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What was the main food in Song Dynasty?

Diet in Song Dynasty: From Elegance to Popularity

Under the influence of the court diet, mutton became a symbol of expensive and delicious in the Song Dynasty, which also made Kanpan spread at private and public banquets. But to put it in detail, it was not the court but the people who really affected the diet in the Song Dynasty.

There is a dynasty in the history of China, which has inherited the beauty of food for thousands of years and created eight Chinese cuisines, but it can leave the humor of food advertisements in the market with rigid etiquette, and there is also a legend that a cookbook in Luoyang is expensive. This is the diet culture in Song Dynasty. Just like the popular tea-fighting game in the Song Dynasty, it was sometimes dignified in the temple and sometimes passed on to the pawn, with endless aftertaste between elegance and vulgarity.

A palace that doesn't eat pork

As the banner of the times, all previous dynasties were nothing more than the diet of the court. In the Song Dynasty, the court changed the exaggerated style of the court diet in the Tang Dynasty, that is, the red hump was taken from the jade chicken and the fragrant fish was ordered from the crystal tray, leaving not only the exact details of the royal banquet court dishes, but also the raw materials and practices that have been handed down to this day. There is an interesting custom circulating from those records full of rich life breath. In the Song Dynasty, the Forbidden City "stopped using mutton" and "did not supply pork" in principle. According to records, the first dish Song Taizu cooked for Qian Chu, the monarch of Wu Yue State, was "Fu Xuan", which was made of mutton. Renzong, on the other hand, prohibited the imperial court from "burning sheep" when it was hungry in the middle of the night, so mutton was the supreme food of the imperial court in the Song Dynasty. At that time, the mutton produced in Fengyi County, Shaanxi Province was called "tender first". I bought it in Shaanxi when I was in Song Zhenzong. With the succession of dynasties, the custom of eating mutton as the main meat in the court of Song Dynasty increased. Roughly during the period of Song Renzong and Yingzong, the imperial court bought tens of thousands of Qidan sheep from Hebei. In the chef's account book of Zongshen era, the record of "434,463 kilograms of mutton, 0/9 of mutton and 4/0/3 of pork/0/1 of kloc" is even more "appalling". Although a small amount of pork expenditure is recorded here, most of the pork is on the list of "watching dishes" and side dishes.

The eating habits of the imperial palace in the Northern Song Dynasty have been handed down even in the Southern Song Dynasty with Hangzhou as its capital. Song Gaozong proudly said that mutton is the main food in the palace, and pork is not needed. Even in the Southern Song Dynasty, when filial piety was practiced, the queen "ate in the palace and provided a sheep every day". Because it is located in the south, there are not many sheep, and the rest of the food is replaced by fish, shrimp and aquatic products with unique skills in the south, not pork.

Look at the dishes before eating.

It is not difficult to find the names of dishes such as "Embroidered Eight Fruits", "Lexian Dried Fruit Fork Bag" and "Golden Deer Fragrant Medicine" in the records of the royal banquet in Notes of Song People. These exquisite dishes are not for tasting. They only belong to the "watching dishes" at the banquet. For example, the "Embroidered Eight Fruit Base" is to stack fragrant round, real orange, pomegranate, orange, goose pear, milk pear and flower papaya with various precious utensils. "Golden Fragrant Medicine" consists of ten boxes of spices, namely brain flower, licorice flower, cinnabar round seed, clove, water dragon brain, gentleman, sand-shrinking flower, osmanthus fragrans, atractylodes rhizome ginseng and olive flower. These famous dishes made of fruits and spices are only used to stimulate appetite or freshen the air with their beautiful colors and exquisite furnishings before eating. In the Song Dynasty, it was called "watching vegetables", "watching fruits" and "watching food". The specific origin of watching dishes can't be verified, but the royal banquet "Shao Weiyan" appeared in the Tang Dynasty, and the rich and prosperous Song Dynasty carried forward this custom and officially became a custom in banquets and daily diets. At the royal banquet in the Tang Dynasty, the dishes in the "vegetarian steaming department" were made of vegetarian dishes and steamed noodles into a group of Penglai fairy-like dancers, with 70 pieces of * * *, which was huge and spectacular. But Song's dishes are more detailed. There is no textual research on the specific method of watching dishes at the royal banquet, but from the perspective of the fruit of the people's king, we can see the leopard. For example, the carved flowers and honey fried like the citizens of Tokyo, the capital. Among them, carving is a pattern food carved with melons in Tokyo food market, that is, "medicinal melon". Not only in Tokyo, but also in the catering markets of various cities, such as Pucheng's wax gourd, a three-foot-long wax gourd placed on a longevity shelf, engraved with rockery, tortoise, crane, birthday girl and fairy, which is extremely exquisite.

