Suzhou people love noodles. The first thing many old Suzhou people do when they get up every day is to come to the old place to make noodles in soup, with wide noodles and toppings. After eating, they wipe their mouths and go to work. Suzhou people have always been very particular about that bowl of noodles, and they have unique recipes in terms of the hardness of noodles, the tightness of soup and the collocation of toppings.

Suzhou people can't live without that bowl of maple noodles in summer. Fengqiao Town, namely Fengqiao Town; Noodles are noodles with toppings such as braised meat or fried fish. Because it is seasoned with old soup without soy sauce and the soup is clarified, it is commonly known as "white soup noodles". Maple Town has a strong seasonality, which used to be supplied only between the summer solstice and beginning of autumn. Authentic fengzhen noodles must use eel bones to hang soup, but it is also easy to deteriorate. In addition, it is difficult to judge whether the soup is rotten because of the addition of distiller's grains at the bottom. So after 12 noon, the store stopped selling.

according to legend, the reputation of fengzhen was in the Qianlong period. Once, Emperor Qianlong went down to the south of the Yangtze River, took a boat to Tielingguan outside Suzhou, and landed in Fengqiao Town. At that time, it was just dawn, and the emperor was in urgent need of food. When he saw a small noodle shop in the town preparing to make noodles, the two followers of Emperor Qianlong refused to let the shopkeeper explain and called for cooking noodles at once. What should the shopkeeper do when he sees that the newcomer's tone is fierce and he dare not say more, but he has not rolled the noodles yet? When I was anxious, I saw some raw noodles left on the table overnight. When I smelled them, my noodles were gone and sour. The shopkeeper was in a hurry and had a whim: there is ready-made wine in the shop. Put it in a little noodle soup. The wine is sweet and can dilute some sour noodles. I thought about it and cooked it, and finally I cooked it into three bowls of noodle soup. Unexpectedly, Emperor Qianlong ate it with relish, and after eating it, he repeatedly praised it: What a bowl of maple noodles! "Since then, the reputation of Maple Town bedding face has spread among Suzhou people.

according to some old Suzhou, fengzhen noodle shop was the most famous in the 195s. Later, a small noodle shop in Qiaosikong Lane of Renmin Road became famous. However, in the 197s, Fengzhen disappeared from Suzhou market. According to some experts, the main reason is that the sanitary requirements for making the maple bridge are particularly high. In summer, if you are not careful, the food will easily deteriorate, and the store is unwilling to take this risk and interrupt the production and supply for more than 2 years.

There are two main factors to evaluate the taste of a bowl of Su-style noodles: soup and topping.

let's talk about soup first. Among the Su-style noodles, the soup of Fengzhen Noodles can be regarded as the most distinctive. Although it is a meat soup, it requires a clear bottom. The soup base is made of meat bones, eel bones, snails, shrimp skulls, fermented grains and crystal sugar. In the old days, the most authentic noodles in Fengzhen had to use the distiller's grains left in the winery, which was full of alcohol. After improvement, it gradually changed into adding wine to make.

look at the toppings again. Braised meat is known as the soul of Su-style noodles, and the topping of Fengzhen noodles is also a braised meat, but unlike ordinary braised meat, this meat is white. The production is also more complicated, except that the blood is thoroughly cooked by fire, and soy sauce is not put in the stew, and salt is used to flavor it. As a result, the color is clear and the taste is light, and the entrance is instant.

When a bowl of noodles is served on the table, fine white noodles are fished in a large blue-and-white bowl, just like "the back of crucian carp", with green onions and white grains, and a white and transparent braised meat, which makes people feel fresh. Among them, the faint scent of wine is combined with the fragrance of noodles just right, and even in the hot summer, the appetite does it one brace up. The color, fragrance and taste inadvertently reveal that "the world in the bowl is wide and the face is twisted dry."

fengzhen noodles are also rich in nutrition. Eating them in summer can strengthen bones and muscles and increase physical strength. The soup is rich in high protein, amino acids and vitamins, but there is little fat. In summer, the humidity is heavy. In order to get rid of the humidity, Suzhou people have to add some ginger and vinegar when eating noodles, which makes the nutrition and taste more balanced.

A bowl of noodles in Fengzhen, which is filled with a strong flavor of Wu culture, perfectly reflects the gourmet style of Suzhou people.