Where do foreign tourists want to go when they come to Taiwan? Don’t be surprised, Taiwan’s night market has surpassed the Palace Museum and Taipei 101 building, becoming the first choice for tourists.
According to the "Survey of Tourists' Consumption and Trends in Taiwan in 1998" by the Tourism Bureau of the Ministry of Transport of Taiwan, the most frequent tourist attractions are
The first name is "Night Market", followed by "Taipei 101", "Forbidden City", "Sun Moon Lake" and "Chiang Cheng Memorial Hall"; more and more tourists linger
, Let the night market be the champion of Taiwan attractions for 3 consecutive years.
"The first level of tourism is to promote Taiwan’s beautiful mountains and rivers.
The second level is to integrate tourists into the lives of local people, and the night market is a sign of Taiwan’s common people’s culture.”
Last year, up to 73% of international tourists went to the night market.
Historical origin: carrying a pole and hawking along the street
Taiwan’s night market has a history of at least two hundred years and has gradually become a market due to the gathering of vendors. Since the Qing Dynasty, Han immigrants came from Fujian and Guangdong to cross the sea to reclaim the mountains and forests, which was very labor intensive.
In the early days of the people’s reclamation period, in order to pray for safety, temples were built to hold god welcoming games, crowds gathered, and snacks followed.
For example, Huaxi Street in Taipei became a city due to its proximity to Longshan Temple, and Keelung Miaokou Night Market also flourished due to Dianji Temple;
Tainan, the ancient capital that was first developed in Taiwan, is an important night market. There are more than 100 night markets in the county and city.
There are also many food stalls next to the Datianhou Temple and Wu Temple. For Tainanese, eating snacks next to the ancient temple seems to have a strong and reassuring taste shared with gods and Buddhas.
The stalls of the night market and the neatly planned food street of the department store are very different. There is hardly any design: next to the ready-to-wear noodle stall, next to the toys, Chinese medicine, and the fruit seller next to the stinky tofu... it's messy.
But this is the characteristic of the night market-a wide variety and surprises everywhere. Most people go to the night market without any special purpose. When they arrive at the night market, they decide what to eat and what to buy according to the situation. That is, "allow yourself to indulge in the power of the night market, the proliferation of goods, and the excessive excitement."
When shopping in the night market, you can buy new items from old stores. Sleeveless T-shirts are 100 yuan, and bags are 399 yuan. The materials and styles are similar to those of department stores, and the price is only one quarter; more novelties.
, Such as big doll-shaped mobile phone ornaments, sunglasses, imitation leather wallets, shiny hair accessories bracelet necklaces, etc. You can get the joy of "digging treasure" for a small amount of money.
The most important ceremony of visiting the night market-eating snacks
Night market culture is deeply rooted in people's lives. In addition to buying cheap goods, "eating" is the most important ritual for visiting the night market. Many night markets are famous because of their unique snacks.
""Snack", I always like the word: the word "small" contains small and small in weight, simple and simple in form, quick and easy action, easy, cheap, and atmosphere in terms of price. The kindness and casualness of the above...The beauty and uniqueness of Taiwanese snacks are all included in these two words."
Snacks that appeared in the Song Dynasty literati’s travel notes "Tokyo Menghualu" and "Menglianglu", the earliest recorded night market documents in China, such as mint cakes, bean cakes, fried chestnuts, almond cakes, sugar lychees, etc.; soups Lamb’s blood soup, clear snail soup, spicy noodle soup; side dishes such as jellyfish, fried liver, wild duck meat, minced chicken, etc. Some snacks are easy to read by name, and some foods are difficult to verify (such as "ghee snails" "),
But if you compare the diet patterns of today's night market in Taiwan with the snacks of the Song Dynasty a thousand years ago, the two still have a high continuity.
Snacks occupy a very unique position in the Chinese food culture system, but there is no precise definition of the scope.
"As long as the food falls between'rice' and'vegetables', it can be broadly classified as snacks." For example, steamed buns, dumplings, pasta, soup, porridge, pastries, etc., can all be called snacks.
Snacks can be the protagonist, full of food like "rice"; it can also be a supporting role, like "dishes", regarded as side food or snacks, supper; or "the main and vice-in-one", using noodles with lo-mei and soup.
Secondly, snacks are often given special cultural connotations, such as eating cut buns at the end of the tooth, eating rice cakes and dumplings (Yuanbao) during the New Year, eating dumplings during the Lantern Festival, eating run cakes during Qingming, and eating zongzi during the Dragon Boat Festival. Generally, families will only celebrate special festivals. These foods are prepared every day, but if you want to eat them at ordinary times, the night market that inherits the snack culture is available almost all year round.
For example, the reissued rice dumplings in Tainan and the run cakes in the Ningxia Night Market in Taipei are quite joyful and free from the constraints of the season.
