Family eats country eats

Southern customs. On the third day of the new wife's visit, her in-laws should test her cooking skills and extend them to family education. A scholarly family married two daughters-in-law at the same time. The eldest daughter-in-law got up early to wash her hands and cook, and sure enough, she cooked a table of delicious food, which was praised by her in-laws. The eldest daughter-in-law said modestly, there is oil and onion, and boiled dung smells good. They looked at each other. Daughter-in-law then held a table of delicious food exhibitions, and tut-tut was heard all over the place. The daughter-in-law was blessed and humble: it was not clever daughter-in-law, but more seasoning.

the victory or defeat is clear without debate.

After my grandmother repeatedly taught me the above story in Zhangzhou dialect, I realized that one element of cooking essence is seasoning, which also emphasized the word "elegance" in China's food culture.

My grandfather therefore added: When he was a teenager, he wandered to Xiamen alone and chewed two big light cakes, calling a bowl of soup the cheapest on the menu, which was euphemistically called "crossing the river with a dragon". It only cost a copper coin, but in fact it was nothing more than a bowl of clear soup with two pieces of onion.

People at the seaside have an exquisite way of eating fish. There are two kinds of shad in Sanma, and shad has the highest grade. A large family takes an examination of their daughter-in-law, so they use this proposition to write a composition. The bride held out a plate of steamed shad in her hands without showing weakness, and it was full of fragrance. When the mother-in-law touched the chopsticks, she saw that the fish was shaved bare and her face sank. It turns out that the value of shad lies in scales, and only scales can boil out golden fish oil with special aroma. However, when the fish was finished, it was discovered that the fish scales were put on by silk thread and clustered at the bottom of the plate. This is convenient to eat and keeps the original flavor. So the father-in-law screamed, "It's a three-generation family after all!" The family finally got a princess and the pea.

this story is one of my father's most proud tutors. This shows that my father not only attaches importance to the quality of diet, but also pays attention to form. Even at a small table, he asked for a corresponding set of dishes. A few vegetables should also be fried to have a name. In the event of a family dinner, radish is dyed and tomatoes are carved. This extreme formalism makes several children unanimously conclude that the father's pleasure in cooking is all in his hands, not in his mouth.

in my father's spoon, except human flesh, there is probably no animal that can't be eaten. When he fell from the position of bank manager to the right, he was sent to dig coal in an open-pit coal mine, and all the food designated by Thaksin was sent home like water. In difficult times, he caught voles, peeled them and put them on branches to roast; He picked chestnuts and simmered them in ashes; Pick sweet potato leaves, pumpkin leaves and even stir-fry locusts. If the bug didn't have a strange smell, it might have become a dish with no worries about its source. Everything that can be bitten by teeth is absorbed into protein by hunger, so that my father can survive in the harsh labor, but many companions who retch at the sight of voles and locusts leave one by one.

My mother died young, and my father always dominated the kitchen. The three brothers and sisters are so happy that their mouths are full of food. Although I don't steal art from the kitchen, I have my own recipes at the dinner table. When they start their own families and make short-term raids, they will all be fired into their own systems. It's my father's turn to go door-to-door for acceptance, but he still puts on his head: green is not as good as blue.

I spoil my tongue when I eat at home. When I go out for a business meeting, I will definitely lose half a lap when I come back. China is indeed vast in territory and abundant in resources, and there are different ways to eat oysters every other county. The fried oysters in Xiamen are different in Quanzhou, but they are two different things in Fuzhou. When I go abroad, I will be United as one enemy, and I will miss the country. Compared with sandwiches, let alone jiaozi in the north, spring rolls in the south, and even Yangchun noodles in the north and south, it makes people grind their teeth with painful thoughts. Although I have tasted French snails, Japanese raw fish and Dutch roasted liver, my throat is always narrow, my stomach is empty, and I don't know if I am hungry for days. Whenever a foreign friend invites him to dinner and asks about western food or Chinese food, he immediately points to a Chinese restaurant. Although it is really useless to know that you will not taste exotic flavors in the west.

Put yourself in others' shoes and come back from London. Write to a good friend who works very hard and often eats sandwiches: "Take care of yourself and eat at least one China meal every day."

Eating in the South and Eating in the North

Maybe not all southerners, but as far as I'm concerned, the diets in the South and the North are very different, which is no less than two distant countries.

In recent years, a lot of imperial meals have been unearthed in Beijing, and the packages are getting more and more exquisite, which is a bit more royal than paying tribute to the emperor in those days. It is just a lot of flour with sugar in it. I admit this is prejudice, absolutely. Please calm down your anger in the north.

