If you think Chongqing is only spicy, then you don’t know it well enough

Text | Wei Shuihua

Photo | Visual China

When talking about their impression of Chongqing, many people will subconsciously say that "Chongqing people talk like they are quarreling." At the end, they will add: Chongqing's food is also like this, too popular. Compared with the gentle Chengdu cuisine and the salty, fragrant and sharp Zigong cuisine, the taste of Chongqing is often presented to people with heavy oil, marijuana and spicy. But if you think that the taste of Chongqing is just that, it proves that you don't know it well enough. In the taste world composed of hot pot, small noodles, pickled mustard tuber, glutinous rice cake, brain flower, potato, wonton, blood soup, grilled fish and fat intestine chicken, this seemingly rough port city with the temperament of an Internet celebrity is also inhumanely complex and profound.

Photo/Zhang Meng

No.1

In 1189, Emperor Guangzong Zhao Dun ascended the throne in Hangzhou and became the third emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty. In the succession sequence of the Zhao Song regime, Zhao Dun was at the bottom of the list. His father, Emperor Xiaozong Zhao Shen, was a distant relative of the royal family of Zhao Kuangyin. In the context of the Jingkang Incident, a large number of royal family members were taken north, and Emperor Gaozong Zhao Gou, who had no children, handed over the right of succession to Emperor Xiaozong, who had no blood relationship with him. This year, Zhao Dun was already fifteen years old.

In the next twenty years, Zhao Dun's two elder brothers died early. The throne fell into the hands of Zhao Dun, the third son of Emperor Guangzong, in a dramatic curve. So, this mediocre heir who won a million-dollar lottery ticket at the age of thirty ordered that his fiefdom Gongzhou be renamed Chongqing, which means double happiness.

Since the name was first given, the temperament of Chongqing has been vaguely showing a simple happiness that originated from mediocrity and rose from obscurity. This character of not asking about the origin but seeking happiness is fully reflected in Chongqing's food. The fish that Chongqing people love to eat is actually a kind of marine fish: green-finned pufferfish. Because of its large head and small body, strong fishy smell, and low edible value, it was once a slow-selling product in coastal areas.

But Chongqing people don't care. In the era without mature cold chain, a large number of horse-faced pufferfish were cut off their heads, peeled, frozen into hard lumps, and transported to the mountain city for preservation. With the blessing of large amounts of oil, rapid fire and various spices, the fishy smell is gone, and the advantages of the fish meat being delicate, firm, boneless, and not falling apart after long cooking are magnified, making it one of the most popular fish in this city not close to the sea. Whether it is hot pot, dry pot, pickled pepper, young ginger, or boiled, horse-faced pufferfish presents authentic Chongqing style.

Because the fish with its head cut off and skin peeled looks like a mouse with a pointed chin and monkey cheeks, Chongqing people gave it a very down-to-earth name: "Haoer Fish". From the content to the name, this ingredient has been completely transformed into a Chongqing dish.

The popularity of Xiaomian in Chongqing is also full of legends. As a humid and hot hilly and mountainous area in southern China, Chongqing is extremely unsuitable for growing wheat. Not a single grain of wheat has ever been produced on the 82,000 square kilometers of land. But the amazing thing is that Chongqing people's love for Xiaomian has made them stand out among the many rice noodle-producing provinces in southwest China, making them one of the cities in China that loves noodles the most.

In the eyes of Chongqing people, the word "xiao mian" has a comprehensive connotation: it can be a humble term for people who cannot afford meat, so they just need a spoonful of lard and some seasonings to eat noodles. With the blessing of Fuling pickled mustard tuber, Zigong sprouts, peanuts, sesame paste, soy sauce, lard, chives, ginger water and the last spoonful of spicy oil, even the simplest food can express the most comfortable life.

But small noodles can also be a symbol of noodles in the world of food, whether it's pea noodles, pork intestine noodles, mixed sauce noodles, beef noodles, eel noodles, or twice-cooked pork noodles; no matter it's poured with bone broth or distilled with scallion oil, the dishes that Chongqing people love most and the flavors they value most can all be presented on the platform of "small noodles". Even the most skill-tested dish in Sichuan and Chongqing, stir-fried liver and kidney, can be made into a bowl of noodles by Chongqing people.

Hotpot is the face of Chongqing, while noodles are the inside of Chongqing. This phenomenon of creating a regional mainstream eating habit completely out of local products is very rare in China. Delicious ingredients are all the same, but interesting Chongqing is rare.

