The ancients paid attention to "five grains, five livestock, six livestock, and eight delicacies". This statement was first seen in "The Rites of Zhou·Tianguan·Shan Fu": "Every king's gift should be eaten with six grains, six livestock for meals, six pure drinks, and delicacies.

One hundred and twenty items. Eight items for treasures, and twenty jars for sauces. "Looking at the order, we can see that grains have the highest status, followed by livestock meat.

Zhen is a type of food that is specially used to show one's status. There is a saying that "common people do not eat delicacies without any reason."

For the nobles, it was food that could be put on the daily dining table; for the common people, it was a delicacy that could only be enjoyed when offering sacrifices to gods.

What are Bazhen?

Different dynasties have different opinions.

Zheng Xuan of the Eastern Han Dynasty believed that the "Eight Precious Things" in "The Rites of Zhou·Tianguan·Shan Fu" refer to Chun Yao, Chun Mu, Pao Dou, Pao Zhen, Tao Zhen, Zhen, Bo, and Liver. What are they?

Where's the food?

Rice bowl, meat sauce with millet, roasted piglet, roast lamb, boiled tenderloin, marinated fresh beef with meat sauce, air-dried beef and dog liver simmered in oil.

In an era when teeth were generally bad, food was fat and tender, and cattle sacrificed to heaven and earth were more "watery" than sacrificed to ancestral temples. Looking at the arrangement of piglets, lambs, tenderloin, and liver, you can also know that this is aristocratic food.

, ranking fat and tender food as top quality was common in both the north and the south in the pre-Qin Dynasty.

There is a lot of evidence in Chu Ci.

The delicacies that attract dead souls to return to their hometowns in "The Soul Conjuring" and "The Big Move" include: beef tendons, loggerheads, turtles, lambs, jackals, dogs, swans, mallards, pheasants, robins (cranes), exposed chickens, etc., as well as

Sugar cane juice, ice products, and the staple food is steamed grain food.

For all animal ingredients, choose fat and tender ones to avoid being soft enough. You also need to experiment with various seasonings that can soften the food, and add enough fat.

Sometimes the ingredients are allowed to ferment naturally and become sour and soft.

The dog meat in "Big Move" is flavored with gall, which can emulsify fat.

Please imagine Chu country fat meat emulsified with bile.

Sour and bitter are the tastes of Chu State, "great bitterness and sourness", followed by sweetness.

In the Eastern Han Dynasty, judging from the poetry at this time, Bazhen was more popular.

"The Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms, Wei, and the Biography of Wei Wei" says that "the food must have the taste of the eight delicacies". The Wei family is a home of poetry, etiquette and hairpins, and the eight delicacies must be eaten in the aristocratic style. They are included in every meal. It seems that it is

Jane was nowhere to be found.

However, there is no record of how the eight treasures of the Eastern Han Dynasty compared with those of the Zhou Dynasty.

I only know that the range of ingredients at this time must be much greater than that of the Zhou Dynasty.

Seafood was eaten in large quantities in the Han Dynasty. Wang Mang and Cao Cao were abalone lovers. Cao Cao himself wrote "Four Seasons Food System", in which he wrote about several kinds of sea fish he had eaten, which can be regarded as the pioneer of the trend.

A few poems from the Tang Dynasty revealed the secrets of Bazhen.

Du Fu's "The Journey of the Beauty" has "The purple camel's peak emerges from the emerald cauldron, and the water essence is coiled on the plain scales; the rhinoceros chopsticks and glutinous rice cakes have not been lowered for a long time, and the luan knife cuts through the empty space; the yellow gate's flying hawks do not move, and the imperial chefs are coming.

"Send eight delicacies", and in Li He's "Dadi Song" there is "The husband eats carp tails, and the concubine eats orangutan lips".

Grilled camel hump, steamed white fish, grilled Chinese pangolin tail, and moose nasolabial clams, these are probably the first four flavors among the eight delicacies of the Tang Dynasty.

The other four flavors can only be imagined from food lists elsewhere.

There are several dishes in the Shaotail Banquet that are worthy of Bazhen standards, such as phoenix fetus, which is fish white, steamed wax in portions, and bear white, which is bear back fat, and small Tiansu, which is deer.

Mixed with chicken grits, deer intestines, and possibly roasted elephant trunk or ant sauce.

There is everything from the mountains to the south and the sea to the north, which is the food scene of the Tang Dynasty, but there are still very few seafood products. The only thing that can be clearly seen in the Shaotail Banquet is the cold toad soup, which uses clams.

"The music surpasses the six realms of desire, and the beauty exceeds the Eight Treasures Plate." It is unknown what the Eight Treasures Plate Lu You said is.

Bazhen didn't seem to have any appeal to the people of the Song Dynasty, and no one was seen bringing the ingredients back and forth to match them one by one.

Maybe it's because it's not needed.

During the Song Dynasty, there was a big difference in the food culture between the north and the south. The food in the north was even more barbaric than that in the Tang Dynasty, and everything was fried in sesame oil.

The differences in ingredients and cooking techniques between the north and the south have caused even Bazhen to declare a "split".

There are two categories of eight treasures mentioned in books of the Yuan Dynasty. Tao Zongyi's "Zhuo Geng Lu" states that they are "daihu, qihang, wild camel hoof, camel lip, camel milk elk, swan sunburn, purple jade pulp, xuanyu pulp"

"Ye" is very Chinese, has a lot of dairy products, and retains some of the eight treasures from the Tang Dynasty that came from the north (such as moose lips and wild camel hooves).

Another version mentioned in "History of Food" is "dragon liver, phoenix marrow, leopard fetus, carp tail, owl roast, orangutan lip, bear paw, crispy cheese cicada", which does not seem to be a treasure that can be eaten.

It’s like a collection of allusions in a study, like the categories in Borges’ fictional Chinese encyclopedia.

Some people have also researched and said that the dragon liver may be the liver of a white horse, because the Ming Dynasty eunuch Liu Ruoyu's "Ming Palace History" wrote that eunuchs valued the testicles of white horses and called them "dragon eggs".

But it is not credible, because the ancients believed that horse liver is poisonous, and there are also stories about not eating horse liver.

Phoenix marrow is the marrow of golden pheasant.

Maybe it's true, and there are people who really search for the placenta of North China leopards and capture falcons such as owls, but this kind of food that is rare and curious and has no bottom line is always too much.

There is no doubt that starting from the Southern Song Dynasty, Bazhen lost its original meaning. It was no longer a popular delicacy on the dining table. Instead, Fanzheng served Wangchuan sample platter, and Cixi served hundreds of apples at one meal.

Just to smell the fruity aroma, purely to show off your power.

Of course, the most important reason is that the food supply in the Song Dynasty was extremely abundant, which changed the pattern of Chinese food culture.