Tang Dynasty Crossing Guide: Chang'an and People's Life Manual

Chapter 9 How to be a qualified foodie in the Tang Dynasty (4)
Potatoes and sweet potatoes are likely to come to your guests' minds first when it comes to bulky root alternatives.These, the deer tour guide has already said, are native to America, and I don’t have them.I tend to have large pieces of vegetables that can be eaten as a staple food, including radishes, turnips, taro, eggplant, tender gourds, etc.In addition, you can dig bamboo shoots in the bamboo forest, and there are lotus root in the lotus pond. When there is no food, these can temporarily fill your stomach.

However, guests are not advised to overeat the two plates of radishes and turnips that were just served on the table, because they have already been made into pickles, and they will be eaten with rice later. Eating too much will kill you.

Sorry, I seem to be late.Someone, take these people out.

The two dishes that followed were very connotative.This plate of steamed ones, guests, don’t look down on them, it’s called Siong, and it’s still small now, and after planting and mutating for more than 1000 years, it will turn into yellow buds and whites, which is the Chinese cabbage in the north.How about it, do you have a familiar and friendly taste in your mouth?
Another dish is spinach salad.Guests, don't underestimate this plate of food. It may be very cheap in your time, but in my Tang Dynasty, this is a new species of "bolen vegetable" that was just introduced from Tianzhu after Emperor Taizong Wen opened the Western Regions. It is very precious. .The folks have just started large-scale planting not long ago, and the cost is quite high.

Cold spinach is a special offering of our shop today, and it is not available every day.Yesterday, in a Tang wear group, the special offer was roasted wild mushrooms.The mushrooms in this dynasty are mainly wild-picked, and it depends on luck whether you can pick them or not.

Don't be restless, guests, this is the staple food, and I won't let you all starve to death in my famous restaurant in Shengshi Chang'an.

There are two choices of staple food: yellow rice and white rice.Yellow rice, also called millet, is similar to millet in your era, and it is the staple food of the people in the north of my dynasty.White rice is a product of rice, and all guests are familiar with it, so I won’t introduce more.

Sorry, we do not serve pancakes and noodles.Although these wheat products are very common, they are more labor-intensive and more expensive than grainy meals, which do not conform to Wei Xianggong's frugal personality, so our shop has never made them.

For customers with heavy mouth, if they really can't swallow these meals, the restaurant can provide a condiment for free.You can choose one of pickled leeks, chopped green onions, garlic sauce, and minced ginger. If you want more, please add money at your own expense.

Finally, our shop will give you a bowl of bean leaf soup for free.Bean leaves are called "huo" in my dynasty, and they are the most common and popular vegetables alongside sunflower.Bean leaves are rich in crude protein and crude fat, and also rich in calcium and phosphorus.Therefore, in the absence of protein feed, using soybean leaves to feed pigs is an effective way to supplement protein.

Guests eat well and go well, we look forward to your next visit.

References & in-depth understanding recommendations for this article:
Wang Saishi. Diet of the Tang Dynasty. Jinan: Qilu Publishing House, 2003
The tea does not add onion, ginger and salt juice, how can people drink it, it turns the table!
tea culture

Tang wears the food group and continues to eat our banquet.

The time and place of eating are clearly stated, and a lot of meat and vegetables are also mentioned.It's roasted lamb, sashimi, steamed pig's head, pickled vegetables and rice. Are you thirsty?

What?Greet Xiaoer for a pot of tea?
If you are strolling and sightseeing in the Tang Dynasty before the Kaiyuan era of Emperor Xuanzong, then the author Lu advises you that it is best to bring your own tea when you go out.Moreover, the waiters in the Tang Dynasty were not called Xiao Er. If you want to greet someone, you should shout "Doctor"-yes, this is the name for service industry practitioners or middle and low-level technical personnel in the Tang Dynasty, which is much different from now.

So, you can shout: "Doctor, serve the pot of tea!"

The clerk in the store came over and said, "What do you want, sir? Tea? What is tea, can you eat it?"

