Mr. Lu Xun said: "The first person to eat crabs is admirable, not a warrior. Who dares to eat it?" In fact, this statement is not accurate.

Our earliest ancestors who ate crabs may not be people, but monkeys (apes). Crabs live in a land-water crisscross area, which is highly coincident with primates. Omnivorous or carnivorous food habits make it accumulate rich protein and fat accumulation; The protein structure of arthropods is simple, and it is easily decomposed and absorbed by the digestive system even if it is eaten raw. Small, non-toxic, weak self-defense, compared with large mammals, reptiles and fish, it is also much easier to catch.

therefore, in the wild times, primates have been the natural enemies of crabs. Other creatures can't keep their mouths shut, but in front of primates, they can easily do it with tools such as stones and fire. Even today, there are still a large number of crab-eating macaques living in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. From this perspective, crab is a gift from the earth to human beings, and it is the most suitable food to be taken seriously on the table.

People all over the world love to eat crabs, with almost no exception.

Americans, Mexicans and Cubans along the Gulf Coast use mustard sauce to pour stone crab tongs, which are sweet, tender and delicious. Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore in Southeast Asia cook blue crabs or Xu crabs with Chili and curry, which is rich in flavor; Northern Europe, Alaska, Chile, Australia and New Zealand in the high latitudes of the northern and southern hemispheres like to use local materials and ice the king crab legs, which are full of chewiness; Canada and the United States on the west coast of North America are rich in rare crabs, which are full of fat and fat after boiling. Western Europe eats bread crabs, which, as the name suggests, are as thick as bread and are enjoyable to bite; Japanese pine leaf crab is actually a kind of snow crab, which is usually half sashimi and half cooked in Japanese stock, which is extremely delicious ...

Of course, eating crabs will not fall in China, a big food country.

Of the more than 4,111 known crabs in the world, China produces nearly one fifth.

Moreover, smart China people have evolved the richest and most diverse techniques in cooking crabs.

No:1

1

Leave aside the crab shells found in prehistoric sites such as Liangzhu culture and Songze culture. China's earliest written record of eating crabs comes from Zhou Li Dong Ren, which describes the "crab in Qingzhou" in the diet of Zhou Tianzi.

Qingzhou is today's Shandong Peninsula; Xu is the meat sauce after the crab is crushed by hammer.

According to the analysis of Zhou Li written in the Han Dynasty, crabs had become refined food on the table of nobles before 2111 at the latest.

By the Wei and Jin Dynasties, when Qi Min Yao Shu was written, crabs had been cooked in various forms, such as steaming, frying, dragging noodles and getting drunk. A method of preserving crabs by pickling with sugar is especially introduced. This kind of sugar crab, in the following hundreds of years, led the mainstream way of eating crabs in China. It is worth mentioning that Jia Sixie, the author of Qi Min Yao Shu, is also from Qingzhou. It can be seen that Shandong Peninsula has been the main producing area of crabs for more than 511 years from the Han Dynasty to the Southern and Northern Dynasties. There, sea crabs are undoubtedly the mainstream, not freshwater crabs.

But this situation has quietly changed in the south.

Liu Yiqing, a southerner of Jia Sixie's contemporary, recorded a poem by Bi Zuo, a famous man in Jin Dynasty, who drank wine and ate crabs. "Holding a glass in his left hand, holding a crab claw in his right hand, patting his belly for a lifetime".

this state of drinking with pincers and being slightly drunk and happy soon became the imitation object of the literati and celebrities of the contemporary dynasty. Since then, crabs have risen from a simple food to an interpreter of life attitude. In the following more than 1,811 years, almost all China literati and scholars unanimously regarded eating crabs as an elegant fashion.

Eight pieces of crabs eaten by the ancients

It is worth mentioning that Liu Yiqing is from Zhenjiang, Jiangsu; What Shi Shuo Xin Yu describes is mainly the anecdotes of literati in Jiankang, Wujun and Yangzhou, the political centers of the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasties.

These places are the core producing areas of freshwater crabs in China.

It can be said that the tastes and preferences of literati for thousands of years have created the unparalleled lofty position of hairy crabs in the crab community in China.

