Warm "food" light in winter
Taste all kinds of flavors in the copper hot pot
——Find your Taiyuan good taste②
The picture shows the traditional assorted copper hot pot of Lao Taiyuan, which is its own school.
It’s cold in winter and needs steaming heat to soothe it. On the winter menu of Taiyuan people, copper hot pot is undoubtedly a heavyweight dish that can be served in both the living room and the kitchen; it can be high-end and high-end, and it can also be home-cooked with a heart-warming mommy taste.
Unlike the spicy and delicious Sichuan hot pot, the authentic taste of northern hot pot, Lao Taiyuan copper hot pot stews "sea, land and air" in one furnace, making it more unique.
Lao Taiyuan Copper Hot Pot is also called "Assorted Copper Hot Pot". It is a Shanxi dish with a story. It is said that the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang and the thirteenth son Zhu Gui became the feudal lord Datong . He often entertained guests, but was troubled by the fact that the wine and food were always cold in winter. A clever minister developed a copper hot pot, a utensil for cooking soup in a charcoal cauldron under the cauldron. Because of his merit in presenting the copper hot pot, this minister was promoted to the third rank on the spot, so the copper hot pot was also called "quick promotion pot". In 1973, Premier Zhou Enlai hosted a hot pot banquet for French President Pompidou and presented him with a "Kowloon Fenbi" copper hot pot, which spread throughout the world. Now this assorted copper hotpot is rated as one of the "Top Ten Shanxi Dishes".
In the copper hotpot with a "soul", the fried to brown and crispy meatballs and the alternately fat and thin roasted pork slices are indispensable, plus the most basic winter Chinese cabbage, fried tofu, and fried potato cubes. The high-end and high-end ones also include luxurious ingredients such as crispy pork, sea cucumber, squid, stewed meat, day lily, fungus, etc. They are neatly arranged, and then the fragrant broth is poured in. Before serving, the handful of chives and coriander sprinkled on the dish are the finishing touch. When eating, you also remove the chopsticks one by one, eating the meatballs first, then the cooked meat pieces of various colors, and then continue to add soup. As the tofu, cabbage, potatoes, vermicelli, etc. gradually absorb the soup, stew it to taste. You can also have a bowl of hot soup. For those who are particular about it, when the hot pot is coming to an end, they will put a steamed bun on the mouth of the pot and let the residual heat bake the steamed bun until it becomes fragrant. One dish can satisfy all your taste buds.
The homely mommy taste is even more unique to me. When I was a child, copper hot pot was the top dish on the New Year’s Eve dinner or the New Year’s Day dinner. Meatballs, roasted meat, and stewed meat are all prepared in advance during the twelfth lunar month, and the combination of various meat and vegetable ingredients is based on family preferences or techniques passed down from the elders of each family. They look similar, but the taste is different. In my memory, lighting a hot pot is a more challenging task than cooking. We kids couldn't help, so we just watched out of curiosity. We watched the family take out red-hot charcoal blocks and put them into the pot, then stuffed a few sticks of firewood or charcoal into the pot. We gradually smelled the fragrance coming from the pot, as if we were just feeling the smell of New Year.
Nowadays, in daily life at home, the operation of copper hot pot, which has a difficulty level of 5.0, has gradually been simplified, and the combinations have become more casual. Whatever is at home, it may be in the pot. There may be no tofu, potatoes, vermicelli, meatballs and a few shrimps will do. You can also make a pot with some dried beans, stir-fried pork , frozen tofu... But no matter what ingredients are changed, what remains unchanged is the winter warmth that moistens the heart and spleen.
Reporter Wei Wei Text/photo
