Shu Qiao: People and food are equal.

Born in 198s, Shu Qiao, a playful girl, has a meal-eating experience envied by her peers. In her view, cooking as simple as sweeping the floor and washing clothes has now become a daunting burden for many young people. The public's rapidly expanding enthusiasm for food and their attitude towards enjoying it have made gourmets a hot and popular business ...

Born in a delicious family

Our family are all authentic gourmets, and we have been inheriting the gene of love for food since Grandpa's story. Grandfather is a comprador in Shanghai Customs. His family is well-off and lives in a foreign style, with two cooks, Chinese and Western. When I was a child, I often listened to my family chanting, which store did Grandfather like best to eat sausage rolls and which store did he only drink Luo Songtang? He loved western food and lived a very particular life. Grandpa and grandma also lived an elegant life in their early years. Grandpa is a professor who studies public health in Shanghai Medical University, and grandma is an "artistic young woman" who loves painting and poetry. In my childhood impression, every morning at breakfast, grandpa took out a small plaid napkin, spread it on a big table like a European banquet, and began to eat western food. The dining table is big enough for sleeping, and I will lie on it in summer to enjoy the cool. There are more than a dozen sauces such as pork liver sauce, chicken liver, duck liver sauce and jam on the table, and there are many kinds of butter. Grandma is a woman who doesn't do housework, but she cooks carefully to satisfy the appetite of the whole family. Grandma doesn't like the maid touching her kitchen, and prefers to cook her own food. Grandma, who loves to spend money, pays attention to the taste of life. Although she cooks, she is not tired of three meals a day. She said, "The worst thing to cook is resentment, and the worst thing to be a woman is to be a dissatisfied wife."

Although grandparents are very particular about life, they are not the kind of aristocratic attitude that is picky everywhere. When they lose their original living conditions, they will try their best to find substitutes, full of sincerity in cooking and eating. When I was a child, my grandfather used an old hand-cranked ice cream machine to make dessert for me at home, and my grandmother made dumplings with leeks and glutinous rice. Originally, I raised a few chickens and rabbits to improve my food, but I was reluctant to kill them because I had feelings for them. Finally, my grandmother gave them all to relatives. For people who like to eat, cooking is the simplest thing in the world, similar to sweeping the floor and washing clothes, but more creative. When I was in primary school, I tried steamed fish, braised pork and apple rolls in toad in the hole while adults were not at home. I thought it was natural. Up to now, I have not deliberately regarded cooking as an art, which has added a lot of unapproachable feelings. Now my father is always looking forward to my coming home in Shanghai. He will make his own mustard chicken wings and red curry roasted hairtail for me to eat. Although I dare not say it is delicious, I like such emotional food very much.

Fully respect food

When I was p>14 years old, I first ate Japanese food in Shanghai, and I liked it very much. At that time, there were guests at home, and we went to a five-star hotel to eat the best Japanese food. A meal cost more than 1 thousand yuan, and I liked raw fish and fruit tea very much. When I was a sophomore in college, I went to Japan to study abroad. The scholarship was very generous. I only had 1, yen for meals a month, so I could taste delicious food all over. Japanese food and beverage information is very developed, and the food guide is very detailed. I will also follow my friends from France and India to eat the most authentic restaurants they think. I especially appreciate the Japanese attitude of respecting food. The chefs are very dedicated. They dress themselves neatly in the restaurant, ask the diners whether they are delicious or not with concern, and especially care about the opinions of foreign diners. They will try their best to meet the requirements beyond the menu.

When it comes to writing a column, at first I wrote articles about medical history in Shanghai Week, all of which are interesting medical knowledge. For example, when it comes to women's makeup from the history of tuberculosis, some women deliberately make themselves look like they have tuberculosis. The emergence of plague has a lot to do with women's love of wearing fur. When women have no mink, they use rat skin instead. I associate medical knowledge with fashion and personal feelings. Medicine and food have the same origin. Later, the food editor of Oriental Morning Post invited me to write an article, and I agreed. I didn't use routines to write about food, but I felt it from my heart, just like writing a "friend" of the food kingdom. My book "People and Food are Equal" expresses my attitude towards diet. People should not do things that are sorry for food, and should not abuse food, such as eating monkey brains and cat meat. I also object to gourmets' condescending picky about food. I also said in the article "Snackers" that picky is a relatively low stage of appreciation, and eating has never been a way to show their identity. Only when they are used to delicious food in childhood, will they have no deliberate pursuit of food and deliberate cultivation of taste in adulthood. Only those who come out of the picky eaters of young teeth will grow into friendly and unpretentious real eaters, because they must be more tolerant and considerate.

It's a very accidental thing to say that I write a "diary of a cook". I started blogging in 22. I usually write column articles for money, but blogs can write what I like. After I got married and lived in Beijing, my father began to read my blog, and there was another way to contact us. I told him that I often cooked at home, and he was very interested, so I simply wrote my own recipe, which was a very personal thing at that time. I didn't expect so many people to read it later. For example, I introduced the practice of stir-frying double balls with Chaozhou chili, and the diary contained, "Pangpang likes to eat meatballs, but she can only eat meatballs when she is in hot pot. The cook thought that there was such a trick in Chaozhou cuisine, so she tried it. Buy cuttlefish balls and shrimp balls and cook them in white water. Of course, don't cook them for too long. Pay attention to keeping them elastic. Take out, each meatball is cut in half, so it looks better and tastes easier to enter. After that, it's very simple. Cut a handful of shallots, dig a spoonful of Lee Kum Kee's lobster sauce, put the shallots, dried peppers and lobster sauce in the wok, stir-fry them with oil, then pour in the meatballs and stir-fry. When each meatball is covered with lobster sauce, you're done. It tastes spicy and fragrant than the meatballs in the hot pot! " Every Monday, I cook for my husband and friends, once a week, also for grandma's sake, don't make a fuss about cooking. Nowadays, young people in mainland China are enthusiastic about food, but many people don't like to do it, and regard cooking as an arduous task.

When the economic conditions get better, some people start to follow the trend and eat expensive and fierce things. For example, killing animals cruelly and seeing eating as a power to show off. I always remember a scene in a Japanese drama in which a girl ordered a cake for her wedding, but the groom never showed up. Finally, the chef took a beautiful cake and sat on the stairs with the sad girl, insisting on eating the cake in one bite, because "a good cake is made for people to eat." This is respect for food. I think good food will bring back warm memories.

It seems that all of a sudden, I became a so-called gourmet, writing columns for the media and planning food movies and TV series. Although I like eating since I was a child, I didn't think it would become my career. For me, it is a good thing to tell others how grateful they are for food. At present, some TV cooking programs are very high-end, and they are all about making shark's fin and bird's nest chinese forest frog. This is a kind of cosmetic thing, which is not our daily life and will not remind you of life. For me, people and food are equal, and cooking food is a very comfortable, close and easy thing. ■