also mentioned that the lunch and dinner on the festive day are the most formal and grand. Especially for dinner, if it is a marriage, there are usually 45 to 80 tables, and a few even 100 to 120 tables. In this way, even if some villages are large, it is not easy to find such a large place to hold the meal at the same time, so it will be divided into two batches: relatives and guests outside the village will have the first meal first and go home early, especially in the era when mainly relying on walking; and then the second batch is other relatives and friends, including people from the village. I rarely see banquets with fifty or sixty tables at a time, which requires the kitchen team to be large enough.
Because the required place is large, village banquets are usually held in the village auditorium or ancestral hall, and sometimes they are also in nearby open spaces, including building open-air kitchens and placing square tables. Some people may like wild village banquets, and the food is done in casual stoves or sheds outside. However, in many villages, everyone will raise money to build more formal kitchens or canteens, which are specially used for banquets. Anyway, every household has many opportunities to use them, so the conditions for making fires, cooking, making rice noodles, lighting, ventilation, and covering the rain are much better.
Dinner's formal dish is different from the fact that there are fish ( sea bass , osmanthus fish , multi-treasure fish or grouper , etc.), shrimp, ginseng, turtle, beef and mutton, pigeon and other dishes. In the past, the village banquet was nothing more than pork, chicken, geese, shrimp, squid (dried goods). Generally, there were no fish, so you might still be worried about fine fish bones. After all, there were elderly people and children at the banquet. If you accidentally caused some twists and turns, everyone would feel uncomfortable, let alone relatives who were far away.
But as a hard dish, you can also make many dishes, such as ground-fried pork, braised pork , Dongpo pork , pig hand lotus root (or peanut), stir-fried pork slices , Guru pork , fried noodles intestine pork liver, etc. The so-called chicken cannot make a feast. Of course, chicken can also be used as fungus mushrooms and daylily fried chicken, as well as stir-fried chicken mixed with . Nowadays, there are sometimes dishes like "steak duck", but in the past, ducks were less common, while geese were more common, including roe, sauerkraut goose or sour ginger goose, etc.
No fish, just use fried squid instead. The shrimp vermicelli is also another seafood dish. Sometimes there are also hair dish oyster bean soybeans. Oyster fermented oyster meat is dried oyster meat. Due to the need to protect the environmental ecology of desert areas, the vegetables are now prohibited, so they have become a good-looking dish. In the past, vegetables would not be used as a dish alone, and they were usually served under the meat. However, now vegetables are formal and the fastest dishes to be snatched away in the end. Especially after someone shouted "This is a farm dish, so sweet", they were even more quick and slow.
Therefore, there are not many types of raw materials, but if the village banquet chef has a high level, he can also make dishes with different tastes on a large table. Although I have heard of the Cantonese " Jiuda Gui " since I was sensible, I don't know if it refers to 9 different hard dishes or 9 large bowls of dishes, but some dishes have one table and two bowls, both in terms of type and quantity, and they meet the requirements. Almost every village has several experts in cooking. They are invited to hold large banquets in the village, and their level is often recognized by everyone. However, they are quite tired, and there is a saying that "there is enough for the meal and the lower seat is hungry" - because they are much smoked, they often have no appetite when eating, but they get hungry soon after they get home.
My favorite food is the braised skin. This kind of braised pork is not the kind of taro braised pork , but it is just ordinary braised pork. The habit of plastering pickled radish slices, and vegetables are also used now. The traditional peduncle of the square Dongpo pork is dried bamboo shoots, but the Dongpo pork is too fat and even if it is stewed softly, the elderly like to eat it, and now they are basically invisible at village banquets.
Nowadays, on various short video platforms, there are teachings to everyone how to make this kind of home-cooked pork, and I will use text to roughly talk about it.Generally speaking, pork (pork belly) is cut into large pieces of meat more than ten centimeters and cooked in white water. Then, use a spatula or toothpick, or even a special fork to tightly tuck small holes into the pig's skin. Then, put it in a frying pan. If you are particular, you will just fry the pork skin and finally fry the meat slightly. However, if you are a little low in level or are troublesome, you will fry the whole piece of meat. Fry it out and let it cool, cut it into half a centimeter thick slices of meat. Finally, put the sauce in the pot. These sauces are generally made of raw powder, fermented bean curd (or southern milk), soy sauce, salt and five-spice powder. Cook the slices of meat into semi-gel, and then put the slices of meat in it and mix well. The pork buckle tastes particularly good, especially the skin of the pork buckle is more delicious. Generally, there are two bowls of buttoned pork on a table. These buttoned pork will not be arranged neatly, just a pile of meat. Even though many people are afraid of eating fatty meat now, if the buttoned pork tastes good, it is still very popular on the table.
also adds one thing to say. Especially the village banquet for marrying a wife, the most orthodox custom has been passed down for hundreds of years. After the new wife comes, she will first offer tea to her relatives and elders. However, in order to let other people in the village (each household has an adult who represents the representative) know the new wife, they usually offer betel nut, which is no longer tea or wine (not everyone can drink). The local dialect is called "carrying betel nut".
These betel nuts are usually broken into small pieces, placed on a plate, and like toasting, the bride and groom walked over one table at a time, and introduced that this is the uncle and uncle, the bride and the uncle, and the villagers usually take one or two pieces of pills and put a red envelope in the betel nut dish, and they don’t have to worry about the amount. It’s just etiquette, and you can put the banknotes directly without wrapping red paper, and the bride will not take it away immediately. If it is full, your family will help you clean it up (this time, the bridesmaids have already returned and are not around).
Of course, betel nut is not just used at this time. The owner usually puts a small bag of betel nut in the gifts he returns to his relatives. So, I knew betel nut when I was very young, and I knew it was hard and had no taste at all (children still like sweets...), but my grandma liked to eat it. Every time I went to someone else's wedding banquet, I would get a little. Occasionally, when I went to the market (to go to the market), I would buy a few dried betel nuts and go home, break them and eat them slowly. But my grandmother also knows that eating too much betel nut will make you "drunk". When you get drunk, you will blush and dizzy, so you only eat it occasionally, and you will only eat one or two pills each time. Unlike now, the news reports that eating betel nut is addicted to eating betel nut in a certain place, more than five or six packs a day. Eating too much of anything is not necessarily a good thing, so the most important thing is probably human self-discipline. It is not helpful to push all the mistakes on others or things.
