Me and Empress Dowager Cixi

Chapter 11 The Imperial Dining Room (1)
For this trip to Fengtian, the three aspects of "clothing", "housing" and "travel" have been arranged. How will the "food" be solved?If you don't go out, it's easy to do anything in the palace, you have to be extravagant and extravagant; but when you go out, especially on the train, the queen mother can only suffer a little bit of grievance.First of all, there is not enough space. The imperial train has specially opened up four carriages for the queen mother to use as the imperial dining room, but compared with the palace, it is still several grades lower.

To put it simply, the four carriages are arranged like this: there are fifty stoves, fifty cooks, fifty cooks, and countless chores.In addition, there are one hundred kinds of main dishes prepared, as well as one hundred kinds of pastries, fruits, dried fruits and the like.

From ancient times to the present, Chinese people have attached great importance to the issue of eating. The recipes alone are enough to write a book. What is involved here is only a small part of Chinese food culture.

To be disrespectful, "eating" is an important purpose of survival for the Empress Dowager Cixi.In fact, this sentence is nothing, even for an ordinary female official like me, isn't it?We never seem to be satisfied with what we eat.Not only is the food in the palace extremely rich, but our respective homes are not much inferior. Although our food is not as rare as in the palace, and the quantity is not so large, it is enough for us to enjoy it until Till you get tired of eating.

I don't know when the emperor started to have such a rule. Whenever the empress dowager or the emperor wants to serve a dinner, there must be a total of one hundred dishes, and there must be no duplicates.The meaning of doing this is no longer known, but this rule has been passed down, and it is the same with the Queen Mother.It's a pity that no matter who you are, no matter how good your appetite is, it's impossible to eat these one hundred dishes. Even if you only taste a small bite of each, you still need a huge appetite!

In fact, every time she eats, the queen mother tastes at most three or four kinds, and the rest is either thrown away or handed over to the female officials, court ladies and eunuchs with higher status.

Under normal circumstances, the queen mother faces a table full of meals by herself and enjoys them slowly, occasionally letting me accompany her.It's just that I have to stand and eat, not sit there with her.

People must be wondering, how big a table should a hundred dishes be on?In fact, the queen mother's dining table is not a whole table, and it is impossible to have such a large table. We always put together many small tables temporarily, just to accommodate those sumptuous dishes.It is very easy to put together the tables, but it is not so easy for the queen mother to pick up vegetables. The ones that are close to each other are fine, but the ones that are farther away will be out of reach.What should we do?Readers, don't worry, the queen mother will definitely be served extremely satisfactorily.

At that time, there was an eunuch named Zhang De who served the Queen Mother with meals.After the death of Empress Dowager Cixi, Li Lianying succeeded him as the chief eunuch.

During the meal, if the Queen Mother wanted to taste any dish, she would order Zhang De to bring it to her slowly and respectfully wait for her to enjoy it.The job of serving food is easy to say, but in fact it is not something that ordinary people can do. It must go through strict training, because every gesture must be extremely respectful and solemn.When the Queen Mother finished her meal, the leftovers were ours. They were said to be leftovers, but basically the chopsticks were not touched, just like sacrificial dishes removed during ancestor worship.

Of course, it is not easy to prepare hundreds of dishes. Frying, frying, cooking, and deep-frying will take a lot of time, and the technology needs to be superb, so the difficulty can be imagined.The situation in the palace will not be repeated here, only how it was done in the car.

Although four carriages were prepared on the train as temporary imperial dining rooms, only one carriage was dedicated to cooking.There are fifty stoves in this carriage, arranged on both sides. They are all made of white clay coated with bricks. There is an iron plate under the pig iron shelf, all of which are painted white. Not only is it safe, but also But also very neat and beautiful.

When cooking, each stove can only undertake the task of two dishes, because many dishes cannot be prepared in one go, such as stewed and steamed duck, which must be cooked at a simmer for two days to be crispy and delicious.

Whenever it was time for the Empress Dowager to eat, the driver and brakeman were ordered to stop.But it was too late to stop the car and cook again, so the cooks could only prepare nervously while the train was moving.Fortunately, the speed of this train is always very slow, so the cooks are not too embarrassed.

What does "get started" mentioned earlier mean?In fact, it is easy to understand that it is the cook who is in charge of each stove.This title is not called casually, only people with fairly high qualifications can win this honor.However, from the perspective of work content, what they have to do is extremely simple, as long as they make two kinds of dishes for each meal.I have always had doubts about these "hands on".First of all, are the two kinds of dishes they are cooking their best?Secondly, even if they are the best, has their technical level reached the point of proficiency?

