From this description, we can see the delicious food at that time, such as bad goose feet, duck letters, sour bamboo shoots and chicken skin soup, eggplant, roasted venison and so on. We can also have a glimpse of the food list sent from our farm in Jiafu during the Spring Festival: "Thirty deer, fifty Zhang Zi, fifty spores, twenty Siamese pigs, twenty soup pigs, twenty dragon pigs, twenty wild boars, twenty domestic wax pigs, twenty wild sheep, twenty green sheep, twenty domestic soup sheep and twenty domestic wind sheep ..." Jia Zhen is still too few, and he is not interested in managing the manor for him.
Today, a dish in A Dream of Red Mansions is related to sheep. In the forty-ninth chapter of A Dream of Red Mansions, it was written that the first dish for grandma was "Steamed lamb with milk" on snowy days. Grandmother Jia said, "This is our old people's dish. It's a pity that you children can't eat it. There is fresh venison today. Wait. "
This dish is homologous to medicine and food, just like eating some hot nourishing food when the weather is cold in winter. Grandma should eat this often in winter. A lamb is a young sheep or a fetus in its womb. "Things that have never seen the sun", that is to say, this is an unborn lamb, which has been taken out for cooking. This is the cruelty of this dish.
"Jia, white jade is the golden horse of the bed" is a description of the heyday of Jia family. Such a wealthy family will certainly not wait for the ewe to give birth to a dead sheep before cooking. If so, the Jia family can't wait for a lamb all winter. Then, will the ewe cook for the grandmother immediately after giving birth to the lamb in winter?
In fact, it can be seen from the words "things that have never seen the light of day" that it is not a lamb produced by a ewe, but a lamb that is directly cut open and taken out for grandma to cook. There is an idiom called "kill the chicken to get the egg", which can explain the way to get the lamb-capture it alive. This is the most cruel dish in the book.
In fact, with the luxury of Jia's family, it is impossible for the chef to specially select the dead sheep that gave birth during childbirth to cook for Jia. So come to think of it, "steamed mutton with milk" is a very cruel dish. There are many villains in A Dream of Red Mansions, such as Xifeng, who killed several lives. For example, Jia she, with white hair and beard, was old and faded, and tried to rob Yuanyang, but failed, so she spent several hundred taels of silver to buy a little girl from a poor family ...! Jia Zhen and Jia Lian are not good roles.
Jia Mu is a good person in A Dream of Red Mansions. She believes in Buddhism, often goes to some temples to burn incense and kowtow, and sometimes prevents Xifeng from hitting the page. However, even such a good man has a cruel side in the author's eyes, and it is difficult to be perfect when he was born in such a noble who exploited others for a living. Just as a gourmet, she may not have witnessed the process of mother sheep being disemboweled, so she can't understand the cruelty of this dish. This is also the reason why the author made Jia's family fall into the middle.