Drinking stalls in Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival
The "Sushan" (first from left) is in the hands of ladies (the mural of Prince Zhang Huai’s tomb) and the upgraded version of "Sushan" (second from left) is in the hands of ladies (the mural of Prince Zhang Huai’s tomb).
There is a saying that goes well: "The dead vine and the old tree are faint crows, and Ge You has the same sofa." In this hot summer, you can add a sentence: "watermelon with air conditioning network, roast duck with ice cream beer". Among them, iced watermelons and ice cream are absolutely necessary summer artifacts. For ancient people, it is wishful thinking to rely on air conditioning to "continue their lives", but their cold drinks in summer are no worse than today’s. You can sell "Fat House Happy Water" and "online celebrity Milk Tea" as long as you want to drink them.
Does Yang Guifei "diabetic" want to drink ice water in summer?
The essence of cold drinks lies in the word "cold". How did foodies solve the problem of using ice in ancient times without ice-making equipment? In fact, as early as 3,000 years ago in Shang Dynasty, the nobles at that time began to carve ice in winter and store it in icehouse, so as to prepare for the summer heat in the coming year. In the Book of Songs, "The Wind in July" says: "On the second day, the ice was cut, and on the third day, it was hidden in the shade." The "Lingyin" here refers to the icehouse where ice is hidden. According to the records in Zhou Ji, after the ice is taken out of icehouse, it will be put in a container for storing ice — — In the Ice Guide, people used ice cubes to sweeten wine at that time, and in The Songs of the South Evocation, there was a description of "freezing and drinking, making it cooler", praising the iced glutinous rice wine, which tasted mellow and cool, and the taste was probably as cool as the current iced beer.
However, because cutting ice and storing ice are very technical, ice products were only summer luxuries of the upper class before the Song Dynasty, and ordinary people only drank cold water. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, there were shops selling ice in the city, but the price was still high. Wang Luo, a poet of the Song Dynasty, recorded in Yunxian Miscellaneous Notes: "The ice and snow in Chang ‘an are as valuable as gold in summer." With such expensive ice, ordinary people can only "look at the ice to quench their thirst", but our great poet Bai Juyi is an exception. It is said that he "takes it by the basket every time he needs it, and he will not pay for it every day", which is a real local tyrant. There are many records in the historical records that every dog days, the court will hold an ice ceremony and give ice to princes and nobles to show their gratitude. After receiving the ice reward, Bai Juyi wrote an article "Xie Bing Xiang", which said: Fu Yi presented the instrument of ice as a grand ceremony of the imperial court; Show special grace with its extraordinary things.
It is recorded in unofficial history that the price of Chang ‘an ice is so expensive because Yang Guifei suffers from "diabetes" and wants to drink ice water in summer. Not to mention whether Yang Guifei suffers from "diabetes" only by her plump body and peculiar smell, even if she needs to drink a lot of ice water, the ice reserve in the palace is still sufficient. It is said that Yang Guozhong, Yang Guifei’s brother, gave a banquet at home one summer. He used to make mountains out of large ice sculptures and surrounded the banquet. As a result, he drank in it in the dog days and wore thin cotton-padded clothes.
People have made their own "central air conditioning" with mountains of ice. Do you still need some ice for drinking water?
Others want to get rich by selling ice. In the Five Dynasties, Wang Dingbao’s "Tang Yan Yan" has a story. It is said that in the midsummer season, some people were selling ice in the market, and people coming and going couldn’t stand the heat and wanted to buy a piece to cool down. Unexpectedly, the ice seller thought that he could live in a strange place and deliberately raised the price of ice to several times the original price. As a result, everyone stopped buying it in a rage, and in a short time.
It depends on the progress of ice-making technology to really let ice into ordinary people’s homes. At the end of the Tang Dynasty, people mined a lot of saltpeter when producing gunpowder, and inadvertently found that saltpeter would absorb a lot of heat when it was dissolved in water, which could cool the water to freezing, so soon someone made use of this characteristic of saltpeter to make cold drinks in summer. How to do it specifically? First, put a jar of clear water, then dissolve the sugar and spices in the water, then put the jar in a big plate with water, and constantly add saltpeter to the plate, so that the water in the jar slowly becomes ice. With this method, people who specialize in making sweet ice gradually appeared in the market, and the cold drink era of the ancients officially kicked off.
