During the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty, the Eight-Power Allied Forces invaded China. After reaching Beijing, the Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty fled from Beijing to the South Street of Xi'an City. When they smelled a fresh fragrance, the manager Li Lianying raised his head. Look, it's a fried noodle restaurant. They reported it to the Queen Mother and the Emperor in time. Due to the long journey, the Emperor and the Queen Mother were also hungry and thirsty, so they said they would eat it. Entering the store, Li Lianying asked the store owner for the specialty vegetarian noodles. After everyone ate a bowl, they said: "It tastes so good, let's have another bowl!" After eating, the Queen Mother asked everyone how the noodles tasted. Everyone said in unison: "Absolutely good noodles, good! Good!" At this time, the Queen Mother and the Emperor were about to drive on the road. The Queen Mother ordered the manager Li Lianying to bring the noodles maker to Beijing and bring them to the palace to make noodles. From then on Vegetarian noodles with soy sauce have settled in Beijing.
2: Noodles are said to be invented by the Chinese. It is understandable that Chinese people who could grow low-quality wheat began to eat noodles 4,000 years ago. But what I ate at that time was not fried noodles, for reasons I’ll explain later. What we ate at that time was soup noodles. Please pay attention to the word soup. The ancient word for soup means hot water. In other words, the noodles eaten by ancient people were a pot of soup and noodles. Why, because of the container. The container for making noodles is very large. It contains not only noodles but also soup, and it is also broth. The judge understood that eating like this would not be a blessing for ordinary people except the royal family and nobles. Noodle soup is a noble food. Why is it so expensive? Soup too.
A brief review will help us analyze the history of fried noodles. Where did the fried noodles come from? Why is the famous town of Beijing?
Beijing was founded as the capital in the Yuan Dynasty. It was previously part of the Yanbei border. What was it used for? People from Shandong, Shanxi and Guanwai serve as a transit station for international trade. After the Yuan Dynasty, beef and mutton dominated the Beijing food market, with hundreds of palace officials and only a few Han people. Therefore, except for flatbreads, Central Plains delicacies such as soup noodles were not available at the banquet. Why? Kublai Khan, the boss of the grassland nation, was not used to eating hot and watery food. With such a complicated thing, the enemy's light cavalry came over before they were even cooked. It is definitely not a blessing to enjoy.
The Yuan Dynasty was short-lived, and Nurhaci entered Beijing again and remained the boss for 400 years. This stage takes a long time, giving time for fried noodles to become popular. So how were fried noodles introduced to Beijing?
It is said that in the second half of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Chang, a southerner, dominated the city of Beijing and gradually adapted to the customs of the northerners. Merchants from Gansu, Shaanxi, Jin and Shandong began to open large businesses in Beijing. Noodle soup has also been brought to Beijing, but it is still a high-end food, similar to the scale of Shunfeng Seafood. Please note that this is still talking about noodle soup.
In the fifteenth year of Wanli, Li Zicheng revolted in the late Ming Dynasty. What did the peasant army rely on to march into Beijing? Rely on instant noodles. Fast food is about fast food, and food with soup is naturally not fast to eat. Besides, I don’t have the ability to make delicious soup. I don’t have enough meat. In the 1,600 years following the Qin and Han Dynasties, farmers in the Qin and Jin Dynasties relied on daily consumption of dry noodles to survive. Only during festivals did they have the opportunity to eat simple soup noodles.
In short, dry noodles were brought into Beijing by Li Zicheng’s army of farmers, and the Nurhachi generation was consolidated. This has happened in the last 200 years or so.
In the third dynasty of the Qing Dynasty, the country was peaceful and the people were safe, and its territory was boundless. Beijing became the capital of the East in the true sense. At the same time, the food culture also flourished with the popularity of the Eight Banners disciples flying like cattle hair. However, the real spread of this situation appeared when the national destiny gradually declined after Qianlong. Friends who have watched the movie "Quanjude" must still remember the scene in which the poor children compete for roast duck as a status symbol. That was already 100 years ago. During the same period, what did the poorer aristocratic children eat? The answer was: noodles with soybean paste.
