In the eyes of the masses, people who can afford a delicious meal should at least eat a few precious ingredients that ordinary people have not eaten and have been to several important banquets at the state banquet level. It's best for the working class to pay for a meal, blow their beards and stare and shout: I won't cook for a month! That can be called a gourmet.
My first impression of China gourmets comes from Lu's Gourmet, which describes a Suzhou gourmet named Zhu Zizhi. He described the man as "eating for more than forty years, never to fill his stomach, but to eat some flavor". For a person who loves to eat and knows how to eat, at the very least, he should "eat his heart when eating vegetables, eat his tail when eating fish, eat yellow when eating eggs, and eat fat when eating meat". Because Mr. Zhu ate so badly, Gao's son, who ran errands for him, was full of anger and vowed to cut off the tail of the old capitalism.
Real gourmets are far above novels. When they opened Mr. Tang Sun Lu's "Eat in China", they took out a green shark's fin: choose the top-grade small ribs, carefully prepare them, stew them in chicken soup with slow fire, and then use big purple abalone, real cloud legs and carefully cooked oil chicken, just wrap the chicken skin with fresh lotus leaves ... Stop, the effort spent here is not enough.
But what does this oriental food eat? It turned out to be nothing more than fried noodles, ribs rice, Guandong cooking ... all kinds of things on the street. In one episode, an understanding shopkeeper asked, Sir, is there anything you don't like to eat? Brother Goro was surprised (probably can't think of anything that can't be delicious) and said, I eat everything. He seems to have shown us the most naive side of middle-aged men. He wants to eat, loves to eat, and can't help eating. In his mind, eating is more wonderful than getting rich and more delicious than love. But he didn't eat crazy. This man just stopped to see Chestnut Dafu on the market. He must have bought one cross and eaten it immediately. His delicious food never seems to bother. Unlike many people in China who are superstitious that Huai orange is a bitter orange, they often eat drunk chicken and half a dozen egg tarts consigned by a plane, and their mouths are watering because of their insatiable desire. Or once you enter the doorway of food, you always fly to Paris twice a year to eat Michelin and go to Tokyo several times to buy ingredients. People bought a bottle of coconut milk in China supermarket, and they were still very happy.
In fact, this book "The Lonely Gourmet" should be called "The Gourmet of the Lonely Family". At the beginning of each episode of TV series, the voice-over will happily say a line to the effect that when you are completely immersed in eating, you can eat whatever you want at that moment, which is the greatest freedom of modern society. Goro's title as a gourmet doesn't quite meet the standards of China people, but as a lone ranger, he is definitely a master. An unmarried middle-aged man can dress himself meticulously when he goes out, and he can't find anything wrong from head to toe. He is already the top grade of the lone ranger. The most terrible thing about this man is that he can make the activity of eating alone so realistic. I remember the year before last in Beijing, it was really terrible to eat alone, and 7 1 1 could only eat two bites. The dinner of the people of the Imperial City with less elegance is grouped in spicy incense pots, and a little more elegance becomes a spicy temptation. I never remember that the food in these two families has other tastes besides being horribly spicy. However, a group of jokes about drifting north are vivid enough, even if the food tastes bad, people can sacrifice their lives for justice. This is a place where you can't live without friends. The food is terrible and life is terrible. There are no more three friends and two friends who tell jokes. Life is no different from eating shit.
Japan is different. The difference is that once the society develops to a certain extent, human feelings generally stop at saying thank you and will never burn to the point of inviting you to dinner. Fortunately, these foods are enough to comfort people. This kind of food is not far from the ends of the earth, and it is not so expensive that its eyes are black. It is everywhere at the end of the alley. When the hero happily burps and smokes a cigarette after dinner, he must be as happy as a fairy.
Because he wants very little, he has no reason to be unhappy. Eating well is a blessing, but eating well is an unexpected surprise. Eating a bowl of tomato spaghetti with hamburger meat, the old man next to him said, I never believe in nutrition. At this age, it is best to eat and drink well.
I have never been to Japan, but I read a report that Japan is an alien planet. Although all the people above are human, they are not very expressive. For these humans, the happiest thing seems to be to go to a food stall, queue up for half an hour to buy a fried meat pie, and then say "Oh, a west" with great satisfaction.
So, a lonely person can find his own happiness, even if this happiness is brought by fried pork chops, so what? Is the happiness of a wife greater than this happiness? It may not be known. Unfortunately, most people can't agree with this view. If you are 30 years old and unmarried, one day you will be happy because you want to eat a hairy crab. Maybe everyone will treat you as a madman and advise you: eat less, and then who can you marry?
Even if you are a country with high-class gourmets, you are not allowed to have lifelong love with food. There is no doubt that it is abnormal, so I have to go to the Japanese drama to see how this uncle stepped into the abyss of abnormality and happiness.