Food is the best adhesive that can tightly connect strangers' hearts. There is no need to communicate, sharing love for food with the action of eating is an world language .
If the family can be together, they will be reunited everywhere. With the warmth of human feelings, a foreign land will become a hometown.
In 2018, we looked around the world and went to the vast world to explore the essence of food and drink. We specially selected several destinations where people travel most during holidays: Thailand, Turkey, Spain, the United States and Taiwan, China.
We insist on "food is the journey" because we always believe that food is the most intimate way to understand the world. Before going to Spain, I specifically learned about its history of conflict and fusion, and for me, it was a pile of boring words. But nothing can make me more impressed by those boring historical facts than observations of a vegetable market.
In the central vegetable market of Valencia , I lingered in rows of stalls carefully arranged like art works. My risotto cooking class teacher's explanation came to my ears: "Olive oil is the basis for Spanish cooking, and the olive trees were brought to Spain by the Phoenicians and Greeks over 1,000 BC; in 711 AD, North African Arabized Moorish drove away the previous Visigoths, ruled this land, and introduced sugarcane, eggplant and rice to Spain. The climate and soil of Valencia are particularly suitable for rice growth, so the big pot of risotto originated here is world-famous." We walked to a stall to select the tomatoes used for risotto. Tomatoes of various colors and sizes made me blurred my eyes.
After the regaining of lost ground, Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, was defeated by the "two kings", namely of the Kingdom of Castile and fernando of the Kingdom of Aragon . The marriage between these two monarchs has brought Spain's national strength to its peak. Columbus discovered America with the support of two monarchs, and potatoes and tomatoes were gifts he offered to the royal family.
Spanish cuisine has a wonderful appearance today because of the ingredients and cooking methods introduced during cultural exchanges.
We still emphasize the importance of gaining new knowledge through travel. Right, it is the classical trip that requires some luggage and going down-to-earth, instead of moving your fingers at home to connect to the world, and being content to taste food everywhere without leaving home.
My colleague Ge Weiying went back to Thailand this time. Thanks to the Thai restaurants that bloom everywhere, we seem to have a good understanding of the cooking style of this Southeast Asian neighbor. We can casually tell the names of Dong Yangong Soup, pineapple rice, and green papaya salad, as if we know their taste. But Ge Weiying told me that the first thing that surprised her was the Dongyan Gong Soup. Unlike what we imagined, the seasonings in Dongyan Gong are more important than what ingredients are used for slow simmering on low heat. The red bird's eye peppers create a spicy taste, broken lemon leaves or galangal with branches and long and thick lemongrass create a fragrance. As for the ingredients cooked inside, white shrimp is the most common, black tiger shrimp is expensive, and plain pork meatballs are also very good. She wanted to find the most classic bowl of Dongyan Gong, but found that in the local culture, there is no standard recipe, only the "someone" method. Therefore, the advantage of eating in Thailand is that even if you order the same dish every time, the taste will never be the same.
The green papaya salad, which is often used as an appetizer, is unexpectedly important in Thai cuisine. This is because it uses the "yam" (yam), a Thai cooking method, throwing multiple ingredients together and mixing, achieving a perfect balance between the five flavors of sour, spicy, sweet, salty, and bitter. No wonder Princess Sirindhorn wanted to write a poem "Song of Green Papaya Salad" to recite this inconspicuous daily thing. The green papaya salad actually has nothing to do with the operation of the salad. It is to place all the ingredients in a mortar and mash them with a pestle. During the process of spreading outward, the freshness and refreshing of this dish are just in line with the appetite of Westerners, and it is named "salad".