3: Noodles have been a common food in many countries around the world for at least 2,000 years. But there are different opinions about the origin of noodles. China, Italy and some Arab countries have all been considered as the origin of noodles. The "Nature" magazine on October 13, 2005 published the technological archaeological discoveries made by researcher Lv Houyuan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and others, proving with facts that China may be the real country of origin of noodles.
Experts discovered these noodles at the Lajia site in Minhe County, Qinghai Province, northwest China. When unearthed, the noodles were well preserved and served in an inverted sealed bowl. The bowl was buried deep in 3 meters of sediment. among things. Since the Lajia site was excavated in 1999, a large number of carbon 14 dating, cultural relics and geological phenomena have shown that the Lajia site in Qinghai Province belongs to the Qijia culture of the late Neolithic and was destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake and flood 4,000 years ago. Destroyed and buried. Because of this unexpected event, the Lajia site preserved many remains of prehistoric human life and disaster scenes that other archaeological sites are difficult to preserve. Researchers discovered a bowl containing noodles that was overturned due to earthquakes and floods. It was sealed by the sand that came with it, forming a rare and precious preservation environment.
The noodles were slender in shape and yellow-brown in color. They were placed in the bottom of an inverted bowl. When the researchers turned the bowl over, they found more noodles in the bowl. These noodles were about 30 feet long. More than 50 centimeters and about 3 millimeters in diameter, it looks similar to the traditional Chinese food ramen. In order to determine the composition of these noodles, the researchers analyzed the phytolith and starch morphology of these ancient noodle samples, and compared the phytoliths and starch morphology of more than 80 plant fruits such as barley, highland barley, wheat, sorghum, oats, millet, millet, and setaria. Characteristics of siliceous body and starch morphology, they later found that these ancient noodle samples preserved a large number of typical shell phytolith granules and starch granules of millet and millet, and concluded that these noodles were made of millet and millet. . Experts further explained that people at that time first ground these two crops into flour, made them into balls, and then stretched them into the shape of noodles. The researchers also said that millet lacks stickiness, and if it is used alone to make dough, it cannot be stretched into thin and long noodles. The ingredients of this kind of noodles are different from the raw materials of wheat noodles commonly used today. It can be seen that China's ancestors had a relatively complete process 4,000 years ago to thresh, crush, and grind the fruits of these plants into enough ingredients to make noodles. Flour for making noodles.
In China, the earliest records of noodles are from the Eastern Han Dynasty. Because people in ancient times had poor sanitary conditions and often suffered from gastrointestinal diseases due to unclean diet, boiling noodles with water is relatively hygienic and can greatly reduce the occurrence of diseases. In ancient China, the names of noodles were different in different periods: in the Eastern Han Dynasty, they were called "boiled cakes"; in the Wei and Jin Dynasties, they were called "soup cakes"; in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, they were called "Shui Yin"; in the Tang Dynasty, they were called "Leng Tao". Abroad, the common view is that noodles were first invented in the Middle East and later spread to Italy through the Arabs. Through the Italians, noodles were further spread to Europe and the world. Since noodles are extremely difficult to preserve as soft pasta, no direct evidence of early noodles has been found in the world for a long time, and there is a lack of opportunities to study the materials and processing processes of early noodles. Judging from the existing evidence, the discovery of this bowl of noodles can show that the Chinese invented and made noodles much earlier than other places in the world. However, more evidence is needed to prove whether the noodles discovered at the Lajia site are the ancestors of Arabic noodles or Italian noodles.
Although it is just a bowl of noodles, the environmental-technological archaeological methods used in this study are indeed at the leading international level. As a new discipline at the intersection of natural science and social science that is developing rapidly in the world today, various new methods of natural science are increasingly enriching archaeological research and broadening the research field of environmental-technological archeology. This bowl of noodles has unique significance for the study of Neolithic agricultural archeology and ancient food culture.