Once, a group of military writers came to Xiamen for a pen meeting, stayed in the most luxurious Jinbao Hotel, and sacrificed live shrimps and drunk crabs every day. However, they were sad and haggard, and their poems and poems were dystocia. When the hotel owner learned that they were invited to eat jiaozi, the men immediately came alive and shouted, showing their true colors as heroes. I went to see my friends, which coincided with the jiaozi meeting, shouting bad luck.

I never liked jiaozi. Sometimes when I go to Beijing for a meeting, my old friends treat each other wholeheartedly, calling in five or six helpers, kneading, cutting and chopping. Shrimp, lean meat, shredded ginger and so on do not hesitate to pay for it, but it is just a dish. In my brother's words, a pair of chopsticks is nowhere to walk, and it is always on a big plate.

Last year, Tian Lin, Yang Mei and Chen Suoju were waiting for their old poetry friends to come to Xiamen, and invited them to taste Cantonese-style "morning tea". The breakfast served was a palm-sized small steamer with three shrimp dumplings or a pair of chicken feet in it. The guest didn't dare to say a word, and the bill was staggering. Yang Mei couldn't help but feel the general's still flat belly and said, "Shu Ting, come to Xinjiang. I'll treat you to watermelon. You can't hold half a melon with both hands. It's ten or twenty pounds. " Chen Suoju muttered in a low voice: "At least tea can be drunk in a big cup." Everyone looked at each other and couldn't help laughing.

Therefore, I remembered that a few Beijing children, such as Ahmad Mohamad, came to Xiamen for the summer vacation many years ago, and when they came back, they wrote to advise me: "I found you so thin that you only drank porridge." What's more, they drink porridge every day in my house and have a phobia of porridge. My father likes this group of small employees best. He can drink three or five bowls of porridge and scrape the dishes clean while eating vegetables. If we open a can, our whole family has been staring at the oil slick and worrying, but we can drink it all before we pick it up. These northern youths have been driven crazy by the light taste in the south, and my father always thought it was his superb cooking skills.

Xinjiang hasn't arrived yet, but I went to Inner Mongolia. Poetry friends meet thousands of miles away, maybe this is the only time in their lives, and everyone is particularly enthusiastic. When I got up in the morning, I saw two bottles of white wine poking at the table to wait on me. Pork, mutton, beef, dog meat, all kinds of meat. Fold high into a arhat disc. The mouth actually said: "It's too extravagant, it's better to have a simple dish of vegetables." But in this festival, even cucumbers are shipped from far away, cut into filaments, and a few are placed on the side of the plate as ornamental plants. When I arrived in Qiqihar, I was invited to dinner again. This time, there were extremely rare fish. Dare to ask for a bowl of soup. My friend was in such a hurry that he brought a big steel cauldron to my side in a moment. Although it's just water with a cucumber and an egg, it's infinitely delicious. When I drink again, my stomach is like a drum, and I can't finish it anymore, so I sell it to my host. The host replied heroically: We northerners don't drink soup.

Even when you are abroad, there is no confusion between expatriates from South China and expatriates from North China. I remember that someone invited Zhang Jie to go home to eat jiaozi, and the listener was a northerner and immediately left his seat to give chase. Only I am still playing with fried chicken legs. Only at Chen Ruoxi's home, I ate the gruel she cooked for me for several days in a row. Take Taiwan Province pickles as an example. We think I still have a stomach, which has been lost in steak and French fries for a long time.

The difference between Taiwan Province food and Xiamen food is only from street to street.

Otherwise, how can a song of roasted meat dumplings be sung all over the Taiwan Strait? Only the noses of Taiwan Province people and Minnan people can smell the smell of roasted meat dumplings every three blocks.

There are so many flavors of famous brands in the south, which often hits friends in the north, saying that they only have jiaozi as a subject. Last year, I was a guest at my home in North Island, England. I had a sandwich for breakfast. Kitajima handed me a toothpaste-shaped caviar, which even Europeans thought was delicious. Unexpectedly, Kitajima and his wife were still disappointed: "I really want to eat Zhajiang Noodles in Beijing again." Oh, my God, I don't want to miss Zhajiang Noodles!

Eat snacks

Today, we don't have to rely on the two jins of pork supplied by the ticket, shred and chop mud slices and stir-fry them, but we just don't have to cut off our fingers, so we can make a New Year's Eve dinner.

