The owner's improvement of the meat filling in the town of Yueya Spring is an adaptation that has happened many times over the past thousand years. Let's start at the beginning.
In Tongguan, the story of the meat buns and Li Shimin is widely rumored.
Legend has it that at the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, Li Shimin, the King of Qin, was passing through Tongguan when he tasted the Tongguan meat buns and praised them: "Wonderful, I didn't know there was such a delicacy in the world." From then on, the steamed buns became famous all over the world. Perhaps this is where the first variation comes in.
It should be noted that the baklava was not an invention of the ancient Han Chinese. Before the Qin and Han dynasties, the Han people used to eat "soup cake" or "steamed cake" at the dinner table, which were not at all the same as the present-day baklava, with one resembling today's braised noodle slices and the other today's pancakes. Later, around the Han Dynasty, Zhang Qian or Ban Chao traveled to the Western Regions and brought back "hu biscuits", the predecessor of baklava, which we now call "naan". And the hu biscuits most prosperous time, also happens to be in the Tang Dynasty.
Perhaps, when Li Shimin, who was on a four-way warpath, passed through the Tongguan Pass, he happened to put cooked meat into the hu biscuits he was carrying, which made the Tongguan Meat Buns the most famous story of all time.
Further back, people's diet continues to develop and evolve, and later there are many popular food, such as steamed buns, buns and so on. Of course, the bun used in this meat bun also changed with it. From hu biscuits to steamed buns, perhaps this is the second variation of the Tongguan meat buns. No one knows exactly when this change began, but it is certain that by the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, the steamed bun used in the Tongguan meat loaf was still a steamed bun.
Socio-economic development can promote the change of things, when the speed of socio-economic development, the faster the change of things. The same is true for Tongguan meat buns.
At the beginning of the last century, Tongguan meat buns changed again, and steamed buns became cow tongue cakes. However, within a few years, after the founding of New China, the bun became the round oil-layered cake we see today.
Today, Tongguan meat buns are still changing, but the changes have been relatively small, such as this store in the town of Yueya Spring, which uses green peppers to enhance the flavor of the meat filling, and I believe that there have been many changes like this. Regardless of the changes, Tongguan meat buns are adapting to local conditions and catering to people's changing tastes.
With variation comes perseverance, and this perseverance is not about skill, but more about a kind of sentiment.
For Tongguan people, Tongguan meat buns are a kind of food they can be proud of. In Tongguan, people are more accustomed to call meat buns as meat buns, and eating meat buns is more like a kind of honor, a kind of well-being or a kind of satisfaction and pride in the hearts of Tongguan people, which can be said to have gone far beyond the concept of eating, and even showed a kind of simple and unadorned sentiment.
Why do you say this? A friend from Tongguan told us that the meat bun has too many stories.
The friend said, in the past in Tongguan, no matter who, mentioning the meat bun, will show a mouth-watering expression, as if talking about the world's treasures. Even now, conditions are better, such a situation still exists. Especially in the past, often encountered people because of something to fight for a lot of time, they will be meat buns as a bet. If one side loses, the winner will be in the witness "coercion", asking the losing party to pay money to buy meat buns back to enjoy together, and then, just also argued redneck thick both sides will be because of a few meat buns and back to good. Therefore, in the Tongguan neighborhood, often heard that someone won the bet and ate three or five meat buns thing, and in the usual, the three or five meat buns is several times the amount of his meal.
Besides using meat buns as a bet, there are of course many other stories. Comrades from the Tongguan County Cultural Center told us two such stories.
The first story is that a few decades ago, a young farmer took his son on a train to see his son's doctor, and met a cadre on the train, who knew the train was going to take a long time, and bought a few meat buns before getting on the train to eat on the way. As a result, when he was eating, he saw the farmer's son staring at him and drooling, so the cadre wanted to invite the farmer's son to eat one. When the farmer saw this, he quickly excused himself. In fact, it is not that the farmer does not want to eat, but also can not afford to eat, then a meat bun only 20 cents, but the farmer knows, he is on the dozens of dollars is to give his son to see a doctor, do not dare to spend a penny more, so can only let his son endure, and so on good to see the disease back home again. Later, his son got well and grew up slowly, but every time he mentioned the meat loaf he would think of this, and he would unconsciously go and buy two more meat loafs and bring them back to his father.
The second story is about the comrade from the cultural center. He told us that when he was a child, his family's condition was not good, so every time his grandmother went to the street to buy a meat bun, he would use a knife to cut it into four, his brother, his sister, himself and his grandmother each one. To know, the palm of a cake, and then cut into four, there is not much more, so in his impression, meat buns is something he never ate enough, but when he was able to earn enough money to buy enough to eat meat buns, grandma has left him
Nowadays, when the Tongguan people's standard of living gradually improved, no longer for the food and clothing livelihood of the time to worry about, the meat buns are still the Tongguan people in the heart of a kind of The meat buns are still a kind of attachment in the hearts of Tongguan people. Although the meat buns on the market have risen to more than five yuan, you will still meet some young people who live in remote villages and come to the city to buy meat buns for the elderly.
Perhaps this is the sentiment of Tongguan people. Regardless of how the art of Tongguan meat bun is changed, for the people of Tongguan, this meat bun is the flavor of Tongguan.