Of course, the chefs in Prince's Mansion are all of high level. They carved sweet and sour plum balls, sweet wax gourd fish and slightly spicy and sweet ginger flowers with bayberry, wax gourd, kumquat, fresh ginger and tender bamboo shoots, carved flowers, big flowers and square flowers on kumquat, orange and papaya, and carved lotus leaves on green plums.

It is worth mentioning that at these royal banquets, people eat either customs or fruits and spices. It has been recorded in Tokyo's love love love that during the royal banquet, envoys from various countries "watched dishes with cakes, oil cakes and jujube towers, along with fruits", but in front of Liao envoys, "I saw sheep, chickens, geese and cooked bones as dishes, all of which were tied with small ropes, and onions, leeks and garlic vinegar were born together", because Liao's eating habits were crude. In the Southern Song Dynasty, there were more and more candied fruit and candied fruit on the plate because of its sweet taste. This popularity of watching dishes is the ancestor of today's craft dishes.

The sound of advertisements between shops

Although the food fashion in Song Dynasty was based on the likes and dislikes of the court, it was never a court food culture but a folk food culture, just as it had always led the fashion trend in past dynasties. During the Song Dynasty, the catering and leisure industry in the city was extremely developed, which made the kings between the imperial capitals look forward to the lights in the city at night. First of all, this is due to the economic prosperity of the Song Dynasty. It's just that restaurants are no longer confined to the middle of the market as in the Tang Dynasty. People in the Song Dynasty officially started the three-meal system in ancient China. Before that, according to etiquette, the emperor had four meals a day, the princes had three meals a day and the civilians had two meals. In the Western Han Dynasty, the imperial edict to the exiled king of Huainan specifically pointed out that "three meals a day should be reduced to two meals". As for this common people, it is a custom to eat from two meals to three meals, which not only proves that the rigid dietary etiquette rules of the imperial court are ineffective in restraining the common people, but also reflects that the prosperity of the Song Dynasty was not praised by historians.

The three-meal system directly promotes the prosperity of the catering industry, and also brings competition among restaurants in the city square. In addition to competing for all kinds of dishes and tableware, advertising, holiday promotion and environmental protection promotion at that time have become the three major promotion methods of catering shops. The catering advertising industry has begun to take shape. Generally speaking, famous restaurants such as Fan Lou and Baifanlou will spend a lot of money to ask people to write poems to improve the reputation of their restaurants. And some unknown small shops will also display special signs such as "Sun Mutton" and "Li Family Wine". In "Chicken Ribs", there is even a record of a vendor selling rice cakes on the street. He tried his best to come up with such a slogan: "I am the one who suffers." As a result, when he was still hawking in front of the abandoned palace of Empress Meng of Zhezong, he attracted the attention of the chief of Kaifeng Prefecture, suspecting that he would satirize the incompetence of the abolished emperor, and was arrested for interrogation. After the trial, I realized that he was only selling his own cake, so he was beaten 100 and released. After that, the stall owner changed his mouth and shouted "Let me put it down and have a rest". This story, which has been circulated as a joke for some time, vividly describes the catering customs in the Song Dynasty. Flags are flying in restaurants and hawking is endless.

