Around 1849, gold mines were discovered in California, USA. The poor farmers who lived in poverty in the rural areas of Guangdong, China at that time, came to the United States in various ways to dig for gold because of the legend of "Golden Mountain". When all the gold was mined, many of these farmers did not return home, but participated in the construction of the east-west railway line across the continental United States.
At that time, there were Irish workers who were building the railways. They did not care about hygiene and liked to drink. The valley where they lived did not need any signs at all. When the railway capitalists went to inspect the road construction, they only needed to use their noses to find these Irish workers, because the entire valley stank.
compared to Irish , Chinese workers from rural Guangdong are not only diligent, but also use their brains to find ways to speed up the project. They are very particular about hygiene. The habits they brought from Guangdong include taking hot baths and drinking boiled hot water every day.
Cantonese people have been required to take hot baths and drink hot water every day since ancient times (those who have experienced the weather in Guangzhou will know what the consequences will be if they do not take baths and drink boiled hot water every day. Friends from the north are imagining less than.).
During the Qing Dynasty , the concept of "drinking tea" in Guangzhou, a Cantonese cuisine that did not exist in other cuisines, started from the "soaking restaurant". The so-called "water baths" are shops that specialize in boiling water with large boilers to supply citizens' daily hot water needs. Some teahouses serve simple breakfast snacks in the morning. Those who do manual labor can buy breakfast while working early in the morning, so the earliest teahouses such as "Yiliguan" and "Erliguan" gradually appeared. prototype. Later, it gradually developed into a dining concept that can be eaten from breakfast to lunch, and even late into the night. There are tens of thousands of types of food. This concept is called "drinking tea". When building railroads in the United States, there are bushes all over the place, so boiling water is no problem at all. Therefore, the Chinese Peasant Union brought a logistics caravan (the people in the caravan did not participate in the physical labor of road construction, but were only responsible for logistics). They were responsible for heating hot water for workers to bathe, providing hot tea for workers to drink, and boiling water every day. Laohuo soup and herbal tea are made, and there is also a kitchen for cooking. What was their food at that time? They eat seafood.
The first ones that were favored by poor Chinese workers were sea cucumber and abalone . California produces the largest red abalone in the world, one is larger than the palm of an adult man's hand. However, Westerners simply won’t eat abalone because they don’t know how to eat it. However, the Cantonese people who come from the top spot of , the top four major cuisines of , and "eat in Guangzhou" Cantonese cuisine, who have been influenced by Cantonese cuisine since childhood, are exactly the best at making abalone! They can eat abalone that no one eats every day for free. There is another thing that Westerners don’t eat now, which is sea cucumber. To the white people at that time, sea cucumbers were simply garbage. Who would eat them? As soon as the net is caught, the fish is wanted and the sea cucumber is thrown away. So the Chinese picked it up and made it into delicious dishes!
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the Japanese went there to catch abalone on a large scale, canned it and shipped it to Japan. Only then did the white people's attention come to their attention. Can this thing be eaten? A German chef tried to cut a large abalone into very thin slices crosswise, then added butter and fried it like a steak, and found that it was very delicious. So the method of eating abalone was extended to the white community. As a result, white people also eat abalone.
In addition to abalone and sea cucumber, various oysters, various mussels , and various clams were not eaten by Americans at that time, and they became the daily food of Chinese workers. Therefore, "eating abalone and sea cucumber every day" became the biggest propaganda and temptation for Chinese workers in the United States to write letters home to attract more children from their hometown to come to the United States. In fact, the poor Chinese workers were so poor that they could only eat abalone and sea cucumbers.
Of course, California abalone is now a very luxury food, raised in captivity, alive, and selling for $45 a pound with the shell on. If it is wild abalone, the California Department of Fisheries stipulates that private fishing of wild abalone must have a license, no diving equipment can be used, and the catch must be successful in one attempt.There are strict requirements for the size of abalone. Once the abalone comes out of the water, it must be measured with a ruler. If it does not meet the standard, it must be returned to the sea immediately. One person can catch up to three abalone at a time. Each person can have up to three abalone at the same time. One person can only catch a maximum of eighteen abalone per year. People from the Fisheries Bureau will closely monitor people who catch abalone in areas where wild abalone is found, and those found to violate the regulations will be severely fined. As for California's sea cucumbers, there are only two types in the wild, and their numbers are getting smaller and smaller. Currently, people with licenses can still dive to catch sea cucumbers in California, but large-scale fishing is no longer available, and wild California sea cucumbers have become a luxury food.
Another thing that regards the Chinese workers as food for the poor is California's bear paws. Of course, this thing is also an extremely luxurious luxury food. But because there were so many bears in California back then, eating bear paws was nothing!
Dried abalone The abalone looks very small. Of course, it’s not the big abalone and sea cucumber that Chinese workers in the United States ate back then. Nowadays, abalone and sea cucumber have become a luxury food. Only in those days, it was a worthless thing for poor Guangdong migrant workers to work in the United States. (There are children in the comment area who thought I was talking about the poor people in Guangdong who ate abalone and sea cucumbers casually in the past: They are totally wrong. I was talking about the Chinese workers who went to the United States more than a hundred years ago and ate abalone and sea cucumbers that no one else ate in the United States. For For the Cantonese people who know how to eat in Guangzhou, Abalone, Ginseng, Wings and Belly were already a luxury item in the Qing Dynasty. How could the poor afford it? It’s because no one in the United States would eat it. , which made the poor Chinese workers feel like rich people, eating abalone and sea cucumber every day)
