The Qing Palace is bounded by the third stage of His Royal Highness Baohe, the front of the stage is called the outer court, and the latter is called the inner court. The banquet institution of the previous dynasty was Guanglu Temple, which hosted the kinds of banquets (state banquets) routinely organized by the Qing government. Here are the banquet establishments of the inner court-the Imperial Tea Dining Room and Royal Dining. The Imperial Tea Dining Room was an institution of the Qing Dynasty Internal Affairs Office. It was originally divided into the Imperial Tea Dining Room and the Imperial Dining Room, which was merged into the Imperial Tea Dining Room during the Qianlong period.
perform their duties with a clear division of labor
Royal Tea House is a place to undertake milk tea (milk tea) and all kinds of tea. Those who make milk tea are all Mongolian tea vendors, which shows that milk tea is a traditional drink in Mongolia. Milk tea is the main drink in the imperial meal, and it is also indispensable in sacrifices and banquets. After the emperor’s meal, the tea room should also serve milk tea in a timely manner. The chief eunuch asked the emperor regularly about the next meal, such as the location of the meal, what he would like to eat, or reminders of the emperor’s birthday and death in recent days. The emperor knew it well.
In the early stage, the imperial dining rooms were distributed throughout the inner court, such as the Changchun Palace dining room, the Chonghua Palace dining room, and the Yonghe Palace dining room. Each dining room also produces tea, cakes and porridge. In the fifteenth year of Qianlong (1750), Qianlong decreed that the dining rooms should be merged into internal dining rooms and external dining rooms. The internal dining room is equipped with meat bureau, plain bureau, hanging stove bureau, meal bureau and dinner bureau. The outside dining room undertakes feasts and sacrifices. In the thirty-sixth year of Qianlong (1771), the imperial dining room added a file office, with eleven pen-post styles, dedicated to records of emperor and royal banquets. As a result, the management level and food process of the Imperial Dining Room have been greatly improved.
皇帝Two regular meals a day
Then the emperor of the Qing court eats several meals a day, and what does he eat? According to the records of the Qing Dynasty, the emperor had two meals a day, namely "breakfast" and "dinner", to be precise, two dinners. There are several snacks or snacks in addition to the two meals. Eating two meals a day is the dietary habit of the northern peoples. This is related to the cold climate in the north, short days and long nights, while most people living in the south have three meals a day. The Manchu Eight Banners nobles who came out of Baishan and Heishui have long practiced two meals a day after they moved into the Forbidden City.
By the end of the Qing Dynasty, when the power was turned on in the palace, there were electric lights, and it was gradually changed from two meals to three meals. The emperor’s dining time is relatively fixed but very flexible, which often depends on the emperor’s needs. Generally speaking, after waking up at four in the morning to wash, drink a bowl of beverages such as bird's nest stewed in rock sugar. Breakfast is from 7 am to 9 am, dinner is from 1 pm to 3 pm, and dinner is added from 7 pm to 8 pm from time to time. If the emperor goes to bed late one day, he will eat late night (night snack).
The weather in the north is cold, the days are short and the nights are long, and there are no lights in the palace before the late Qing Dynasty. The emperor should go to bed early and wake up early and not greedy for the dark. From the daily meal schedule of Emperor Qianlong, it can be seen that in addition to two main meals, the emperor would also have additional meals from time to time. The imperial dining room was required to be prepared at any time, and the emperor could eat anything he wanted. Mrs. Pujie Ai Xinjue Luo Hao's "Food in the Court" wrote that the emperor often did not fix the time and place for meals, and the imperial dining room must be served immediately when he wanted to eat. For example, when the emperor was walking, the dim sum bureau had to put a lot of dim sum and tea in two round cages, carried by five or six people, and followed the emperor. As long as the emperor said he needed it, he brought it up immediately. This is a headache for the imperial dining room. .
The emperor has a relatively fixed type of each meal, generally including hot dishes, pots, steamed food, cooked food, pickles, staple food, soup porridge and desserts. There are some special dishes during festivals and seasonal seasons, such as Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first lunar month, Mooncakes on the Mid-Autumn Festival on August 15th, Zongzi on the 5th day of May and Dragon Boat Festival, Chongyang Flower Cake on the Chongyang Festival on the 9th day of September and Laba Congee on the 8th day of the 12th lunar month Wait. Another example is the spring cakes of Lichun, the elm money cakes of Guyu, the autumn leaf noodles (noodle soup) of Liqiu, and the sticks of the winter solstice.
and court-specific meals, such as "auspicious dishes" is a dish only available in the late Qing Dynasty, generally composed of four large bowls of dishes, each bowl of dishes On the upper part, a word is put out with bird’s nest, showing words such as "Wang Shou Wu Jiang" or "Fu Shou Wan Nian" to make the emperor happy, similar to today's birthday cake with cream to write a happy birthday blessing. "Tiananshan" was first seen in the Xianfeng period. It prevailed in the four dynasties of Xianfeng, Tongzhi, Guangxu and Xuantong.The form of Tong Man Han imperial meal is more solemn and the standard is greatly improved.