Tracing the origin of Taiwanese snacks-Fujian cuisine and soup
Snacks may be a "facility" in Chinese food culture, because they are not as complicated as Chinese dishes; but some people believe that snacks should be derived from the "Fujian" among the eight major Chinese cuisines.
"There are many soups in Fujian cuisine." Keelung cultural and historical worker Cao Mingzong said that there are many seafood soups in Taiwanese snacks. For example, fish soup is made with mackerel, swordfish, eels, sharks, larvae, etc. There are also squids. Soup, Scallop Soup, Shrimp Soup, Crab Soup, etc.
This is related to the abundance of seafood in Taiwan, and also to the fact that in the early years, most of the Han immigrants came from the coast of Fujian and Guangdong, and were ruled by maritime countries such as Spain and Japan, so there are many seafood snacks.
Taking the mullet, which was caught in a large amount in the early years, Lian Heng described its deliciousness in the "General History of Taiwan": "The eggs of a mullet are formed into a single child. They are slightly divided into two, which are as long as a foot and weigh more than ten taels. It can be stored for a long time when it is salted and dried. It can be stored for a long time by pressing it with a stone. It can be stored for a long time. When eating, it is squeezed and roasted. The skin cells are not over-scorched. It is sliced into thin slices.
Mullet has always been a famous dish in Taiwanese cuisine, but the Liuhe Night Market in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan is also sold as a snack.
As the coastal ports of Keelung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung have a wide variety of catches, fish paste products have become an important snack. Before cooking, the fish is beaten into a paste, and starch is added to knead it into noodles, which is called "fish noodles." Tainan's traditional handmade fish noodles are made with "dog mother fish", which is of low economic value. Put it in boiling water for a while and it will be cooked, and then topped with a little gravy sesame oil to enhance the flavor, and serve with hot green vegetables and seaweed slices.
Deep-fried fish paste is eaten in Japan and is called "tempura", while in Taiwan it is called "sweet not spicy". Whether it is tempura or sweet or spicy, it is a Japanese loanword derived from the Portuguese word tempura. The Portuguese introduced this deep-fried cuisine to Japan in the 16th century, and Japan introduced it to Taiwan.
Keelung Miaokou Booth No. 16 is the first stall in Taiwan to sell tempura. It mostly uses small sharks and conger eels that are abundant in Keelung, and adds cornstarch, sugar, and miso to make fish paste. Put the beaten fish paste in an ice bucket to keep it low temperature, so that the Q is firm and firm. When the customer orders, the chef kneads them into slices and fries them in a boiling oil pan. Remove them when they are golden and cut them into pieces. Strips. Dip it with sweet and spicy sauce and marinate cucumbers to make it more refreshing.
Two legends of oyster fried, two ways to eat meat dumplings
In 2007, the Department of Commerce of the Ministry of Economic Affairs hosted the "No. 1 Voting Event for Foreigners' Taiwanese Food Ranking". As a result, the number one Taiwanese snack among foreign friends was oyster fried.
Regarding the origin of oyster fried, some people say that it originated from the southern Fujian and Chaozhou snacks-fried oysters, but Tainanese also have their own legends.
Literature and historian Wang Haoyi pointed out in "Slow Food City-The Complete Record of Tainan Snacks" that Zheng Chenggong led an army to land in Tainan in 1661 and during the battle with the Dutch army, he obtained local materials due to insufficient food. It coincides with the 5th day of the lunar calendar. It is necessary to worship the god of water, Quyuan, but there is no rice to make rice dumplings. I had to beaten with sweet potato flour and fry it with bean sprouts, shrimps and other seafood to make cakes instead of zongzi as a sacrifice. Jian (Shi Chai)" is the predecessor of oyster fried.
This flavor was later passed back to the coastal areas of Fujian by Zheng Chenggong's soldiers. The locals called it "Oyster Fried" and it was eaten in Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou. Lin Yutang, a humorist who was originally from Longxi, Zhangzhou, and Tan Kah Kee, a Malaysian leader of overseas Chinese who lived in Xiamen, love this taste and regard it as a great enjoyment of life.
The method of frying oysters in Taiwan is to put the oysters on a large pot and fry them, add eggs, cabbage (in winter, put chrysanthemum), stir, and then pour in water made of sweet potato flour, and pour the sauce on it. table. Today, from Keelung in the north, to Kenting in the south, there are oysters fried. Everyone can't figure out where the original place is.
What's interesting is that many traditional snacks are spread out due to local cultural differences, and new production methods will be derived, resulting in "North-South differences."
For example, the meatballs are made of sweet potato flour, wrapped in ground meat made of pork hind legs, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shoots and other ingredients, steamed and then fried, topped with sweet and sour sauce. The deep-fried meatballs are "Changhua Meatballs"; the "Pingtung meatballs" are only steamed. It is impossible to tell who created them.
