? The Sichuan cuisine of today is filled with the flavors of Hunan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong and Guangdong? |

- Fengshu Junquan -

Every time we eat at the dinner table

There is a Sichuanese at the table, we are always teased with a sentence

"You Sichuanese can eat spicy food"

But in fact, the modern Sichuanese cuisine has a lot of flavor.

But in reality, the flavor of modern Sichuan cuisine

isn't "authentic" Sichuan

it's been shaped little by little by the history of immigration to this part of the world

This is from the June 2016 issue of Chinese Heritage

Today, Sichuan cuisine has become the most popular food in China and abroad. Sichuan cuisine is red all over the sea and abroad, leaving aside the shabu-shabu hot pot restaurants, counting those that fry up a table of dishes (home cooking) alone, no less than a hundred or ten in each city. Even Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong, which have not always eaten spicy food, have not been able to "eat" as well as they did more than 200 years ago, which is very intriguing.

I'm from Shandong, only a few times in Sichuan and Chongqing, there are a number of friends in Sichuan, the knowledge of Sichuan cuisine is not deep, my taste in this area of enlightenment from my mother's old house next door to the Sichuan neighbors. According to some recent network point of view, called the "origin is not high", however, I stubbornly believe that Lu Cai influenced the molding of modern Sichuan cuisine, it is worth talking about.

Nowadays, looking up the recipe of Sichuan cuisine, but all the high-level, sophisticated dishes, most of them are not as unusual as the Sichuan cuisine, spicy flavor, which carries the shadow of the Lu Cuisine and Jiangsu and Zhejiang Cuisines.

▲ Nine bowls is a traditional feast of nine meat dishes. Nine bowls feature steamed dishes, mainly steamed: head bowl, steamed whole chicken, steamed whole duck, steamed elbow, salted roasted white (meat buckle), sweet roasted white (sandwiched meat), steamed meat with vermicelli, bamboo shoots, taro, potatoes, kelp, seasonal vegetables.

This is reminiscent of the classic "nine bowls" - nine dishes in a "bucket bowl" - that were used in the early days of modern Sichuan cuisine, including chowder, braised pork, and ginger chicken, The nine dishes in the bowl include chowder, braised pork, chicken with ginger sauce, roasted pork, roasted bamboo shoots, steamed elbows, steamed pork, and so on. In addition to the ginger chicken and sand meat, slightly reflecting the ancient Sichuan flavor "good spicy", "heavy sweet and greasy" characteristics, most of the rest of the Lu Cuisine Road, looks like a full banquet in the Lu Cuisine in the folk of the simplification of the historian Meng Wentong has mentioned with interest the influence of such a dish. The historian Meng Wentong also mentioned this influence with great interest.

▲ Ginger chicken

And then there's a dish of boiled cabbage, which has a nourishing but clear broth, with a handful of tender cabbage cores lying in it, which is light, fresh and fragrant, and not too spicy or too numbing, but it's also a heck of a lot of Szechuan food. The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on some of the most popular products and services in the world.

▲ Open water cabbage

Sichuan cuisine is about spicy, which is a misunderstanding of the impression. Because spicy is not the original flavor of Sichuan cuisine.

Modern Sichuan cuisine, probably molded in the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Before then, specifically before the mid-Qing period, Sichuan cuisine had little reputation at all, and did not even have a style of its own. Of course, there are those who would say that as early as the Qin, Han, and finally the Song Dynasty, Sichuan cuisine had already formed its own unique system. Then, the wars of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties drove the Sichuan natives to the fringes of society, and the ancient Sichuan flavor system they inherited has actually had very little influence on modern Sichuan cuisine.

A vacuum on one side draws the wind from all sides.

In the early Qing Dynasty, the well-known "Hunan and Hubei filled Sichuan", Hunan and Hubei came, of course, with their preferences, their tastes. The "Nine Bowls" feast includes a staple dish, the pot helmet, which is a replica of the Shaanxi flavor from name to reality, slowly refined in subsequent development.

Worthy of special mention, there is also the "sauce flavor" contributed by foreigners. In the Qing Dynasty, the Cabinet Minister Zhuo Bingtian, who served in the Jia, Dao and Xian Dynasties, was a Hakka immigrant who moved to Sichuan from Jiaying Prefecture (present-day Meizhou) in Guangdong Province at the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, and his ancestor was a shopkeeper of the sauce. After the end of the three dynasties, the Zhuo family in Chengdu to return to their old profession, in front of the "Xiangfu" in Cotton Street, opened the most famous Sichuan in the Qing Dynasty, "Guangyi" Sauce Garden.

▲ Nine bowls of meat dishes waiting to be served

Accidentally, another sauce garden, Yuan Lizhen, also opened for business on Cotton Street. The initiator of this sauce garden is Hu Shuqiao, a migrant from Fuzhou, Jiangxi Province, who moved to Sichuan. brewing seasonings and sauces of auxiliary materials, but also brought about a change in Sichuan cuisine. At the same time, chili peppers, which were introduced to Sichuan from abroad, enabled the ordinary people of Sichuan to combat the lack of oil and salt.

During the Qianlong period in the Qing Dynasty, Li Huainan, a Sichuanese native of Luojiang who traveled to Zhejiang province, collected the cooking experiences of home cooks and housewives in his free time, which were later compiled by his son Li Tiaoyuan and engraved into a book of food scriptures called "Awakening Garden Record," which was widely circulated in the Sichuan culinary world. Gourmets in Sichuan began to understand the cuisine of Jiangnan and even further afield.

▲ Mapo Tofu

If the nine bowls also give people the impression of "low birth", to the Qing Xianfeng, Tongzhi years, Sichuan cuisine has changed. Sichuan became the country's premier granary and tax source, dignitaries and the upper echelons of society began to enter Sichuan. As a result - "Nantang cuisine" appeared logically.

The so-called Nantang, or called Nankan, is to do the flavor of the south of the pavilion, specializing in steamer steaming vegetables, red pot stir-fry, fish and shrimp seafood cooking. Before the emergence of Nantang, red pot stir-fry has been the shortcomings of Sichuan cuisine, even if it is "home must be used in the whole collection of things" recorded in the "Sichuan fried chicken", but also fried to seven minutes cooked, and then "with a spoonful of soy sauce, with the study of rotten pepper, Sichuan pepper, fennel, into the water in a big bowl, the pot to cook for the degree! "

This is the first time I've ever seen the world's most popular movie.

The first half of the last century, Sichuan cuisine has been ranked first of the four major cuisines in China, the modern Sichuan cuisine and then a hundred years all over the world, people feasted on, but very little to pursue this side of the flavor of the imported history.