Zhu Youxiao, known as the carpenter's emperor, is not only a simple guide to craftsmen, but also a skillful craftsman. "An axe belongs to a catty, and everyone bows and exercises himself. Although a skillful craftsman, you can't cross it. "
We found that the emperor was also a super eater of seafood hotpot. In the History of the Ming Palace (the History of the Ming Palace is the 16th to 2th volumes selected by Lu Ya, a Ming Dynasty eunuch, from the 24 volumes of Deliberation in Records written by Liu Ruoyu), there is a detailed description of sea cucumber cooking. It is said that Ming Xizong likes to eat more than ten kinds of moxibustion clams, fresh shrimps, bird's nest, shark wings and sea cucumbers. Come to think of it carefully, isn't this the very popular seafood hotpot?
At that time, sea cucumber hot pot was just a kind of court food. Because in the numerous diet charts of Jin Ping Mei in Wanli period of Ming Dynasty, we have never seen the dishes of sea cucumber.
Suiyuan Food List describes 326 kinds of northern and southern dishes popular in China from 14th century to 18th century.
the author Yuan Mei (1716-1797), known as "Northern Ji and Southern Yuan" during the Qianlong period of Qing Dynasty, was a gifted scholar on a par with Ji Xiaolan. Yuan Caizi is a gourmet. He lived to be 81 years old, and after 4 years' unremitting efforts, he wrote a masterpiece in the history of China's diet, Menu with the Garden. This miniature version of the China Diet Encyclopedia covers all the foods eaten by China people in the Yangtze River valley for a thousand years.
the menu with the garden describes the sea cucumber eating, and its "three methods of sea cucumber" says: the sea cucumber is tasteless, and the sand is full of smell, which is the most difficult to please. However, the nature is strong, and you can't simmer in clear soup. It is necessary to examine the small Stichopus japonicus, first soak it in sand and mud, roll it in broth for three times, and then simmer it in chicken and meat. Mushrooms and auricularia auricula are used as auxiliary materials, which are similar in color and black. Generally, if you treat tomorrow, you have to simmer the day before the sea cucumber is rotten. Seeing the money watcher, it is good to mix cold shredded sea cucumber with mustard and chicken sauce in summer. Or cut into small pieces and simmer with diced bamboo shoots and mushrooms in chicken soup. It is also good for assistant minister Jiang to stew sea cucumber with tofu skin, chicken legs and mushrooms.
In Yuan Mei's account, senior officials in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, such as Qian Wei and Assistant Minister Jiang, have been feasting guests with sea cucumbers at home, and they highly praised mustard and shredded sea cucumbers in chicken sauce.
It is mentioned in Suiyuan Food List that sea cucumber is tasteless, and the sand is full of smell, which is the most difficult to please.
Indeed, sea cucumber, an ancient marine mollusk, survives tenaciously by unique means of self-defense: when the enemy attacks, sea cucumber will spray its internal organs into the sea, forming a "false target" to attract hunters, and it will take the opportunity to escape without a trace. After about 5 days, it will grow a brand-new pair of internal organs and continue to live on the bottom of the sea. This is one of the key factors that sea cucumber can reproduce for more than 6 million years.
sea cucumber's "rough skin" makes it excluded from human diet for a long time.
As early as the Three Kingdoms period, Kuloko Shen recorded a kind of coastal special product called "local meat" in the Records of Foreign Bodies in Linhai, which may be the earliest record of sea cucumber in Chinese literature. However, at that time, the cooking in China was still dominated by the roasting method (barbecue), and the sea cucumber would be as hard as a rubber after being directly barbecued by an open flame, and it could hardly be bitten.
during the song dynasty, there was no record of human eating sea cucumber. Wu Zimu's "Dream Liang Lu" only records scallops and bird's nest. The Taiping Guangji compiled by Li Fang and others in Song Dynasty collected 5 volumes of unofficial history from Han Dynasty to the early Song Dynasty. Among the 1 aquatic animals in the volume, 61 kinds of aquatic foods were mentioned, but no sea cucumber was found.
China people's understanding of the edible value of sea cucumber began in the Ming Dynasty. As a Chinese herbal medicine, Li Shizhen was not mentioned in Compendium of Materia Medica published in 159. It is the Food Materia Medica compiled by Yao Kecheng in the late Ming Dynasty that gives a detailed description of sea cucumber. In Zhao Xuemin's Compendium of Materia Medica, there is also a detailed record that the medicinal value of sea cucumber is enemy ginseng, hence the name sea cucumber.
sea cucumber became popular in the late period of dry growth. This is precisely the first time that Yuan Mei described the three practices of sea cucumber in detail in "Eating List with the Garden".
One of the reasons why sea cucumber can enter the Eight Treasures of Seafood and become a top-grade restaurant is the prevalence of Shandong cuisine. Shandong cuisine's masterpiece is roasted sea cucumber with onion. However, many of the essences of Shandong cuisine come from Confucius' House. In China Confucius' Cookbook, written by Ge Shoutian, there are 17 kinds of dishes in Qing Dynasty, including 39 kinds of treasures. There are 28 kinds of seafood and 4 kinds of sea cucumber, including bamboo shadow sea cucumber, grilled sea cucumber, milk soup gold and silver sea cucumber and fish skin grilled sea cucumber.