No:2

2

Since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the exquisite cooking methods of sugar crabs and bad crabs in the north began to go south, and they began to combine with lake crab in the south to grow new delicacies. In Sui Shu, it is recorded that Emperor Yangdi was lucky in Jiangdu, and the local people presented him with the story of sugar crab. Every time before Emperor Yang-ti eats sugar crabs, he has to ask his attendants to clean the crab shells carefully and paste them with golden dragon and phoenix clouds, which is euphemistically called "Golden Dragon and Phoenix Crab", which shows the emperor's love for it.

The sugar crab here is obviously different from the sugar crab in Qi Min Yao Shu:

Fresh and complete live crabs are used to spit out the sediment.

Boil the syrup, let it cool, and put the live crabs in the syrup overnight.

Add proper amount of mash and salt into a clean jar, take out the crabs in syrup and put them into the jar, and seal the jar mouth with soft mud.

In fact, cheap sugar production technology was introduced to China from India or Arabia during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty.

Before that, China people mainly ate maltose and honey, and the cost was high.

Therefore, the sugar-stained crab in Qi Min Yao Shu is actually extremely expensive to make. However, this kind of sugar crab eaten by Emperor Yangdi consumes much less sugar, and its taste is not so sweet and greasy because of the participation of salt and fermented grains. I think it should be both salty and sweet, with a bouquet.

Wine and ginger cover up the original fishy smell of freshwater crabs, highlighting the freshness of the food itself. Obviously, this has the style of modern drunken crabs and steamed crabs dipped in ginger vinegar.

With the further maturity of sugar-making technology, by the middle of the Tang Dynasty, crabs were no longer exclusive to aristocrats, but more and more entered the life of ordinary people. Li Bai, a poet, often patronizes Hu Ji's wine shop in Chang 'an. When he is tired of eating beef and mutton with western flavor, he will eat crabs. He said: "Shake the fan to the restaurant and hold the crab claws."

it's naturally a pleasure to suck crab meat and drink wine. However, judging from the season, the weather in Chang 'an only needs to be "fanned" in summer. The crabs eaten in summer, whether they were sent to Chang 'an in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in the heat or the sugar crabs stored in the cellar the year before, < P > showed that the popularization rate and anti-corrosion level of sugar crabs had reached a considerable level at that time.

No:3

After the Song and Yuan Dynasties, China's literati culture reached new heights again and again. Lake crab's status has also risen, and a large number of poems about crabs have appeared.

Su Shi said, "Laugh at Wu Zhong's gluttony and obstinacy, and a poem is worth two tips." Laugh at yourself for trading poetry for crabs. Huang Tingjian said: "The seaweed sugar crab fertilizer, Jiang Lao termite alcohol. Every time I hate my stomach, I boast of my teeth. " Eat crabs until you doubt your life. Why do you never get tired of eating them?

Lu You said, "Crab yellow swirls and drools, and wine retches at the beginning." Eating crabs cured all senile cataracts. And so on, too numerous to mention. The phrases "inlaid with gold", "fat cream" and "tender jade" which describe crab roe, crab paste and crab meat have even become high-frequency words in literati's poems and essays after the Song Dynasty.

in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Li Yu promoted eating lake crab to worship similar to religious belief. He said that crabs were his life, and he had to prepare money for buying crabs every year before lake crab went public, which he called "money for buying life". And

crab cooking can't be boiled, fried, seasoned or garnished, so it can only be steamed, peeled and eaten by itself.

With the unremitting hype of literati, by the Qing Dynasty, the price of lake crab had broken through the sky.

In A Dream of Red Mansions, on the one hand, it describes the scenes of the sons and ladies steaming crabs, holding crabs, drinking wine and reading poems, and on the other hand, it writes that grandma Liu witnessed a lake crab banquet in the Grand View Garden, and the cost was "equivalent to the poor family's food and clothing for a whole year".

compared with today's prices in lake crab, in fact, the prices in the middle of Qing dynasty were even more outrageous. We can see Cao Xueqin's inner contradiction: he envies the elegance of crab, but hates flaunting lake crab's bad habits.

