In most people's eyes, all they need to eat litchi is one pair of hands and one mouth. But for people in southern Fujian and Chaoshan areas, an extra dish of soy sauce is needed: dip it in.

Not only litchi, but also in southern Fujian and Chaoshan, almost all fruits can be dipped in soy sauce: peaches, mangoes, plums, oranges, carambolas, olives, apples, watermelons and bayberry. It's better to have a bowl of porridge with it. This is a satisfying midnight snack.

to deconstruct the taste of fruit dipped in soy sauce, we should start with the taste of soy sauce itself.

protein in bean seeds is fermented and decomposed to produce amino acids. This is the basic element that constitutes the human body, and instinct gives us the pleasure of feeling amino acids. Japanese calls this pleasure "purport", while Chinese calls it "freshness".

Under the catalysis of sunlight and temperature accumulated by fermentation, starch and amino acids in beans undergo Maillard reaction, forming melanoidin which is mainly composed of ketones and aldehydes. It endows soy sauce with deep color and unique aroma, and also makes its taste more complex and diverse.

most importantly, salt participates in the whole process of bean fermentation, inhibits the production of miscellaneous bacteria and provides a salty bottom taste for soy sauce.

Yes, everything that China people have worked hard to invent soy sauce is actually for the sake of salty taste-using less salt instead of salt, while keeping the taste level unchanged, or even better.

it is a profitable business to add worthless beans with low land requirements and high yield. This is the philosophy and wisdom of China people who believe in "doing great things with little money" and "keeping a house diligently".

In fact, salt, as the first discovered condiment, has been very valuable for most of human history. The coastline is as long as Europe. Before the Middle Ages, there was no salt in cooking. Only when the table was served, salt was sprinkled on the food surface with a sense of ceremony. In the Bible, white and expensive salt is a symbol of noble character; At the table of the British royal family, salt can only be placed in front of the king, and others should decide the distance from the salt by their status; In Da Vinci's The Last Supper, a salt bottle overturned in front of Judas foretold the death of the traitor.

In China, where the inland is vast, "people are short of food", and salt is more expensive. Yandi and Huangdi fought a bloody battle in Hanquan; Chu and Qin invaded Bashu because of salt resources. The famous saying of the first emperor: "He who gets salt gets the world" explains everything in that era. Even in the Tang Dynasty, when the economy and society were highly developed, the salt tax still accounted for more than half of the state's fiscal revenue.

Soy sauce, based on the reality that the whole society is short of salt, is a technology that uses less salt to make more condiments.

In essence, the taste of soy sauce is the same as the "superposition effect" of monosodium glutamate and salt: under the premise of reasonable use, monosodium glutamate, which is composed of amino acid salts, is compounded with salt to taste, and has less sodium content than salt alone.

Therefore, the essence of dipping fruit in soy sauce comes from the ancient tradition of dipping fruit in salt.

In China, dipping fruit in salt is actually a method with a long history. The ancients even limited that only the high-purity sea salt "Wuyan" produced in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces is the condiment specially used to match fruits.

In the Tang Dynasty, Li Bai wrote a poem: "Myrica rubra in a jade plate is for the monarch, and Wu salt is as bright as a flower and white snow", which is to put Myrica rubra in a delicate jade plate and sprinkle Wu salt to eat; In the Northern Song Dynasty, Zhou Bangyan had a saying: "The sword is like water, Wu Yan wins the snow, and the fingers break the new orange." This is even more particular. Use a sharp knife made in Taiyuan to break the orange and put Wu Yan on it to eat.

There is still the custom of washing fruits with salt water everywhere. Pineapple, Myrica rubra and carambola can all be soaked with salt water. Besides washing and disinfection, people think that salt water can improve the taste and make the fruit sweeter.

There is even a kind of licorice fruit popular in the streets of Guangdong. Add salt to the juice boiled by licorice, and then soak papaya, mango, watermelon and other fruits, especially those with strong sour taste. After soaking in licorice juice for several hours, the acidity faded and it became more sweet.

Chaoshan in southern Fujian, where fruits are dipped in soy sauce, is just one of many examples of "salty eating" fruits in China.

An interesting phenomenon is that most fruits flavored with salt are subtropical and tropical fruits from the south of the Yangtze River or even Nanling Mountain. This kind of food custom has passed China's political center in the north of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River valley in past dynasties perfectly. It is not difficult to get a guess that dipping fruit in salt, for areas lacking tropical and subtropical fruits, may be just a "ostentation" behavior to enhance the sense of ceremony at first.

In fact, Japan, which is similar to the northern latitude of China, is also short of tropical and subtropical fruits for a long time. Today, the price of watermelon in the Japanese market speaks for itself. In contrast, Japan has also retained a large number of similar eating habits, such as strawberry dipped in salt, watermelon sprinkled with salt, plum dipped in salt, avocado mixed with soy sauce and so on. "Avocado dipped in mustard soy sauce is like eating oily and fatty fish sashimi", which is a famous line in the Japanese variety show "Mi Mi Lan".

Although there is no shortage of salt in Japan, because fruit is expensive and hard to get, we should use salt and soy sauce to enhance its taste level and give it more sense of ceremony.

salt is the only substance in nature that can accurately correspond to the six tastes that human beings can feel: sour, sweet, bitter, salty, pungent and fresh. For people who are short of salt, this kind of seasoning with rich flavor provides changeable possibilities for many precious and hard-to-get ingredients.