A Dream of Red Mansions describes the extravagant life of Jia's family. Just eating and wearing makes people dazzled, which can be said to be a portrayal of the life of the nobles at that time. They often spent hundreds of taels of silver per meal, which was enough for ordinary families for several years.

From this description, we can see the delicious food at that time, such as bad goose web, duck letter, sour bamboo shoots and chicken skin soup, eggplant, roasted venison and so on. We can also get a glimpse of the food list sent from our farm in Jiafu during the Spring Festival: "Thirty deer, fifty Zhang Zi, fifty spores, twenty Siam pigs, twenty soup pigs, twenty dragon pigs, twenty wild boar, 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 mean to the people who run the manor on his behalf.

A dish in A Dream of Red Mansions mentioned today is related to sheep. In the 49th session of A Dream of Red Mansions, "The glazed world is full of red plums, and the baby with fragrant powder is full of fishy smell", it was written that the first dish that the grandmother Jia sent when eating in snowy days was "Steamed lamb with milk". Grandmother Jia said, "This is the dish of our elderly people. It's a pity that you children can't eat it. There is fresh venison today. Wait for it."

This dish is the same as medicine and food, just like eating some hot nourishing food in cold weather in winter. Grandmother Jia should eat it 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 a lamb that has not yet been born, and it has been taken out for cooking. This is the cruelty of this dish.

"Jia Bujia, white jade is the golden horse for the bed" is the description of the Jia family in its prosperous period. Such a rich family certainly won't wait for a ewe to give birth to a dead lamb before cooking. If so, the grandmother may not be able to wait for a lamb all winter. Then, will the ewe just give birth to the lamb in winter and immediately cook for the grandmother?

In fact, we can see from the words "things that don't see the light of day" that it's not a lamb produced by a ewe, but a lamb that is directly cut open and taken out for the grandmother to cook. There is an idiom called "kill the chicken to get the egg", which can explain the way to get the lamb-take the lamb alive. It is the most cruel dish in the book.

In fact, with the luxury of Jia's house, it is impossible for the cooks to specially select the dead lambs that gave birth during childbirth to cook for Jia. So come to think of it, "steamed lamb with milk" is a very cruel dish. Many villains are portrayed in A Dream of Red Mansions, such as Xifeng, who killed several lives. Jia She, for example, is white in hair and beard, still old and lustful, trying to seize Yuanyang, but without success, he spent several hundred taels of silver to buy a small girl from a poor family ...! And Jia Zhen and Jia Lian are not good characters.

Grandmother Jia is just a good person in A Dream of Red Mansions. She believes in Buddhism, often goes to some temples to offer incense and kowtow, and sometimes stops Xifeng from beating the page maid. However, even such a good man has a cruel side in the author's eyes, and it is hard to be perfect to be born in such a noble who exploits others for a living. It's just that as a gourmet, she may not have witnessed the process of mother sheep being disembowelled, so she can't understand the cruelty of this dish. This is also the reason why the author made Jia's family go into decline.