Datang version of "ice cream" has become a means of showing off wealth at banquets.
In addition to sweet ice water, a new beverage variety — — "drink". The drink is made of fruits or herbs, which can quench thirst and also has the effect of clearing away heat and toxic materials. This should be the ancestor of herbal tea, reminiscent of "Wang Lao Ji".
Drink was very popular with consumers in Sui and Tang Dynasties. It was said that there were drink shops everywhere in Chang ‘an at that time, just like today’s tea shops in the streets and lanes, the business was booming, and some drink shops could drink first and then pay. In "Gossip about Yutang" by Wang Renyu of the Five Dynasties, he mentioned a drink shop, saying that a drink shop in the west city of Chang ‘an was doing very well, and every summer, he cooked drinks in a big pot and sold them. The drinks sold by this family can cure "thousands of diseases", and it is good to drink them, so it has a great reputation. Of course, it’s not cheap. "A hundred articles sell one suit" and it’s sold as a potion.
The most popular ice cream in summer actually appeared in the Tang Dynasty. On the mural of Prince Zhang Huai’s tomb in the Tang Dynasty, there were two maids holding plates with "Sushan". One of the maids holds the basic version in the box, while the other maid holds the upgraded version on her plate. Crispy, similar to today’s cream. To make a crisp mountain, you should first heat it to a state that it is almost melted and very soft, then drip it on the ice on the plate, make the shape of mountains while pouring it, then insert flowers, colorful trees and other decorations, and finally put it into icehouse for refrigeration.
Ice cream can also play with flowers, and it is estimated that only romantic Tang people can think of it. So, what does the Datang version of ice cream taste like? Wang Lingran, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, described it this way: "Taste is the honey of a golden house, and it is the best for beauty. My hands are dripping with rain, and I feel like I’m getting up, and the winter is dry and my body is formed. " It means that this crisp mountain is made by beautiful women bit by bit, tastes like honey, and tastes like six words — — It’s ice-cold and cool.
In the Tang Dynasty, it was an extremely respectable thing for a crisp mountain to appear at a banquet, so it became one of the popular means to show off wealth at that time.
It’s equivalent to going out for a meal now, and it’s a truth that it’s perfect if there is a delicate dessert made by a French chef after dinner.
"Ice and Snow Cold Yuanzi" online celebrity Cold Drink in Song Dynasty
There are many kinds of cold drinks used by Song people to cool summer. For example, there are sweet bean soup, coconut wine, bean water, deer pear pulp, halogen plum water, ginger honey water, papaya juice, tea, heavy perfume, litchi paste water, bitter water, kumquat ball, snow-soaked skin-shrinking drink, Mei Huajiu, Wuling Dashun powder and perilla drink in the book. There are pear pulp, coconut wine, papaya juice, soap water, sweet bean sugar, mung bean water, spleen-shrinking drink, plum water, river tea water, Wuling powder, Dashun powder, litchi paste, Mei Huajiu, white fire, lactose snow and so on in the anonymous West Lake Old People’s Prosperity Record. Only you can’t think of them.
In the market, all kinds of soup drinks appear as thirst-quenching drinks in the stalls of small businessmen. In this regard, the Northern Song Dynasty painter Zhang Zeduan’s "The Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival" is reflected. In the picture, there are nearly 20 stalls selling food and fruit under big umbrellas, and the signboard of "Drinking Son" is hung above one stall. At that time, in Kaifeng, the capital, you can also see merchants selling "ice and snow piled on beds and benches in the street", and prepared sugar mung beans for people to drink.
There is a kind of beverage in Song Dynasty called "soup", which is equivalent to today’s fruit juice beverage. Song’s note "Shi Lin Guang Ji" contains the recipe for making fruit juice drinks: first, the flowers and fruits are salted, dried in the sun, baked and ground into fine powder, and then they are put into containers for sealed storage. When entertaining guests, they are taken out and brewed into drinks, which is a bit like instant coffee today. There is also a kind of beverage called "boiled water", which is equivalent to the current Cantonese herbal tea. It is a plant beverage made by soaking and boiling flowers, leaves, roots, stems and fruits of plants.
