China is probably the country with the longest “eating culture”. Not to mention the extensive and profound cooking methods, even the names of the dishes are colorful. Eating culture will be directly reflected in the names of dishes. Naming dishes is very particular. An elegant name may become a quatrain and make people comment repeatedly; a clever name may be a vivid legend that makes people admire; an interesting name It may contain a historical allusion, which makes people have endless aftertaste; even if it is a common name, it may be a humorous joke, but it can make you laugh and laugh, achieving the effect of "sounding" first.
Naming dishes is mainly based on ingredients, taste, shape, quality, color, seasonality, cooking techniques, place names, characters, allusions, metaphors, meanings, expressions, numbers, etc. The following are the summarized dish names: named after ingredients: lotus leaf chicken, silver carp tofu, mutton and fish soup. Named after flavors: five-spice pork, strange-flavored chicken, hot and sour soup. Named after shapes: cherry meat, Tai Chi taro paste, chrysanthemum fish. Named after quality: a bite of crisp. Named after color: Golden Jade Soup, Jade Dew Group, Amber Meat. Named after the season: Dongling porridge, autumn leaf cake. Named after the cooking techniques: braised tenderloin, steamed pork, and fried hairtail. Named after place names: Beijing roast duck, Nanjing salted duck, Fuling pickled mustard. Named after characters: Dongpo Pork, Wensi Tofu, Kung Pao Chicken. Named after allusions: Sing the Orioles in the Willow Waves, Pearl in the Palm, and Yangguan Threefold. Named with metaphors, meanings, and expressions of emotion: Tongshen cake, dragon and phoenix legs, longan buns, unicorn fish, mandarin duck fillet, and ants climbing the tree. Named by numbers: Yi Wo Si, Er Color Wan, San Bu Gu, Si Mei Geng, Wufu Cake, Children's Day Dish, Qifu Cake, Eight Treasure Rice, Nine Silk Soup, Ten Yuan Geng, Drunken Thirteen Oysters, Twenty Four Qi wontons, colorful beef louvers, eight treasures and three flavors of pears, hundreds of birds return to the phoenix, thousand-layer cake, and ten thousand years of purple abalone.
Banquets also have various names, such as: whole fish banquet, whole sheep banquet, whole duck banquet, whole vegetarian banquet, Manchu-Han banquet, bird’s nest banquet, bear paw banquet, shark fin banquet, and sea cucumber banquet. There are birthday banquets, wedding banquets, New Year's Eve banquets, summer banquets, Spring Festival banquets, Confucius Mansion banquets, hundred chicken banquets, thousand old man banquets, there are too many to mention.
Another important manifestation of "eating culture" is probably the shape of dishes. When it comes to shape, we must talk about knife skills. The knife skills of Chinese cuisine mainly include cutting, batching, chopping, etc. The main knife skills include straight knife, flat knife, oblique knife, odd-shaped knife, etc. The raw materials can be made into blocks and segments. , strips, silk, slices, cubes, grains, velvet, powder, mud and other shapes; there are no less than 200 names of knife techniques in modern China.
The shape of the dish should not only focus on the shape, but also pay attention to the color effect. The principle is that the true nature of the food ingredients must be reflected, and the color matching with the ingredients must be reasonable. Food often changes color during the cooking process. Maintaining the original color of the raw materials or changing the raw materials to a predetermined color is a creative problem, which requires superb skills.
In fact, unique modeling techniques such as melon carving, egg painting, and dough sculpture have been around since ancient times. For example, "Shaowei Banquet List" records that 70 Penglai immortals made of dough were steamed in a cage; "Chunming Meng Yulu" records that the fruit plate was made of 120 kilograms of lychees and 260 kilograms of jujube persimmons; "Qing Yilu" records In the Wuyue area of ??the Five Dynasties, fish fillets were pickled and fermented to make peonies, but the authenticity cannot be distinguished. Let's take a look at some of Lu You's poems about eating: "The green plums are cleverly paired with Wu Yanbai, and the beautiful bamboo shoots are more suitable for the fragrance of Sichuan. The plain moon is opposite the silver man, the red snail pours the jade mash. Half of the cheeks are dyed with red pear, and the snow crabs are chopped into pairs. The claws are as big as a plate, and the red ones are as sweet as honey." It can be seen that the ancients' attainments in "eating culture" are no less than those of today's people.