Or like meat dumplings, there are differences between the north and the south. The "Dinggang rice dumpling" in the north is first fried with soaked rice, then wrapped in bamboo leaves, filled with various ingredients, and then steamed; the "Xiagang rice dumpling" in the south is directly wrapped in bamboo leaves. After filling, the water is boiled until fully cooked, and the taste and flavor of the two are different.
Taiwanese snacks "funny"-pig blood cake
Taiwan, where foreign cultures are greatly integrated, has many innovative snacks, such as the weird name "coffin board". The method is to put thick slices of toast into a frying pan, then dig out the skin and part of the bread core to turn into a hollow box. , And then inject the stuffing made from chicken liver, peas, potato, shrimp, flower sticks and other broth stewed, and then cover the bread cover, much like the current French bread soup.
For more than 50 years, when the owner of the southern food stall at the front desk introduced this ingenious dim sum, because it resembled a "coffin" and named it "coffin board," it really became famous.
In 2009, a British travel website ranked pig blood cake as the top of the "Top 10 Weird Foods in the World". In September this year, the media reported that the US Department of Agriculture banned the sale of pig blood cake on the grounds of "unhygienic production procedures." When I returned to Taiwan, I asked snack lovers to point out that this was "cultural discrimination," but later discovered that it was a misunderstanding.
However, there are indeed foreign friends who saw snacks made from animal offal and blood at the night market in Taiwan, and they were surprised but retreated. For example, the mystery guest and Japanese writer Yuka Aoki, who served as the night market reviewer of the Tourism Bureau, often took his Japanese friends to the night market, because he walked around like a maze, which is fun to eat and play, but Japanese people generally don’t dare to eat animal offal. Snacks made with limbs, such as chicken feet, chicken liver, pig blood, large intestine, etc.
Whether it is pig blood cake or rice blood cake, they are all rice cakes made of glutinous rice and animal blood (pig, duck, chicken). Because duck meat nourishes yin and insufficiency, farmers in the past killed ducks based on the virtue of thrift and couldn’t bear it. Duck blood is discarded, so rice and duck blood are served in a food container, steamed and eaten with sauce, and then spread, and gradually become a commoner’s snack.
However, the price of duck meat is high and the feeding time is time-consuming. The supply of duck blood is in short supply, and chicken blood is not easy to coagulate. So pig blood is gradually replaced by duck blood, becoming "pig blood cake." The way to eat it now is to steam the pork blood cake, dip it in sweet and spicy sauce, coat it with peanut powder, and sprinkle it with coriander. It is a popular snack at night markets.
According to the Ming Dynasty "Compendium of Materia Medica", the smell of pig blood was "salty, flat, and non-toxic", and it was mainly used for "blood production, treatment of ventral gas (that is, stroke, abdominal distension), and overseas miasma."
In the book "Taiwan Taste", the food writer Jiao Tong studied the origin of pig blood soup. Interestingly, he found that Mr. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of Western medicine, once praised pig blood: "It contains only a lot of iron, and it is the supreme quality of replenishing the body. After illness, postpartum and all people with blood thinness, they used to refine it. Iron-based treatments are now treated with pig blood. What the Chinese people eat is not particularly savage and savage, and it is very suitable for science and health."
In Jiao Tong's eyes, fresh pig blood soup is a creative snack for the common people in Taiwan: "Pig blood is ruddy in color, soft, and meticulous, and it is seasoned ingeniously to become a delicacy."
It is this taste of "national food" that has made many food writers sigh "Fat to the depths without complaint "oil". He often serves as the highest record of various food reviewers and the famous blog food writer Xu Tianlin. It is a night of continuous eating. 18 night market snacks!
From "Great Fusion" to "Great Furnace"
Some people say that the memory of food is difficult to be replaced by time, because it is a tradition that sticks to the old taste, and also because it is a kind of "consideration." For example, the writer Shu Guozhi of "Snack Master" described the night market owner's words, "He still opens in the middle of the night. With a hot big pot of rice noodle soup, this is a kind of willingness to take care of others."
Taiwanese snacks are in the long river of Chinese food culture. Due to the convergence of food from all sides, the wisdom of life of the people is added, and the taste is more abundant. After a hundred years of inheritance, the face of night market snacks has long been "shifting in time and space", from "all parties and one hegemony" to "big melting furnace": Tainan danzi noodles entered and occupied Huaxi Street, Chiayi chicken rice, black sausage, and transferred to Taipei Shilin Night Market; Kaohsiung Gangshan Beef Noodles can be eaten everywhere. The variety and variety makes the night market unstoppable.
It is true that snacks are not only available at night markets, but the cultural meaning of night markets makes eating snacks at night markets meaningful; and in this seemingly disorderly but actually the most reasonable and lively space, you can spend time and energy and experience the night without restraint. The freedom, liberation, and the fragrance of the lips and teeth are the reasons why the night market gathers popularity and attracts people like a pilgrimage.
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