No.2

Chongqing has never been a livable city. Although it is often regarded as the predecessor of the ancient Ba State, the remains of archaeological excavations have always limited the cultural center of the Ba State to Langzhong, Dazhou and other places in Sichuan. It was not until the Qin Dynasty unified the world that the ancient Jiangzhou City, which was of conquest significance, was built near Chaotianmen in Chongqing today. As a hub that controls the throat of the Yangtze River and connects the Sichuan Basin and the hinterland of the Central Plains, Chongqing has important military and transportation significance - but that's all. The Yangtze River system has carried away a lot of humus, making the soil here barren; the environment where there is no three feet of flat land is extremely unsuitable for reclamation. In the value system of ancient agricultural civilization, the so-called mountainous area is an area that lacks arable land, a necessary condition for settlement.

This awkward positioning made Chongqing's urban value follow a roller coaster curve in the following thousands of years: in the war era, it was the fortress of Shu Han to defend against the Eastern Wu, the main road for Huan Wen to attack Cheng Han, the heroic city of the Southern Song Dynasty to resist the invasion of Mongolia, the support of Ming Yuzhen to compete for the world, and the key town of the tug-of-war between various forces in the late Ming Dynasty. But in the peaceful unified dynasty, Chongqing was downgraded and ignored many times: in the Han Dynasty, Chongqing was governed by Jiangguan Duwei, a military officer under the governor of Yizhou; in the Tang Dynasty, Chongqing was under the jurisdiction of Dongchuan Jiedushi under the jurisdiction of Mianyang; in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, Chongqing was divided into two, belonging to Chongqing Prefecture and Kuizhou Prefecture respectively.

The scumbag style of the central government of successive dynasties, which used Chongqing like a tool and discarded it like a worn-out shoe, objectively cultivated Chongqing's urban character of not paying much attention to historical evolution but being extremely tolerant of new things. Reflected in food, Chongqing's current diet has almost not preserved any of the Han Chinese food traditions of the Tang and Song dynasties, which advocated freshness and emphasized steaming. Stir-frying, hot pot, and deep frying, these cooking methods that seem to be common on the surface, but in fact have high technical requirements in terms of firepower, cooking utensils, and auxiliary materials, are widely used in Chongqing cuisine.

Chili peppers, which were introduced to China in the late Ming Dynasty, also have an important position and a long history of consumption in Chongqing. Unlike Guizhou, which was originally short of salt and was forced to use spicy peppers instead of salt, Chongqing is adjacent to China's core well salt production area and has the support of the Yangtze River water transport, so it is not short of salt. The locals were initially willing to use a large amount of chili peppers in cooking for one reason: they love to try new things.

Today, every restaurant in Chongqing, big or small, has its own recipe for chili oil and chili sauce: yours uses Erjingtiao, mine uses Chaotianjiao, and his uses a mixture of three types of chili peppers: Erjingtiao adds flavor, Chaotianjiao adds spiciness, and Qixingjiao adds both spiciness and color... Finally, pour hot oil on it and boil it. Exquisite gourmets will calculate the time to make chili peppers, and the aroma will be even more different. For people who don't eat spicy food, chili peppers provide not flavor, but a monotonous burning sensation. It is useless except for destroying the original taste of food. But Chongqing people know that only a small shop deep in an alley in this city can evoke a unique taste experience in their memories.

Different varieties of peppers contain capsaicin, dihydrocapsaicin, nordihydrocapsaicin, homocapsaicin and homodihydrocapsaicin, which are compounds that provide spicy taste. In different proportions, they present completely different intensity, fluctuation and duration. Similar to the subtle experience provided by tobacco, alcohol, coffee and other addictions, the taste of Chongqing has also undergone a fermentation that can only be understood but not described in the spicy palace built by peppers.

Chongqing people's love for beef also shows a similar dining style. Whether it is the crispy and sticky braised beef, the fragrant and fragrant beef in lantern shadow, the tasty sour soup beef, the sharp boiled beef or the hot and spicy beef hot pot, beef is the irreplaceable protagonist of these Chongqing delicacies and the hometown flavor that every Chongqing wanderer misses the most.

In areas with a traditional farming culture, people have a subtle aversion to eating beef. Whether in India under religious constraints, Japan before the Meiji Restoration, or China in the pre-industrial period, the value of cattle in terms of food is not worth mentioning compared to their contribution to farming. The "two catties of beef and a pot of good wine" of the green forest heroes in "Water Margin" can well represent the real life of the lower-class people who wandered on the edge of the imperial law in ancient China.

But in Chongqing, people cannot have a meal without beef. This is related to the social state of contentment and pursuit of pleasure created by the port city, and more to the mental state of being far away from the imperial power and having no taboos. Put aside the pretentious things for the time being, the first priority is to make it delicious.