If you feel that these little doctors doing chores are rude and ignorant, and you call the shopkeeper angrily, the shopkeeper will probably tell you with an apologetic smile on his face, forgive me, he knows that tea is a very noble, cultured and very Drinks filled with thirteen, but the grade of the small shop is too low, and this kind of thing is not prepared every day. It is recommended that you go to the temple or the homes of those high-ranking officials from the south to fill in thirteen... Ahh, go drink tea.

Before the time of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, in the northern part of China, not only were there no tea in the restaurants on the street, even if you went to the homes of ordinary noble officials or ordinary people, don’t expect anyone to bring you a cup of tea every now and then.Why do you ask?Alas, do you think that the people of our country have been drinking tea since Pangu created the world?

Let’s put it this way, if you have developed the habit of drinking tea every day before time travel, then you’d better not travel through the era before the Western Han Dynasty. If you want to drink tea, you have to pretend to be sick and ask the doctor to give you When prescribing the medicine, add the leaves of a tree blindly called "tea" or "tea" or "ming", and then let the family spend a lot of money to buy this medicine at the pharmacy, and boil water to drink by themselves.

If you really want to travel to the Western Han Dynasty and insist on drinking tea every day, then I suggest that you find the coordinates when you land, and you must land in Shuzhong in the Western Han Dynasty, which is now Sichuan Province.The people of Sichuan, who have a particularly well-developed sense of taste, have been drinking tea since the Western Han Dynasty, but only here.If you don’t place it correctly and wear it to another place, you can only laugh at it with the masses, “Those melons are fine, why are you drinking medicine all day long?”

If you travel to the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the scope of your location can be extended to the entire south, but it is best to reincarnate in the upper-class aristocratic society, wave the dust with the descendants of Wang Xie in Wuyi Lane, drink tea, talk about ideals, life, and world.By the way, if you like to drink yogurt and eat ice cream, you can consider traveling to the Northern Dynasty at this time, where daily drinks are mainly dairy products, and they are guaranteed to be pure natural without adding artificial chemical ingredients.

Going back to the serious part of Tang wear, it must be said that if you want to watch Li Shimin or Wu Zetian, and want to drink tea in the capital Chang'an or the eastern capital Luoyang, it is really a bit technically difficult.You know that the Sui and Tang Dynasties inherited the regime, value orientation, and living habits of the Northern Dynasties, right?Therefore, in early Tang society, dairy products were much more popular than tea beverages, and it was much easier to ask for a cup of yogurt or rice wine than tea.

Therefore, if you want to drink tea, you must either go to the homes of those Jiangdong Chinese who have maintained their southern living habits, or go to monasteries—monks are one of the groups that popularized the habit of drinking tea earlier, because tea has a stimulating effect and can help them maintain Keep your mind clear and read a few more scriptures.

But wait a minute, even if you got a cup of tea in the temple, are you sure you can swallow it?
Please put your nose on the cup first and take a deep breath. What you can smell, besides the astringent aroma of tea leaves, may also be the spicy aroma of onion, ginger, and pepper, the sweet aroma of jujube and cinnamon, orange peel, The cool taste of mint, the milky smell of yogurt, the oily smell of beef, mutton and pork...

Well, even if you are very lucky, there is no other strange smell except tea, so you raise your head and drink it—very good, 99% of this tea is salty, at least you must add some salt, otherwise it is no Sencha.

During Tang Xuanzong Kaiyuan Tianbao period, the habit of drinking tea became popular in my country. Since then, most ordinary people and restaurants can serve tea.However, at the end of the Tang Dynasty, many people, even most people, were used to adding the above-mentioned ingredients to the tea when drinking tea.

The general steps of these people's "Grandma Liu's method of making tea" are as follows:

[-]. Take tea leaves. Tea leaves are processed by steaming, roasting and drying fresh leaves. They may be in the shape of scattered leaves, but most of them are pressed into cakes, which are more like modern raw Pu'er cakes.