No:4

4

The bad habit of eating crabs, which is cultivated by the literati and directed by themselves, has a single price, a single material and a single way of eating, will always come to an end. Also in the middle of the Qing Dynasty,

Yuan Mei's "Suiyuan Food List" has appeared a variety of eating methods, such as boiled crab with salt water, crab soup, fried crab powder, mixed crab with pumpkin meat

and even steamed crab with shell and eggs

.

What's more valuable is that there is a title devoted to seafood in Suiyuan Food List. Although there are no sea crabs in it, it has

subverted the ranking of aquatic products "one lake, two rivers, three streams, four seas and five ponds" by China literati since the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and also broke the strangeness of China people's understanding of the sea for hundreds of years.

This has something to do with the rapid development of food preservation technology in the 8th century and the improvement of transportation infrastructure in Qianlong Dynasty, which made seafood enter the dining table of more people in China, but it also has something to do with the gradual knocking on the door of China by western powers.

Since then, the swimming crab in the eastern waters of China, the blue crab in the southeast waters, and the swimming crab in the Taiwan Province Strait and the western Pacific (Portunus pelagicus) have returned to the mainstream stage of China's diet after thousands of years. By the way,

the ancient and interesting ways of eating, such as raw pickled crabs and sturgeon rice, which have been preserved in a few underdeveloped areas in ancient times, such as southern Zhejiang, eastern Fujian and Chaoshan, have also been restored to elegance.

This is not a coincidence of history, but a necessity for a nation to have a sea-like mind again.

No:5

Wu

Another metaphorical detail is that, while the western powers bombarded the China gate with strong ship profits and brought the sea crabs back to the dining table of China people,

lake crab, who dominated China's food pedigree for more than a thousand years, quietly climbed onto a battleship on the Yangtze River.

They hid in the dark bottom of the cabin, quietly and without passports, and embarked on a long road to Europe. In the next 111 years, China hairy crabs have gone through the hybridization of seed selection, breeding and flooding of water system, and have lost their original appearance. However, people were surprised to find that lake crab suddenly became an invasive creature in Germany.

These distant cousins of China hairy crabs have the appearance of green back, golden hair and white belly, and still retain the descriptions of high-quality lake crab in ancient books of Ming and Qing dynasties.

Although the taste may not be better than Yangcheng Lake, the impeccable face value still attracts the favor of Chinese people.

Germans don't eat freshwater creatures originally. Most of lake crab, which has no natural enemies, is directly killed as fertilizer or put into a grinder as duck feed. However, after witnessing the eating of overseas Chinese, they also started to use their brains. Some white people even bought it with the mentality of trying it and baked it in the oven. Anyway, the crab shell is hard to eat, and they are not afraid of being burnt by excessive firepower. It can be seen that

human beings always have similar talents in eating crabs.

The pleasure brought by crab meat, crab roe and crab paste is incomparable to any other food.

Let's take a look at how people all over China handle all kinds of crabs.

Panjin, Liaoning Province: Crabs and rice cook together

| Jiangnan hairy crabs born in the northeast |

Because of the lack of literature records, no one can tell when the river crabs in Panjin originated today. This kind of crab, which is the same as Jiangnan hairy crab, is rooted in the history of black land, which may be traced back to the period of agricultural development in Northeast China. After the mid-19 th century, the Qing government was weak and gradually gave up the border ban on Northeast China. Korean immigrants entered the northeast in large numbers and began to grow rice. Panjin, as the nearest swamp area to Yalu River, became the earliest paddy field to be developed.

This almost repeats the history of the Eastern Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties, when northern immigrants entered the Yangtze River Delta and developed the everglades into paddy fields. Coincidentally, Panjin is adjacent to the Bohai Sea, and the Daliao River flows into the sea through this area. This is quite similar to the Yangtze River Delta region, which adapts to the growth of migratory organisms.

Perhaps, the first lake crab in Panjin entered as an invasive species in Taihu Lake Basin, but the local people gave enough tolerance and even kept it in paddy fields consciously.

