine. The bract meat must be slaughtered in winter. After a night of semi-drying, it is cut into a stick-roasted shape, wrapped in thatch, sealed with thick mud and hung in the shade. It can be stored as fresh meat that is not bad in July and August next year. This sealed fresh-keeping method is also very scientific in modern times.

The staple food includes cakes and rice, as well as snacks. Because it was very popular at that time, Jia Sixie first talked about the method of making bread yeast, and then cited the methods of making white cake, sesame cake, pulp cake, cream ring, chicken and duck egg cake, thin ring cake, cut cake, water-drawn cake, rice flour, powder cake, dolphin skin cake and so on. The pulp cake is baked with bone marrow, honey and flour. The cream ring is a fried scorpion, also known as a torch. Thin ring cakes and cut cakes are also mixed with honey and fried in oil. Ring cakes, also known as cold utensils, are slightly shorter. The jelly is a round cake, and it is also required to be mixed with honey and water. Jia Wei is a noodle picked up by fingers in a basin and cooked with urgent fire. Potato seeds are like chess pieces. They can be stored for some time after being steamed. If necessary, they can be boiled in water and served with gravy. The powder cake is like rice noodles. Squeeze the flour paste into a line through a perforated horn spoon, then cook it and pour the juice. Dolphin skin cake is somewhat like the dough in Shaanxi now. It is made by mixing the dough and coating it in a bowl, and scalding the bowl in water.

there are millet paste, cold food paste, long rice, Hu rice, etc. for meals, as well as the preparation methods of dry food such as glutinous rice paste and jujube essence.

Jia Sixie is valuable because he has not forgotten the diet of ordinary people. In his book, he also set up a "vegetarian" section, which deals with many popular dishes, which is very rare information in the history of cooking. This point is often ignored by some gourmets, so in the Song Dynasty after the 21th century, China began to publish vegetarian monographs.

The vegetarian dishes recorded in Qi Min Yao Shu include leek soup, stewed soup, fried black beans, fried laver in paste, steamed garlic, souto rice, honey ginger, glutinous rice, glutinous rice, glutinous rice, glutinous rice, glutinous rice, glutinous rice and eggplant. For example, the way to lick eggplant is to choose seedless tender eggplant, cut it into four pieces with a bamboo knife or a bone knife, and cut it easily with an iron knife. Blanch the cut eggplant in water, boil the hot oil, cook the scallion, soy sauce and eggplant together, and finally sprinkle some pepper and Jiang Mo.

pickles and the like are more important in the civilian vegetarian diet. The finished vegetables and pickled vegetables mentioned in Qi Min Yao Shu are: sunflower, fermented grains, turnip, turnip, mustard, salty fermented grains, light fermented grains, soup fermented grains, single fermented grains, fermented grains, fermented grains and fermented grains. Although making pickles is extremely learned, I don't know the tricks, and it is not easy to succeed. For example, some dishes can only be washed with extremely salty salt water, but not with fresh water, otherwise they will rot. Another example is that laver will dissolve itself when it is stained with cold water, and it can't be scalded with hot water, otherwise it will lose its original flavor. The pickle jar must be sealed to prevent the internal and external air circulation. The pickle jar, which has been popular since the Han Dynasty, is used for this purpose.

There are many ways to eat vegetarian dishes, which were highly valued in the Southern and Northern Dynasties. There are many kinds of vegetarian dishes. Liang Wudi said that he "changed dozens of melons and ate dozens of flavors" ("Biography of Liang Shu He Chen"), which shows that the cooking of vegetarian dishes had a very high standard in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, which had nothing to do with the prevalence of Buddhism at that time.

At the end of Qi Min Yao Shu, the methods of boiling sugar are also described, including boiling white, black, amber, boiling, baking, white cocoon sugar, yellow cocoon sugar and so on. Most of these sugars are maltose, and the more beautiful sucrose began to be mass-produced in the Tang Dynasty.

Qi Min Yao Shu is the greatest cooking work before Tang Dynasty, which is a high summary of the cooking techniques in the Yellow River valley from Han Dynasty to Northern Wei Dynasty.