The desolate and heroic northwest wind roars around the famous city of Chang'an .
Today, when the types of ingredients and processing methods are already extremely rich, Xi'an food is still known for its "rustic and fullness". The pasta, oil-flavored meat pieces, and a large bowl of thick wine are not only the homesickness of modern Shaanxi wanderers, but also the favorite enjoyment of Guanzhong men and plump Tang beauties a thousand years ago.
Carry a cage of "Fuxingfang Hushicake" and visit Bai Juyi !
"mutton soaking buns", " Roujiamo "... Various noodle cakes locally called "mo" are now the staple food on the table. However, don't think it's natural and that's what it has been since ancient times.
wheat used for grinding flour is not a native grain crop in my country, but is traveling all the way from the Mesopotamia Basin of West Asia. Shaanxi is one of the "frontier positions" for wheat to enter China, and has also become the main battlefield for wheat to compete with my country's native crop "millet (millet). These two crops fought for thousands of years. In the Tang Dynasty, wheat established its victory and ascended the throne of the "king of staple food" of the northern people.
After the wheat is harvested, threshed, ground into dough, and then add water to make dough of various shapes and cook. These pasta are called "cakes" by people in the Tang Dynasty. Whether they are steamed buns, buns, sesame cakes, or noodles, they are called various "cakes".
mmed into a female figurine for pasta unearthed from the Tang tomb in Xinjiang
I want to ask what kind of cakes people like to eat the most, the famous time-honored brand "Fuxingfang Humacake" is the great poet Bai Juyi!
Bai Juyi's career was not going well for a while and was demoted to Zhongzhou (now Zhong County, Chongqing) as a local official. One of his friends Yang Guihou was the governor of 0,000 (now northeastern Chongqing) at that time. One day, Bai Juyi's family made a quash cake. I remembered that Yang Guihou was a villager, so I gave him some, so I sent someone to give him some, and attached a poem "Send to Hu Cake and Yang Wanzhou":
The quash cake was like Kyoto, and the crispy and oily aroma of the noodles was newly released. I have always believed that I am so arrogant to the hungry Ambassador Yang?
various Tang Dynasty pastry
Baida poet's four words point out the origin of the deliciousness of "香港": "crunchy and oily noodles". In fact, to put it bluntly, this thing is similar to the sesame cake we eat now - make the white flour and make the cake, apply oil, sprinkle some sesame seeds, put it in the stove and roast it. When it comes out of the oven, the fragrance blew eight miles in the wind, hurry up while it is hot!
"Fuxingfang" is a high-end residential area in Chang'an City in Tang Dynasty, separated from the imperial palace by one street. Most of the residents in the yard are high-ranking officials and nobles. The restaurant in this shop has a prosperous business and is famous all over the world. It can be seen that "Humacake" is a delicacy that people from all walks of life in the Tang Dynasty are fond of.
In Bai Juyi's poem, he confuses " Hucai " and "Humachi", but in fact, "seedame sesame cake" is just a kind of "Hu cake". The coverage of "Hu Bing" is very wide and has a variety of forms. Some people believe that the "naan" in Xinjiang is the default version of Hu Bing. There is also an "upgraded version of Hucai", called "Gulouzi", which is not available in ordinary cake shops. If you want to taste it, you may have to find an insider to take it to make an appointment for customization.
What is "Gulouzi Hupan" like? Its most prominent feature is that it is huge and huge. To make a cake, you need to use a whole pound of lamb, plus the corresponding amount of flour, ghee , and seasoning. First make the cake, which needs to be divided into many layers. Each layer of cake should be topped with lamb filling, pepper, fermented black beans, and butter. In this way, all the ingredients are sorted layer by layer, and finally sent to a huge stove to bake.
Because this super luxurious multi-layered roujiamo is too large, it is likely that it will not be completely roasted thoroughly. The outer layer is almost burnt, and the meat filling inside is still raw. It doesn’t matter. People in the Tang Dynasty have always been bold and unprofessional in eating food. They have the style of Europeans and Americans eating steaks. As long as the meat is half-cooked, they will invite everyone to have a meal. It is estimated that a "Gulouzi Hucai" can be enough for the whole family to eat for a long time.
What should I do if the little kid is targeted? Take them to eat "Bilo"!
In addition to Hubiao, we will introduce a popular pasta in Chang'an, not because it tastes delicious, but because it has magical effects and is said to be able to ward off evil spirits and ghosts.
This pasta is called "Bilo", which is also a "Hu food" from the Northwest Silk Road. Its basic shape is made of pasta or rice crust, which can be steamed, fried or roasted. There are many kinds of fillings, including the "Cherry Biluo" made by a high-ranking official, taking the elegant and tender route. The cherries wrapped in the dough are said to keep the color and taste of the fruits unchanged after they are ripe. There are also those that use expensive "cereal mushrooms" to make fillings, called "cereal Pilot". The most common filling is white rice with various seasonings.
From the perspective of a snack bar, just listen to those rare and expensive fillings. For the public, pursuing the cost-effectiveness of the products, the "Bilo" dough is basically filled with rice filling. People in the northwest generally like to eat heavy-mouthed food. The popular practice in the industry is to add garlic to the rice grains and add a lot of garlic. The more you are, the more you like it.
so in the small restaurants on the side of Chang'an City, "Bilo" is almost all garlic-flavored. Introduce two Biluo stores:
, one in Dongshi City (one of the two central commercial districts of Tang Chang'an). It is said that there was a gangster on the street doing evil things. The King of Hell sent two little ghosts to take their lives. The gangster wanted to get close to the ghost messenger and invited them to a meal. He took them to the Biluo store in Dongshi first. Unexpectedly, the two little ghosts smelled the smell in the store and covered their noses and refused to go in at all.