[-]. Break up the tea leaves, roast them on fire until they are red and dry, crush them and pour them into porcelain bottles.

[-]. Boil the water. Before the water boils, add the above-mentioned ingredients into the pot.

[-]. After the water boils, pour the powdered tea leaves into the water and cook together with the ingredients to make a pot of tea porridge.

Do you think the tea brewed in this way is not drinkable at all?Well, obviously you are not the only one who thinks this way. For example, a guy named Lu Yu① will stand side by side with you, stomping on Ming porridge and cursing: "This thing is only suitable for flushing the toilet in the gutter."

The authentic Tang-style sencha method advocated by Lu Chasheng, which is elegant, fresh, cultured and tasteful, has been learned by the Japanese and has been preserved to this day, as follows:

[-]. Break the tea cake into pieces, put it in a container and roast it on the fire, at least twice evenly with the firepower, the drier the better, it is said that it can thicken the tea flavor.

[-]. Put the roasted tea into a paper bag while it is hot to prevent the aroma from overflowing, and let it cool.

[-]. Pour the tea leaves into a special tea grinder, the finer the grind, the better.It is not possible to grind into debris as big as water chestnut, at least it must be ground into fine rice, and it is best to be ground into pine pollen.

[-]. Pour the crushed tea crumbs into the tea lollipop and sieve it through the loaf. Anyway, I just want fine tea powder.

[-]. After the tea powder is collected, you can start boiling water.Lu Chasheng believes that mountain spring water is the best for brewing tea, river water is worse, well water is the worst, and tap water...

Sixth, use a special stove, good charcoal, and a special small pot to boil water.When there are fish-eye patterns on the water surface, and when there is a slight sound, it is called initial boiling, and salt is added at this time.

[-]. The edge of the pot is bubbling like a spring, and it is boiling. At this time, use a ladle to scoop up a ladle of water and put it aside for later use.

[-]. While stirring the boiling water in the pot with a bamboo utensil, sprinkle tea powder into the center of the water, and soon the water boiled again, turbulently, so pour the scoop of water back into the pot, press the fire head, and prevent the tea powder from bursting go outside.

[-]. As soon as the three boiling waves appear, the tea is considered to be boiled, so quickly remove from the fire, don't continue to boil, and pour the pot into those noble celadon white porcelain tea bowls.

[-]. The key to dividing tea is to artistically pour the froth on the tea water (tea powder is not instant coffee powder, most of which are floating in the water) into each tea bowl. The most basic requirement is: uniform thickness, look Comfortable, masters can even pour these froth into various patterns and shapes to compare tea fighting.

[-]. A pot of tea can only be poured into five bowls at most, and the limited edition is only worth money. If there is more, it will not be noble and glamorous enough, but a fool who drinks cows and mules.

① Lu Yu (733-approximately 804), the author of "The Classic of Tea", advocated the Tang-style method of frying tea.

After the publication of the Lu's method of sencha, it soon became one of the standards of elegance for the aristocrats in the upper class. It became popular all over the country and passed down to later generations.Therefore, if you are a tea addict, it is recommended that Tang Chuan choose after Kaiyuan Tianbao (friendly reminder: almost after the Anshi Rebellion), at least you can drink the strange-tasting eight-treasure stewed tea when wandering among the people, and in the royal family’s home Then you can enjoy the authentic tea ceremony service.

References & in-depth understanding recommendations for this article:
Edited by Huang Zhongxian. Research on Ancient Chinese Tea Culture. Beijing: Published by Science Press, 2010
Li Baidou's Hundred Poems on Wine... Did you drink a fake bar for me?

wine culture

After talking about tea, let's talk about other drinks.

If you are still eating rice noodles in a restaurant, and you are thirsty and your tongue is dry, as a Tang Dynasty person, no matter whether you are a man or a woman, you should take a picture of the food table boldly at this time and shout: "Doctor! What wine?" You said that you get dizzy when you drink, and you want a drink?Don't be afraid, listen to me, ask for wine first, and talk about the drinks later.

(End of this chapter)