During the festival, the emperor’s royal dining table is quite generous, but the daily diet is not as luxurious as imagined. The diet at the beginning of the Qing Dynasty was relatively simple. Emperor Kangxi “did not eat and taste” and only eat one type of main ingredient in a meal. If this meal is pork, he will only eat pork dishes instead of poultry and fish. dish. In the early Qianlong period, there were only 18 dishes per meal, including staple food, pickles and desserts. Although there were so many dishes on the imperial dining table, the emperor sometimes got tired of eating meals in the palace after eating for a long time. This is related to the old-fashioned palace cuisine and following tradition. If the dishes are not allowed to be arbitrarily matched, eight-treasure dishes must use fixed eight kinds of raw materials, and no other ingredients are allowed. Another example is that the relationship between host and guest cannot be reversed. Too much seasoning is not allowed for cooking chickens, ducks and geese. The original flavor of poultry ingredients must be maintained, and the variety of seasonings is relatively fixed and single.
The emperors of the Qing Dynasty always maintained the Manchu eating habits. The Manchu people like to eat the meat of pigs, cattle, sheep, poultry, beasts, and various river fishes, especially pork; they like to eat lard stewed vegetables and salty pickles and pickles; they like to eat mushrooms, fungus and other mountain treasures Seasonal melons and fruits; like dairy products and sweets; staple food is mainly pasta, like sticky food. Cooking methods include roasting, roasting, stewing, boiling, and stir-frying.
Hot pot is the main dish in the Manchu banquet. It is said that the hot pot popular in the north and south was invented by the Manchus and other fishing and hunting people. Lamb, pork, mountain poultry, and beast meat can be served in the pot, with sauerkraut, vermicelli, etc., hot Fragrant and full-bodied. During the Nurhachi and Huangtaiji periods in the early Qing Dynasty, the animal husbandry, hunting, planting, and harvesting were the main ingredients of the court, which basically continued the Manchu eating habits.
The emperors of the past dynasties after Shunzhi entered Beijing, with the expansion of their ruling territory and the influence of the Han nationality’s food culture, their dietary preferences and tastes gradually enriched, especially the palace flavor that paid more and more attention to meals during the Qianlong period. There are mainly three different flavors of Qing palace meals.
One is Shandong cuisine flavor . When the capital was moved to Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, most of the court cooks were from Shandong. The Qing Dynasty’s owner of Beijing inherited the eating habit of the Ming court who liked to eat Shandong dishes. The second is the traditional Manchu flavor . The Manchu diet originated from the ancestors' half-raising, half-fishing and hunting life. They liked to eat pork, beef, mutton, poultry, and beasts, and they were continuously improved by the chefs of the Qing Dynasty, thus introducing a kind of palace cuisine with Manchu characteristics. The third is Suzhou-Hangzhou cuisine flavor . When the emperor patrolled the south of the Yangtze River, various local foods were offered with local characteristics, and the southern state capitals paid tribute to the palace’s fruits and vegetables and other ingredients, which also made the emperor, especially the Emperor Qianlong, love Suhang cuisine. These three cuisines were inherited and improved to form the Qing Dynasty court diet system.
Emperor Qianlong loves hot pot and loves Suhang cuisine
Emperor Qianlong loves hot pot throughout his life, according to Qianlong's fifty-fourth year of royal food list records, this year I ate more than two hundred hot pots in China, sometimes three hot pots a day, which shows how much this emperor loves hot pots. Nowadays, hot pot is spread all over the hotels and restaurants in the north and south of the river, and it has become a delicacy in the lives of ordinary people.
乾隆帝
However, Emperor Qianlong not only liked the hot pot in the north, but also the Suhang cuisine in the south of the Yangtze River. According to the archives of the Office of Internal Affairs of the Qing Palace, in April of the sixth year of Qianlong, before Qianlong went to the south of the Yangtze River, the word "Su Yan" appeared in the court archives. The Su Yan at that time was quite formal. On the 50th birthday of the empress dowager, the emperor decreed "to change the Su Yan for three days." In the 30th year of Qianlong (1765), when the Emperor Qianlong went to the south of the Yangtze River for the fourth time, he admired the meals cooked by the home chef of Suzhou Weaving Pufuyou. On February 15th, he ordered Ma Guoyong to reward Zhang Cheng and Song Yuan. And 张东官 and other kitchen servants "one or two silver pieces per person".
During the Southern Tour of Emperor Qianlong, he brought Zhang Dongguan and other Suzhou Weaving Mansion chefs back to the capital. From then on, Suzhou cuisine became one of the three major cuisines of the Qing palace.One. Qianlong visited the south of the Yangtze River six times in his life and tasted the delicacies of the north and south of the Yangtze River. In addition, the special ingredients that the state capitals in the south of the Yangtze River paid tribute to the imperial dining room of the Qing Palace formed the emperor's preference for Suhang cuisine.
The daily life and eating habits of the feudal emperors of the past dynasties are state secrets, and no one outside the court can understand them. The House of Internal Affairs of the Qing Dynasty recorded the emperor’s daily life and diet in detail, and formed a record of nearly 200 million words of food facts-the "Imperial Tea Dining Room" archive, which is extremely precious for the study of the Qing Dynasty court meal system, economic life and social culture Historical documents, , and no such archives were left in any dynasty before the Qing Dynasty. From the window of the archives of the "Imperial Tea Dining Room", perhaps today's people can understand the real Qing palace dietary system and diet evolution, and understand the dietary habits and taste preferences of different emperors.
