When it comes to Nanjing cuisine, whether it's Nanjing people or foreign gourmets, the first thing that comes to mind is the famous "salted duck". People in Nanjing like ducks best. In Nanjing, there is a saying that no duck sits.

However, in the suburbs of Nanjing, there are many "goose dishes", such as Dongshan old goose, Liuhe salted goose and Gaochun "Yunxi" fragrant goose. This salted goose is made in the same way as salted duck. Then why is salted duck popular in the streets of Nanjing's main city?

Nanjing time-honored brand also made salted goose and roasted goose.

"In Nanjing, almost every street has a duck shop and sells salted geese. "This is a sentence written by Xue Bing, a Nanjing writer, in his food monograph" Hungry for Food ".

Yan Zhengyi, a food expert and general manager of Nanjing Anleyuan Restaurant, told the Zijinshan reporter, "The processing method of salted duck and salted goose is the same. In the 1980 s, we also sold roast geese and salted geese in Anyuan, as long as we could get the goods. "

Before the 1980s, this was a planned economy. How many ducks and geese does the commercial department provide to Nanjing Catering Company, and how many ducks and geese can restaurants and braised dishes sell? In addition to Nanjing's time-honored brand selling salted geese, street stalls in Nanjing also sell salted geese.

In the book "Practical Goose Raising Technology" published by 1990, we found such a passage: "At the end of 1986, there were only 1453 individual cooked food stalls registered in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, and Nanjing people ate about10 million geese a year.

Before the reform and opening up, state-owned restaurants and pot-stewed restaurants sold salted geese, which was related to the planned supply of materials. After the reform and opening up, a large number of stalls selling salted geese appeared, which may be related to the low price of goose meat.

In addition, in the past, there was a saying among the people that "the poor eat geese and the rich eat ducks" and "the family has a thousand kilograms of grain and does not raise a flat mouth king (referring to ducks)". As long as the geese are fed grass, it belongs to "looking up to heaven" culture, while duck culture is different. It is very important to feed concentrate. Because geese are cheaper than ducks, in the 1980s, some braised dishes stalls in Nanjing regarded salted geese as salted ducks.

Why did Nanjing market gradually stop selling salted geese? Strictly speaking, the supply of geese is not as good as that of ducks. Shi Zhendan, deputy director of the Animal Husbandry Research Institute of Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told the reporter that Yangzhou Goose and Taizhou Goose, which are raised in Jiangsu in large quantities, only lay about 50 eggs throughout the year, and only lay eggs from June 10 to April of the following year.

Because there are no eggs and young geese in summer, the number of geese is very small, and the requirements for the breeding environment of geese are extremely high. For various reasons, the price of goose is higher than that of duck and chicken. "The production of geese is small, and the supply of goods is not enough, which cannot form a consumption trend."

Shi Zhendan remembers that when he was a college student in Nanjing in the 1980s, he could still buy salted geese in Nanjing State-owned Luwei Store next to Dahua Cinema. When he returned to Nanjing after studying abroad, he could only buy salted duck.