China Popular Itineraries |
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The Custom and Development of Dietetic Structure |
What we call the custom of dietetic structure is the arrangement of wine, dish and food, or the proportion of drink and food. In Chinese dietetic struc-ture, dishes take the most important position; wine, the second; food the last. When people say "China is the best place to enjoy delicacy" or "The time-honored Chinese dietetic culture is becoming a worldwide fashion", they mainly refer to dishes. While food, though extremely essential to the exis-tance of human beings, is quite simple in people' s daily life.
Actually, dish includes vegetable, meat and fish dishes.
In ancient China, wild vegetables, fruits and meals with little grain and without meat constituted the common dietetic structure of the lower strata, while meat-eating was a common practice among the nobles during the Spring and Autumn Period. So later "meat" became the synonym of the nobles. It was recorded in Zuo Commentary :" The army of Qi was attacking the King-dom of Lu. Zhuanggong, the monarch of Lu wanted to fight. Cao Gui plead-ed to see the monarch. His countyfellows said, ' It is the meats' business, It' s none of your business. 'Gui responded, 'The meats are short-sighted and de-void of insight. '"But compared with that of today, the diet of the meat strata was not very good. It was also documented in Zuo Commentary: Xianggong's diet was two chickens daily.
According to historical documents, pork, chicken and dog were the main meat consumed in ancient China. It was recorded in The Analects of Confu-dus. "Yang Huo would like to visit Confucius. Refused, he sent a pork leg to Confucius." The gift to such a Saint as Confucius was no more than a pork leg. The hermit in The Analects of Confucius "asked Zi Lu to stay for the night and killed chicken to treat him. " Chicken was, as is seen from this sto-ry, the best that common people could entertain guests at that time. Dog meat was so popular in the Qin and the Han dynasties that there emerged a new 0c-cupation called "dog butcher. " Fan Kuai, a senior general of Liu Bang (the first Emperor of the Han Dynasty), used to be a dog butcher. Since the Tang and the Song dynasties, beef has been popular. In Pao Ding, the Ox Butcher there was a story about Pao Ding, a skillful ox butcher. While the heroes in the Outlaws of the Marsh often guzzled wine from large bowls and devoured big pieces of beef, Wu Song, a heroic character in the novel, gobbled up about two kilograms of beef before fighting the tiger.
From the above, we can classify the raw materials for dishes into six cat-egories:
(1) Meat: including quadruped wild animals and livestock such as pigs, oxen and goats; birds and poultry such as chickens, ducks and geese; scaled fish, shrimps and crabs. In short, those flying in the sky, running on the field, swimming in the water, so long as they are edible, all belong to this category. Besides, insects such as locust, silkworm chrysailis and snake also belong to this category.
(2) Eggs and milk: that is, eggs and milk produced by wild or domestic animals.
(3) Oil and fat: the fat from livestock, poultry, fish and the cooking 0il extracted from plant seeds.
(4) Vegetables: including cultivated vegetables and edible wild ones. Specifically speaking, stalk and leaf vegetables such as celery, cabbage and chives; rhizoma vegetables such as turnip, lotus root and bamboo shoot; fun-gus vegetables such as mushroom and edible fungus.
(5) Melons and fruits: including the nut, core and shell of all fruits and edible melons, dry or fresh, such as peach, walnut, coconut, wax gourd and cucumber.
(6) Condiments: such as salt, sugar, vinegar, ginger, pepper, cassia bark, fennel, gourmet powder, spices and so on.
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