Crabs catch pests for rice, loosen soil, and provide organic fertilizer with excrement;

And rice also provides rich bait for crabs. This kind of life made Panjin become the south of the Yangtze River as early as the Japanese occupation.

In the 1961s, people in Liaoning described Panjin's prosperity as

"beating roebuck to scoop fish, crab climbing into rice cooker"

. Like the southern hairy crabs, the best way for Panjin crabs to eat is steamed and boiled. Northerners are not good at cooking aquatic products, only Panjin river crabs, steamed and dipped in ginger vinegar juice, can get real taste. Southerners come to Panjin, and locals treat guests in this way, which is enough to make each other feel like they are home.

Perhaps it refers to the tradition that northerners eat "original soup and original food" in jiaozi. In Panjin, crab rice is often cooked in the same pot, and the rice is cooked in the lower drawer and steamed in the upper drawer. By the time the crab is fragrant, the rice is cooked. Rice born with crab * * *, the local people call it crab rice, and think that there is crab flavor in rice. In fact, its aroma and taste are mostly absorbed by the crab taste in the same pot.

Tianjin: Purple Crab Hot Pot

| The big taste in small crabs |

Purple Crab is actually a subspecies of hairy crabs, the big one is like a silver dollar, and the small one is like a copper coin.

According to the aesthetic standards of lake crab in the south, which is very beautiful, this kind of miniature player is actually not on the stage. However, there was a shortage of crabs in the north, especially in winter, when the crab roe was the most abundant. Through the thin crab cover, it showed a layer of purple, and its flavor and artistic conception were outstanding. Naturally, it was regarded as the top grade, and it was spared no expense to break the ice and catch it. In the upscale Tianjin restaurant, the "seven-star purple crab" is sold in winter, which is actually a purple crab steamed with egg custard, and the crabs are arranged in the shape of seven stars. Although custard will play a certain role in heat preservation, and the juice oozing out when steaming purple crabs will make custard more fresh and sweet, in general, this is not an innovative or unique taste.

What's more, we will chop the purple crab into small pieces, steam it and pour it with sweet and sour sauce, which is the best dish in Tianjin winter season: purple crab with sour sand. However, the most enjoyable way to eat is the purple crab mixed hot pot that ordinary people in Jingu can cook. Tianjin people call assorted hot pot "pot". Pots are made of clear soup, among which tofu, cabbage, sea cucumber and abalone are rich and frugal, and each household has different materials. However, there are four things that are known as the four treasures of Tianjin winter season-whitebait, purple crab, iron finch and chives.

Iron finch is a migratory bird that lives in high latitudes. It is bigger than sparrow and smaller than pigeon. The head and breast of sparrow are usually used to be soft and slippery, and the rest of the shelves are thrown in assorted pots to hang fresh soup. Put the whole purple crab into the pot to cook. The crab is small and easy to taste, and it will be cooked in just a few minutes. The soup seeps into the crab meat, which is extremely soft and tender. After eating the crab, you can still drink the soup.

The soup in the purple crab assorted pot is wonderfully fresh and sweet, and you won't lose the Cantonese-style edge-beating furnace.

Laizhou, Shandong Province: a big crab with scallion oil

| When Shandong cuisine meets the taste of the sea |

People in Laizhou call the swimming crab "the big crab", and anyone who has been to the local gluttonous place will feel that the word "big" lives up to its name.

The large temperature difference between day and night, the abundant nutrients brought by the Yellow River into the sea, and the environment of the natural cold water fishing ground in Bohai Bay all bring extremely superior environment for the growth of Portunus.

In the seafood market in Laizhou, the largest Portunus trituberculatus weighs one and a half kilos, which is unmatched by Portunus trituberculatus in Lianyungang and Portunus trituberculatus in Zhoushan.

In the face of Portunus, Chef Jiaodong also showed his rough and unconstrained cooking skills. Onion oil drenching is the most worthy practice for Laizhou crab. No need to cut, no need to dismantle, the whole big crab is steamed; Take another pot and boil the oil until it smokes; Finally, remove the crab cover, spread with onion and ginger, and pour hot oil while it is hot. With a bang, the big crab with scallion oil full of Shandong cuisine flavor is the best prize for autumn.