No.3

In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Sichuan and Chongqing became the most stalemate areas in the offensive and fighting between the Manchu, Dashun, Dashi and Southern Ming dynasties. The people were exhausted by wars and massacres. According to statistics during the Shunzhi period, the population of the Sichuan Basin dropped sharply from 7.8 million during the Wanli period to less than 90,000. In order to replenish the population, in the early and middle Qing Dynasty, millions of immigrants from Hunan, Hubei, Guangdong, Jiangxi and southern Shaanxi entered the Sichuan Basin. This was one of the largest population migration events in Chinese history - Huguang filling Sichuan. It profoundly changed the language, folk customs, social environment and population structure of the Sichuan Basin, and fundamentally laid the foundation for the direction of Chongqing flavor.

As the most important transportation hub between Huguang and Sichuan Basin, a large number of people from Huguang came to Chongqing to make a living. The Huguang Guild Hall, which is still a landmark of Chongqing today, is a witness to this history. In Chongqing cuisine, this kind of inclusive details are more common: taro chicken, which is like Hunan-style chicken with taro added; fried eel, which may be a modified version of Hubei skinned eel; Qianjiang chicken offal, which is close to the traditional pickled pepper chicken offal in the mountainous areas of northern Guangxi; Chongqing-style grilled fish, which is exactly the same as Guangxi grilled fish. Although the origins of most dishes are no longer traceable, Chongqing people's tolerance has been deeply rooted in their genes. This is the basis for Chongqing cuisine to be popular everywhere, and it is also the confidence of millions of Chongqing people to go out and work hard, live in other places, and adapt to local diets.

What is dramatic is that Chongqing, which has always been on the edge of the Central Plains dynasty, has not been able to escape the great changes in modern China. In the 1870s, with the signing of the Sino-British Yantai Treaty, the Yangtze River waterway was opened by British colonists, and the British gained the right to station merchant ships in Chongqing. In 1891, the additional clauses of the Yantai Treaty came into effect, and Chongqing became the latest and most inland port city in China. The mountain city, known for its magic, has thus opened its most magical page.

The rough dock workers ate the old hot pot with red oil that never changed the base of the pot, and the bean curd rice without fresh vegetables and meat; the consuls and merchants from the great powers ate exquisite steaks, coffee and cakes. The two worlds that seemed to have never bordered each other suddenly collided in Chongqing, and also impacted the value system of the ancient city. Ten years after the opening of the port, a child named Li Shoumin was born in Chongqing. In his novel "The Legend of Swordsman in Shu Mountain" written under the pen name "Huanzhu Louzhu", those loyal ministers of the fallen Ming Dynasty, martial arts heroes, immortal couples in caves, beautiful ladies in the boudoir, swordsmen playing in the world, demons lurking in the valley, and the battle between good and evil, and the battle between heaven and man, are all vivid and vivid on paper.

It describes chivalrous heroes and demons, but behind the scenes is always the hometown where they were born and raised. It is no coincidence that modern Chinese martial arts was born in Chongqing.

Today, the simple yet delicate road structures, the colorful mountain buildings such as platforms, stilts, overlapping, and cliffs scattered throughout Chongqing were all formed in that era. In the flavors of Chongqing today, you can find the extremely delicate ice jelly made with rose jam; you can also find the Chen Mahua with a strong market flavor and a burst of carbohydrates and fats; you can find the Chongqing-style braised food with complete craftsmanship and complex production; and you can also find the simplest, most popular, and most common Fuling Zhacai.

This unity in contradictions makes Chongqing, a unique city, one of the most representative food sources in China; it also allows everyone who comes to Chongqing to find the taste they love.

-END-

At the end of 1937, Liang Shiqiu came to Chongqing, the temporary capital during the war of resistance against Japanese aggression. The following year, he lived in the "Yashe" in Beibei. In those years, he created most of the works in "Yashe Talks on Food", including Peking's roast duck, Tianjin's steamed buns, Shandong's pancakes, Henan's tile fish, Jiangsu's lion's head, Zhejiang's fried eel noodles, Fujian's Buddha Jumps Over the Wall... But there was no mention of Chongqing's local cuisine. Chongqing at that time was called the "temporary capital", but in fact, it was China's wartime capital and the Far East command center of the world anti-fascist war. The liaison agencies of the allies such as Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union in China, the exiled government of the Republic of Korea, and a large number of Chinese elites were stationed here.

Liang Shiqiu did not write about Chongqing cuisine, of course not because the hot pot was not fragrant and the pig intestines were not delicious. He tried hard to describe the various customs of North China, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, probably to express his attitude of not settling for the southwest and not forgetting his homeland after being occupied.

Even a mere scholar was like this, which shows the determination of the whole country to fight the war at that time.

Chongqing, which had experienced ups and downs for thousands of years in Chinese history, finally came to the forefront of the world stage in those eight years. It witnessed the reversal of this ill-fated country, and also epitomized the process of the Chinese people, who were walking dead in Lu Xun's works, finally regaining their spirits. The taste of Chongqing is not that simple.