Even on weekends, brothers go back to their old house for a party, and the seventy-year-old man is tireless in learning, and the recipes in his hand always keep up with the trend. The fennel chicken and iron plate fish skewers are always full and withdrawn. Only vegetables are always in short supply. At present, the taste of southerners is so bad that even southerners themselves feel guilty. Needless to say, turtles, lobsters, sea cucumbers and fresh shellfish, even the palatal membrane and chicken feet of pigs have become a magnificent and elegant hall. Until one day, the seven-year-old son picked up a piece of pork and said with emotion, "Mom, are we poor?" The son added that on the way to school, he heard his neighbor's grandmother say: At present, the rich eat kimchi and the poor eat diced meat.

Even so, a university professor left a meal with four dishes and one soup on the table. Vegetables are real vegetables, Chinese cabbage, melons, lentils and bean sprouts, and soup is tofu soup. This professor does not work in a Buddhist college, but is well-known in the Chinese Department of the whole country. The reason why he was forced to be a vegetarian is easy to understand, because his monthly salary can only buy 1 kilograms of pork.

After Xiamen was opened as a special zone, the restaurant industry was so developed that it completely controlled the market.

In July and August this year, the tourism industry was frustrated, and many restaurants closed down one after another, so the citizens ate live shrimps happily. In the past, these raw seafood were concentrated in the water tanks facing the street in restaurants.

I always have a chance to be invited to eat because I have a poor reputation. Refuse everything whenever possible. According to the vegetarian professor friend, the current society should be to eat well and be official. There are many people who get promoted and get rich at the dinner table. I also heard that one of the reasons for the depression of the restaurant industry is the new regulations that newspapers have repeatedly called for prohibiting binge eating and drinking with public funds. Therefore, there must be many people who want to fade out of their mouths.

I had to come back from dinner, and I was so tired that my lips hung around my ears that I couldn't recover. The worst thing is that there is still a half-baked eater sitting next to me. There is nothing to talk about, and it is not good to bow my head and eat. The difficulty of finding a topic makes me have a headache or pretend to be drunk. At this time, I am most eager to sneak into the street and find a snack bar. I am steaming and crowded in the crowd. I dare to suck loudly and knock on the plate and hit chopsticks. Once I ate in a luxury hotel in Guangzhou, and the last dish was pangolin, knowing that it was to protect animals, I refused to move chopsticks; Whether it's fur seals or protecting animals, my heart is full. So I walked away, and a young friend took me to the big food stall, leaning against the wall and holding a plate of 5-cent fried snails, which was as justified as chirping and kissing, presumptuous and happy. Along the way, I also bought some kebabs with bamboo pieces, and the soup was dripping with water. People who come and go in the street don't care about anyone. It's better than sitting in a garden hotel and scooping sesame paste with a small spoon of blue flowers and fine porcelain. Anyway, there is no orchid finger in A Dream of Red Mansions.

I wonder if loving snacks has something to do with liking folk customs. There are many kinds of snacks in Xiamen, and the most popular one is to take a pair of bamboo chopsticks and fry tofu in a pan. Some men in the literary and art circles often squat under the pony lamp, sweating profusely, craning their necks to sip sorghum wine, and their eyes shine. Occasionally passing by, someone raises a glass and invites them. Finally, because of his thin face, the greedy insects crawled from a distance. The literary friends in the food stalls also regard this as elegant, and it is proved that Lu Xun was also an old horse in this way, so the front skirt is always covered with oil stains, which is also a big sign for those who cover the fried tofu.

I often go out. Everywhere I go, I often refuse to have a meal. I go through the streets to hunt wild food without permission, but I have been deceived repeatedly and never change my mind. Occasionally, I can dig up the original works and tell them to my friends, who scoff.

At the Sichuan Star Poetry Festival, friends invited them to eat Chongqing hot pot, and they were forced to make their tongues swell and their lips black and purple. Therefore, they desperately ate pea tips, and then they desperately upset their stomachs. Even being helped to pay tribute to Leshan Giant Buddha. At first glance, the giant Buddha knew that he had a good appetite and looked lovingly at the other side. At the dim light on the other side, there were a bunch of people sweating around spicy tofu.

Since then, I have never thought about Chongqing hot pot. However, due to diarrhea, I finally failed to taste the Sichuan flavor. There is a restaurant opposite the hotel where I live called "Meimei Couple Lung Film Shop". I see it every day and I will never forget it. If someone asks me what is the most delicious snack in the world, the answer is: husband and wife lung slices.

because I haven't tasted it yet.