Manchu-Han Banquet was originally a commercial title of large-scale traditional banquet during the period from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, and its early prototype was "Manchu-Han Banquet in Yangzhou in Qing Dynasty" written by Li Dou. When Qianlong went down to the south of the Yangtze River, the local cook specially learned some Shandong dishes and palace dishes to please the emperor, which made the reception banquet a new kind of banquet, which was not only blended with the imperial food in the capital palace, but also mixed with the local southern delicacies. In Yangzhou Manchu-Han banquet, there are already three braised tendons in the sea.
Later, when the old Beijing Eight Building hosted birthday banquets, it often made banquets based on this recipe, and called them "Manchu-Han Banquet" to attract guests. Among the 217 dishes handed down from the Manchu-Han banquet to the present, sea cucumbers have appeared for 12 times, among which the main course is: the 55th dish, braised black ginseng with red sauce.
in 1978, at the request of Japan's fuji trading co., ltd., a Manchu-Chinese banquet was made in Fangshan restaurant, in which the main course included butterfly and sea cucumber.
after the 18th century, sea cucumber became an indispensable variety in the "Maritime Silk Road" trade after silk, porcelain and spices, and also closely linked Australians in the southern hemisphere with Makassar and Chinese in the northern hemisphere. Makassar-Guangzhou-Macau, which was once a famous Maritime Silk Road, became a sea cucumber route.
makassar strait, in the middle of Indonesian archipelago, is an important intercontinental sea route between Asia and Europe, an important route from the South China Sea of China and the Philippines to Australia, and a shortcut to interregional routes in Southeast Asia. It is known as one of the eight straits with important military and economic significance in the world.
more than 3 years ago, Makassar was the largest city, the largest port, the most open free trade port, the transit station of the Maritime Silk Road, the gateway to the spice islands and the trading distribution center in Southeast Asia. During the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, the Maritime Silk Road became increasingly prosperous, and Guangzhou-Macau-Makassar became a fixed route for maritime trade: every autumn and winter, Portuguese merchant ships set sail in Macau, riding the northeast monsoon, and arrived in Makassar full of silk and porcelain. In the spring and summer of next year, spices such as pepper and sandalwood will be shipped back to Macao. According to historical records, there were about 1 to 22 merchant ships in China at that time. During 1637 to 1644, 8 to 1,2 tons of pepper were transported to China every year, with the largest annual traffic volume of 2, tons, accounting for 5/6 of Indonesian total output.
The rising demand for sea cucumbers in China in the Qing Dynasty was firmly grasped by Indonesian Makassar who made a living by maritime trade. Around 1666, Makassar discovered sea cucumbers in northern Australia and started the first export trade in northern Australia-sea cucumbers.
The Makassar people go to northern Australia once a year, and arrive at the beginning of the monsoon in December or January of the following year, and then return to the return air in June. It was the Yungu people in Australia who traded with the Makassar people in northern Australia.
The Yungu people are local indigenous peoples. They don't eat sea cucumbers, and think that unprocessed sea cucumbers are poisonous. Even the whole set of sea cucumber processing technology was brought by Wangjiaxi people. In the exhibition, historical photos recorded the sea cucumber processing station at that time: the Makassar cut the sea cucumber, cooked it, dried it, smoked it, and then transported it to the port of South China in exchange for money from China.
The Makassar people brought trade opportunities to the Yungu people. Yonggu men will volunteer to work on the ships of Makassar, while Yonggu women are willing to marry Makassar. This situation is reflected in the bark paintings of the Yungu people in Australia: the rainy season has just arrived, and the cumulonimbus clouds all over the sky are triangular, which not only means the arrival of the rainy season, but also the ships of the Makassar people are coming.
With the trade going on year by year, the cultures of China people, Indonesian Makassar people and Australian aborigines are gradually transmitted to each other. For example, in the music and language of Australian aborigines, we can find some traces of the Makassar. Today, the extensive exchanges between China and Australia are the continuation of the sea cucumber trade more than 2 years ago.
Australian aborigines communicate with the outside world because of international trade-they sell sea cucumbers, and the Makassar people who trade with them not only bring knives, shirts, hats, rice, sugar and other commodities, but also bring foreign culture and entertainment, such as card games. Cards, which have been popularized in most parts of the world today, have also witnessed the history of cultural exchanges between people on two continents.
Chinese people regard sea cucumber as one of the four "seafood": abalone, ginseng, wings and belly, which is a kind of precious food.
Chinese sea cucumber consumption is limited to festivals (China Spring Festival), wedding banquets, banquets, etc. 9% of the global sea cucumber catches are processed into various dried products for consumption in Asian markets, with Chinese mainland, Hongkong, Taiwan Province, Singapore and Malaysia as the main markets. Sea cucumber is not a popular food in Japan, with an annual import of only 3 ~ 4 tons, and frozen dry products are its import type. South Korea imports 15 to 2 tons of dried sea cucumber products every year. In Thailand, eating sea cucumbers is limited to tourism, and Thais don't like sea cucumbers very much. Western countries (such as the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, etc.) import sea cucumbers for Chinese people to eat.
half of Chinese mainland's sea cucumber imports come from Indonesia, and the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand (55 tons) are other major importers. The annual import volume of Chinese mainland sea cucumber market is about 5,5 tons, which shows the importance and dominance of Chinese mainland to the international sea cucumber market. It is worth noting that due to the uneven purchasing power of consumers, the sea cucumber market in Chinese mainland covers all kinds and grades.
Some of the information and pictures in this article are from the first exhibition "The Story of Sea Cucumber-Chinese, Makassar and Australian Aborigines".