Romance and Diet of Celebrities

Of course, the most direct recorder of any folk food custom is the contemporary literati. Scholars in the Song Dynasty spared no effort to popularize and spread the drinking style and eating customs at that time. The diet works in Song Dynasty can be roughly divided into three categories: food classics, tea science and wine science, among which not only the number and types are greatly increased, but also the status of diet works in books is greatly improved through the compilation of scholars. For example, in Song Dynasty, Zheng Qiao's "A Brief Introduction to Tongzhi Art and Literature" only studied the classics and listed them in a single category. * * * included 4 1 360 volumes of works.

Poetry and prose that integrated diet description into chanting things were everywhere in the Song Dynasty. For example, Su Shi, a literary giant, wrote a lot of poems in this field, such as Dongpo Tang Fu, Pork Fu and Gourmet Fu, trying to make tea in the courtyard and deliver tea with Jiang Kui. Of course, the advertising poem he wrote for the old woman who bought cakes was "Jade hands are rubbed evenly, and the oil is light yellow." Sleep at night, spring knows the weight, and the plaque is beautiful and wrapped around the arm. "It is also a story that has been passed down through the ages.

In addition to preserving and writing food books and poems, many writers only participate in the invention and production of food. For example, Zheng Wenbao, whose calligraphy and poetry were very famous in the Northern Song Dynasty, created clouds and shadows, which were very popular. According to records, the method is to mix lotus root, lotus root, water chestnut, taro, chicken head, water chestnut, arrowhead and lily together, then steam them with lean meat, cool them with wind, mash them in a stone mortar, add Sichuan sugar and honey to cook them, mash them in the mortar and mix them evenly, and then take them out and make them into balls. This delicious food was even included in the Song Dynasty cookbook.

The most famous are Su Shi and Dongpo Meat. When Su Shi worked as Ying Yong's assistant in Huangzhou, he tried to find out the popular method of roasting pork at that time and was able to create a new dish. Su Dongpo also wrote a jingle to record this practice: "Huangzhou good pork, cheap." The rich refuse to eat, and the poor don't know how to cook. Slow fire, less water, full fire, he is beautiful. Get up and play a bowl every day, so full that you can't care. "As I said before, mutton was recognized as a rare dish at that time, and it was a trouble, so cheap pork made the rich people look down on it at that time. After the creation and recommendation of great writers, it soon spread widely among the citizens of the Song Dynasty. This is the "Dongpo Meat" that has been passed down to this day.

At the same time, in the Song Dynasty, which was extremely rich in products, there was no taboo about religious diet. In order to pursue novelty, some exotic foods were also included. For example, among taxi drivers in the Song Dynasty, eating puffer fish became a fashion. Celebrity Mei likes to invite friends and relatives to eat puffer fish at home. He wrote in "Puffer", "Spring buds are born in spring, and flowers are flying on the spring shore. At this time, puffer fish is not expensive. " The puffer fish is highly toxic and can only be cooked after detoxification. It was at this time that Su Dongpo's humorous anecdote about eating puffer fish to death. Because of the high price of puffer fish, gourmets actually invented the practice of fake puffer fish. Similarly, in the Qing Palace in Shanjia, I also remember the production of "fake fried meat": sliced gourd and gluten, fried them separately, and then fried them with onion, pepper oil and wine. Gourd and gluten not only stir-fry like meat, but also taste like meat. Later, the fake puffer fish, fried puffer fish and fried fake puffer fish have appeared in restaurants as famous dishes. It is conceivable that it is precisely because of the summary, writing and dissemination of various diets by scholars and gourmets that the citizens of the Song Dynasty were able to know these novel foods. In addition, catering businesses can follow the trend and imitate seafood, thus forming a folk food trend. These anecdotes are not enough to ramble on.

Today, although the prosperity of the Song Dynasty has already turned into the splendor recorded in the pages, the details are like walking on the streets of Henan, and breakfast is the unified situation of mutton soup; The fashion of drinking tea can be seen from time to time, but what seems invisible is that the dietary customs of the Song Dynasty have already entered the people and have never been lost for thousands of years!