In fact, the "boiling" used by Dongyan - that is, "dtom" in Thai - and the "flammation" in green papaya salad are almost all the Thai cooking techniques. It has no fire cooking oil for Chinese cooking at all. According to the Western author of the Thai Bible, the gorgeous method of "enjoying more than 20 kinds of herbs, spices and ingredients into a small bowl without recognizing but not causing disaster" is also "has a completely opposite logic to Western food." Thai cuisine must have been influenced by other cuisine , but what Ge Weiying saw was the independent and continuous dietary tradition of this major product country. Think about it, Thailand is also the only country in Southeast Asia that maintained its complete sovereignty during its colonial years.
For colleagues who go further, they have to face stronger senses and taste differences from exotic diets.
Another reporter Wu Liwei went to Türkiye. Traditional Turkish dishes have a different look from taste to color. For example, the protagonist's meat will often be seasoned with dried fruits. At a traditional Turkish restaurant, the cold dish she tasted was "suffilded with rice, pine nuts and raisins in the oven, roasted slowly, and then cooled and cut into sausage-like slices"; one hot dish was "stewed with dried apricots, dried figs, raisins, longan and mutton into a pot", and the other was "slowly roasted with quinoa and beef and mutton, rice, pine nuts and raisins, and finally poured with some glucose to increase the flavor." This seasoning method does not conform to our eating habits, and one of the characteristics of traditional Turkish dishes is that they have to take a long time to boil and stew, and the dishes are not good-looking enough. In this way, is it meaningful to judge based on the Chinese food standard "color, fragrance and taste"?
When faces food in foreign land, it should be understood in the other party's cultural system. Türkiye, where meat has an absolute advantage, is actually a hard work for people to try to enrich the taste of meat and vegetables from ancient times to the present. After understanding this, Wu Liwei knew how to appreciate the "self-made" attitude of Turkish cuisine - "There are many standards for food all over the world, but the Turks do not succumb to any one. It does not care about the appearance, it only focuses on the simplicity and spirit of the richness of the food taste."
The technique of rotating barbecue is the most difficult. First, it is thinner and then keep moisture.
On the other hand, the Turkish attitude towards pasta made Wu Liwei feel particularly friendly. Her hometown is in Shanxi, and she vividly introduced the various creations of "Lao Xier" in pasta in previous food special issues. After coming to Istanbul, she found that there was also a nation here that was equally infatuated with pasta: the chefs in breakfast shops used at least five kinds of flour to make scones, one of which was made of long cakes. The chef should put them on a long strip with a stick like holding Hada , and then put them into the brick stove to bake; there was also a beef-filled scone, which the chef would use a sharp knife to cut the cake, "the sound was as if it was cut a fresh cabbage"; the most amazing thing was the baklava called Baklava, each piece was stacked with 100 thin dough crumbs, and the pistachios were also spread in the middle of the 40th and 60th layers. When making this kind of pasta, dozens of layers are stacked together and rolled together. The powder in the pasta room is flying, and it looks like steam in the bathroom from a distance. If you want to taste these various pastries, you can only hate that the pasta takes up your stomach and you don’t have any more stomach.
If you want to say that the food that makes Chinese travelers feel the closest to, you should still experience the Chinese food overseas. My colleague Rye went to , California, in the United States this time, and , San Francisco, is one of the stops. In a place like California where there are many Chinese people, you no longer doubt whether the Chinese food is authentic, but you are worried about which cuisine and what kind of genre to satisfy your cravings. Rye visited China Live, a Chinese restaurant in the city that has become a hot topic: "Four Seasons Dumplings" filled with caviar, sea urchin, scallops and salmon, sesame cheesecake and black tea tiramisu. They look exquisitely arranged with high-end Western cuisine, and the entrance is a familiar Chinese flavor.