In addition to this carriage, there is a section in the remaining imperial dining carriages that is dedicated to preparation work, that is, washing, cutting, and arranging the ingredients of dishes so that they can be cooked at any time.Think about it, some dishes have to be peeled before they can be eaten, some have to be cut into sections, some have to be sliced, some have to be cut into chunks... almost no kind of dish can be put directly into the pot, it has to go through it first Some tidying up.This job is not a big deal in ordinary families, but it is preparing meals for the queen mother. Not only are there a variety of dishes, but they also need to be prepared carefully. If you are not careful, you will be punished, so more than 20 people are arranged here, which sounds like a lot. , but they are still too busy.

Take the bean sprouts as an example. The thin roots on the stem must be picked off first, and it must be handled very carefully.Think about it, bean sprouts alone are so troublesome, let alone other things, how can there be more than twenty people?
Besides, there are fifty stoves in total. Although they look neat and imposing, they are not so easy to serve.The first is the fuel. These stoves use briquettes, and it is not an easy task to ignite them.Because the briquettes will not burn all at once, waste paper or wood flowers must be used as primers.When lighting, too many or too few primers will not work. If there are too many, a lot of smoke will be emitted, which is unbearable. If there are too few, the fire will not start.There are also people who are responsible for this job, let's call them cooks.There are also fifty such people, and each person is in charge of a stove.

"Getting started" is only responsible for preparing the two main dishes that he is best at, and then there is nothing to do. The task of the "starter" is to stand next to the "starter" and bring him soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, etc. at the right time.This "appropriateness" is not something that ordinary people can do, and one must have some knowledge of cooking.

Although these people are all responsible for the errands in the kitchen, there are also distinctions between high and low.For example, when the cook is lighting a fire, even if the two types of chefs, the "hands-on" and "hands-on" cooks are idle, they will not lend a hand to help, because in their view, this kind of work is much lower than themselves. I have lost my identity.

All those who work in the palace, regardless of their status, are very concerned about face-saving from top to bottom, and even put on airs. The influence of the empress dowager on everyone can be seen.

The stove can be used after it is ignited, but the gas will also come out to smother people.On the way to Fengtian, several eunuchs were smoked down.Later, they slowly found a way to prevent it. As long as the fire started, they would open all the car windows so that no one would be smoked.In addition, there is another method that can play a preventive role, that is, install a chimney on the stove, direct the outlet to the window, and put the unpleasant gas outside.When the fire is hot and the briquettes inside are red, the chimney can be removed.

The hard work of the cooks is not limited to this. In order to start the fire as soon as possible, they have to keep fanning the fire door of the stove with fans, and the fire door is very low, so they have to bend down when fanning.

Think about it, each stove has its own "starter", "starter" and three cooks, and 150 stoves will need [-] people.In addition, there are many eunuchs coming and going, moving to and from, that can't be counted.As soon as it was time for the Empress Dowager to eat, the four carriages used as the imperial dining room immediately became lively.Everyone is nervously doing their own duties, cautiously, not daring to make any mistakes.These eunuchs are really well-trained, not only did not have a single accident, but everyone's work was done in an orderly manner.

The fire started, and fifty cooks moved at the same time. They lit the stove almost at the same speed and in the same way. Even the chimney used to disperse the gas was taken down at the same time.This is not really strange, the most astonishing thing is that fifty cooks bent down together, fanning up and down with a fan in each hand, it looks like boatmen paddling together, the scene is quite spectacular.

Although cooks do different jobs and have different status, there is no difference in dress.Their attire is the same as that of the eunuchs in the palace, very gorgeous, only a white cloth cover is added on the sleeve.Therefore, although this is the imperial dining room on the train, it is also radiant and dazzling.

The Queen Mother likes to be clean.People in the past, regardless of whether they were rich or not, and their status was high or low, did not pay much attention to the cleanliness of the kitchen.The queen mother is different from ordinary people on this issue.When she lived in the palace, she always liked to go to the imperial dining room, so it was always kept clean and tidy.This time I went to Fengtian, although the imperial dining room was changed to the train and the space was very limited, the habit of tidiness remained the same.Even the floor is clean enough to eat, this is the cleanest kitchen I have ever seen.

According to regulations, there are two "dinner meals" a day, and each meal must be served with a hundred dishes.In addition, there are two "snacks". As the name suggests, the snacks are much inferior to the main meals, but because they are the snacks of the Empress Dowager, twenty bowls of dishes are the minimum standard. Normally, it takes about forty or fifty bowls. Like to be too casual.

(End of this chapter)