Online celebrity’s cold drink in the Song Dynasty is "ice and snow cold yuanzi", which is very refreshing just by listening to its name. This is a small dessert with a combination of value and delicacy, which is deeply loved by the people of the Song Dynasty. It is made of soybean and sugar. The soybean is fried, shelled, ground into bean powder, mixed with sugar or honey, and then added with water to form small dumplings. Finally, it is soaked in ice water, which becomes a sweet and delicious cold dessert. "Ice-snow licorice soup" is a soup made of licorice, sugar and water, which is cooled and then added with ground ice cubes. "Raw flooded papaya" is to peel papaya and remove pulp, cut it into small squares and soak it in ice water.
In addition to these summer soups, there were actually popsicles in the Song Dynasty, but they were not called popsicles at that time, but were called "ice and snow". How is this ice and snow made? Generally, in winter, a copper basin is used to pick up a basin of water, and sugar is put in the water. You can also put some juice and pectin, and then take it outside to make it freeze. After the whole basin of water is frozen, it will be transported to icehouse, where it will be cut into small pieces (or carved into small animals) and sold in cold drinks shops next summer. In the Dream of China in Tokyo, there is "ice, snow and cold water" in the "miscellaneous sale of lanes and alleys" in the capital of song dynasty in June, and it is "all the streets and bridges are sold", which shows how popular it is.
According to the Records of Song History and Rites, in summer, the emperor will give some special rewards to ministers, including "honey sand ice". "Honey smoothie" is ice with honey and bean paste, which sounds a little similar to today’s red bean shaved ice.
Yang Wanli, the best spokesperson for cold drinks in Dasong.
Speaking of people who loved cold drinks the most in Song Dynasty, Yang Wanli, a great poet, is definitely one, and he can be called the first spokesman for cold drinks in Song Dynasty. He specially wrote "Ode to Ice Cheese": "It seems to be greasy and cool, and it seems to be floating. The bottom of the corn plate is broken, and the snow disappears to the sun. " Isn’t the "ice cream" here the 1.0 version of ice cream? To say that this great poet Yang really loves cold drinks, he specially wrote a poem about ice vendors: "The Emperor City stopped noon on June 26, and the people in the city were sweating like a pig. Selling ice comes from the water, and pedestrians don’t eat their hearts. "
This is not all. It is estimated that he was frustrated in the officialdom, and he once thought that "it is better to go home and sell ice cream when an official is not the master for the people". According to him, the profit of selling ice cream in the Song Dynasty is quite rich, enough to support a family: "Northerners make a career of ice and snow, and ice and snow live in a cellar."
Li Qingzhao, a talented woman, is also a lover of cold drinks. She likes to boil the shell of cardamom into mature water to drink. It is said in "Spread the Huanxisha, Sick and Rainy at the temples" that "cardamom can’t even boil water a little, so don’t divide tea". In her later years, Li Qingzhao cooked a cup of cardamom boiled water at the beginning of her serious illness, precisely because this boiled water has the effect of dispelling cold and dampness, warming the middle and promoting qi.
Cold drinks are delicious, but eating too much is harmful to your health after all. Song Xiaozong once ate too many cold drinks and had loose bowels. He said, "I drank too much ice water before, and suddenly it suddenly fell down. Fortunately, it was calm." The king of a country is like a greedy child. No wonder the assistant minister of the Ministry of Rites earnestly advised that the king of a country must not eat indiscriminately according to his own preferences. Song Huizong, who also loves cold drinks, is said to have hurt his spleen and stomach because of "eating too much ice". Many doctors failed to treat him, so Yang Jie, a famous folk doctor, was summoned to the palace. Yang Jie carefully observed Song Huizong’s illness, and still used Chinese pills to regulate qi, but decocted with iced water, and it really worked, which made him famous in the world.
In the Yuan Dynasty, there was another innovation and breakthrough in cold drink making. It is said that Kyle Polo traveled to China and brought the formula of our ancestors’ ice cream to Europe. Foreigners improved it on the basis of ice cream and finally made delicious ice cream. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the most famous cold drink was the "iced sour plum soup" in old Beijing. The specific method is: after the dark plum is soaked, add hawthorn, dried tangerine peel, licorice and other raw materials and boil them together with rock sugar, and after cooling, it becomes a sweet and sour sour plum soup.
Cold drinks have come to this day, and the renovation has already exceeded the imagination of the ancients. However, back in ancient times, standing in the streets and lanes, you can still see a long queue from time to time. Yes, it is a "online celebrity" cold drink shop, and their business is very good! (Text/Reporter Chen Pin)