Rye used to work part-time in a restaurant while studying in Australia and had his own private kitchen. This experience made him love to observe the operation of a kitchen - in the California kitchen, there are many genders, ages and races. As long as young people have ideas and are willing to work hard, they will not have been doing repetitive work such as washing vegetables and peeling for more than ten years. In the InSitu restaurant in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, chef Corey Lee, born in the 1970s, turned the menu design into an art exhibition, collecting famous dishes from legendary chefs from all over the world, and then he reinterpreted it, and customers can place orders from these "collections". Another Jason McLeod dressed casually, making it difficult to believe that he is already a two-star Michelin chef. He runs the "Ironside Fish and Oyster Bar" in San Diego , strictly implementing the concept of "from the ocean to the table", selling only sustainable fish, recommending guests to eat oysters, and experiencing "the taste of the ocean without decoration". Their careers have pointed out the direction for young people who have just entered the kitchen.
Rye also interviewed several Chinese girls who were studying cooking in California and who had started working. Compared with many older generation Chinese chefs, they no longer have too much burden or pressure. Entering the kitchen is due to their love for food. Hou Tingting said that the biggest challenge in the kitchen comes from controlling time, but what she enjoys the most is the "Dream Factory" side of the kitchen. For example, in the restaurant she was internship, a raw mutton salad can be so fresh and sweet after being converted; Yan Shuoqing is a pastry chef who prepared a French high-end dessert "Santon Dono Black" for rye. She chose pastry because she "likes dealing with flour, butter, and sugar, and doesn't like the kind of "fighting and killing" that is both bones and bloody." Making dim sum has requirements for patience and care, but female chefs are very sensitive to beauty and color. If you take every step of the way, you will get the most beautiful results.
We often evaluate a dish based on whether it is authentic, and keep more possibilities out of the door because we forgot that there is no unchanging way in the world. A dish is created by geography and history, and will also change with the environment and the times. My friend Cao Ling is going back to Taiwan this time. Before this, we had been to Taiwan twice, but we always felt that we didn’t understand enough about this land. What puzzled Cao Ling was how to summarize the "Taiwanese flavor" she felt? In Taiwan, she ate a "Fuzhou noodles" with lard, leeks, Fuzhou meatballs and a poached egg, and a Sichuan spicy hot pot with a base of clear oil and can be used as soup. However, there is no such noodles in Fuzhou, and there is no such hot pot in Sichuan. In addition, Inner Mongolia does not have Inner Mongolia barbecue, Wenzhou does not have Wenzhou wontons, and Sichuan does not have braised beef noodles. These are only available in Taiwan.
Cantonese cuisine is loved by Taiwanese people, and the soft-shelled lobsters from Ajishi Guanhai Teahouse can be eaten together with the shells.
, however, is the Taiwanese food writer Zhuang Zuyi , which provides her with the answer: diversity and inclusion are the characteristics of Taiwanese cuisine. "Stores selling buns, steamed buns, and cut noodles are often on the same street as rice noodles, bowls of rice cakes, and meat balls. The visitors do not distinguish between ethnic groups, regardless of whether your ancestors are Shandong, Hakka or Tainan. Different dietary traditions seem ordinary and are completely internalized by our stomachs." Under this premise, instead of worrying about whether it is orthodox, it is better to "naturely embrace a diversified cultural background", which is similar to California cuisine. Such dishes contain a hint of nostalgia and a hint of nostalgia, which itself is a witness to the years.
In Taiwan, you must not miss all kinds of snacks, as snacks have long become part of Taiwanese life.
In fact, the one who can sit together and eat is the family, even if he or she is just a passerby who meets you once. When Wu Liwei returned, she told me that the most impressive meal in Türkiye was to visit Tamer, a staff member of the Giresson Provincial Tourism Bureau. That day, the table was filled with home-cooked dishes: nettle vegetable porridge, corn butter batter, pickled lentils, grape leaves wrapped rice, and a cup of coffee after the meal.Although they could only speak simple English, leaving a lot of regrets, she remembered the simple and warm meal, the song Tamer sang about local products, and the smile on every face. This made me who had just finished my trip feel deeply - indeed, food is the best adhesive, which can tightly connect strangers' hearts. No communication is even needed, sharing love for food with the action of eating is a world language.