Another Biluo store is in Changxingfang. There is a regular customer in this store, a scholar. One day, I dreamed that a mysterious person came to report the good news and said that he passed the imperial examination and several neighbors also passed the imperial examination. So a group of people went to the Biluo store for dinner. As soon as the meal started, the dog raised by the store barked. The scholar woke up and was talking about this dream with the neighbors. The waiter in the Biluo store came to collect the accounts and said, "You guys ate two pounds of Biluo, and ran away without paying them. Is it a good idea to eat a king meal?"
and the two sides talked about the details. The owner suddenly realized: "No wonder you all eat very happily, so Biluo didn't move in front of the mysterious customers he brought. I suspected that I put too much garlic, and that was indeed not a living person..."
In this regard, the customs of the Tang Dynasty are quite similar to the vampire legends in Europe and the United States, and they all think that ghosts are afraid of garlic. By the way, "garlic" is not a native crop in China. It was introduced to our country from West Asia during the Qin and Han Dynasties. It is said that it was brought back by Zhang Qian when he went on a mission to the Western Regions during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han.
Who is the respect for Chang'an hard vegetables? Roast the whole lamb to serve!
Have enough staple food, do you want to eat meat? The most popular thing in in Chang'an City is not beef (the law of the Tang Dynasty stipulates that killing cattle must be sentenced), nor is it the modern national meat-eating pork, but mutton.
There are many ways to eat mutton, such as "roasted lamb", which is very similar to our modern popular "grilled lamb kebab", as well as steamed lamb heads, mutton noodles, etc. Let’s have a representative famous dish. This dish also has a very fashionable transliteration name, called “Hunyang Dihu”.
"The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" stills
You can guess that this is another hard dish with a huge amount of weight, the kind that one or two people can't finish it even if they are overwhelmed. It is time-consuming and material-intensive to make, and it can only be seen at a banquet for wealthy families.
Several servants carried a large wooden plate to the hall, and the plate was filled with a complete roasted whole sheep with steaming and burnt fragrance. The chef took out a knife and cut open the sewn sheep belly , and there was a roast goose hidden inside. There is something in the goose's belly, which is mixed with seasonings and glutinous rice.
looks familiar, right? Perhaps this is the ancestor of the "three sets of ducks" and "eight treasure ducks" in later generations. The method is to stuff the clean and full geese into the sheep's belly, roast them together on the fire, take out the roasted geese, cut them out and eat them one by one, and throw them away as a container, of course they will usually be thrown to the servants for enjoyment.
Sleeping in a restaurant in Chang'an City? What kind of stuff is in your stomach?
has cakes and meat, so there is no problem with eating. But don’t you think there is less mood? How can Chang'an enjoy the stomach and comfort the stomach without the "Tang poetry catalyst" - fine wine?
" Li Bai Hundred poems about drinking wine, sleeping in a restaurant in Chang'an City." Du Fu 's poem is a bit vague. It does not describe which restaurant Li Bai was drunk, nor does it indicate what wine he was drinking. We might as well guess.
ended in the Tang Dynasty, and the "Thirteen Famous Wines" in the country have been included in the literati rankings. Among them, the four famous wines in Chang'an are: Xinfeng Wine, Langguanqing, Grandmaqing, and Xishikian.
lang Guanqing and grandmaqing are both famous products in the district of " Xiamaling ", in Changlefang, the easternmost part of Chang'an City. "Xinfeng" is the ancient name of Lintong County, Shaanxi today, and has been out of the city. If Li Bai was drinking a famous wine brewed by a restaurant in "Chang'an City", then the one who got him drunk was most likely "Xishi accent".
What kind of wine is this? How high is the degree?
hehe, not very high, measured by modern standards, it should be more than twenty degrees. You should know that the high-intensity liquor that modern alcoholics like to drink is made by distillation, and it was only after the Yuan Dynasty that it was clearly recorded. Before this, the wine with the highest alcohol content in the Tang and Song dynasties was only about ten degrees, which was similar to beer.
Look at the color of the wine again. Since "Xishikan" is a famous liquor, the store should pay attention to maintaining the purity of the koji and liquor during the winemaking process. Then the product is yellow and the best one is amber, which is closer to modern rice wine. As the saying goes, "Lanling wine tulips, jade bowls contain amber light."
Half jade-inlaid with gold-edged cups from Li Jingxun's tomb in Xi'an
If it is cheap wine, various microorganisms will be mixed into the wine during the brewing process, and the finished product will be green, which is the "green ant wine" written by Bai Juyi, also known as "turbid wine". Therefore, the quality of the wine sold in the Tang Dynasty and the cost-effectiveness can be judged by the color.
A bowl of fine wine is faintly amber, looks sticky and greasy, and may even hang a wall, but if you want to pick up the bowl and taste it, modern people may scream again: "There is no alcohol at all, it's all sweet! This is a fake bar mixed with saccharin!"
is really not, this is a technical problem. In the era of no distillation and purification, most of the brewed grains that reacted with koji were saccharified. After saccharification, only a small amount of wine could continue to be saccharified. Therefore, the main taste of the wine in the Tang Dynasty was sweet, not spicy. If you are curious about this taste, it is recommended to go to modern Xi'an to try "Huang Gui Chou Wine". It is said that in terms of manufacturing technology, seasoning and degree, it is quite close to Tang Dynasty wine.
