Or so-called small seafood
Jiangnan is really the place with the deepest cultural heritage. Before the fishing moratorium, I was invited to the Hilton Ningbo Dongqian Lake Huamao Hotel on the coast of the East China Sea. Qianhu Pavilion Chinese Restaurant had already prepared a dinner, and the theme was: or so-called spring.
This was originally a poem by Mr. Yu Guangzhong describing Xiamen, but it did not prevent the restaurant's chef, Fenghua chef Wang Pingjie, who was from the same hometown as Jiang Gong, from cooking the local flavor that made him talk about it in detail with the proud small seafood of the East China Sea.
From the South China Sea to the East China Sea, many seafood products have had "promotions in academic qualifications" and leaps in value. As a "mountain man" who has lived in Lingnan for a long time, I have been a bystander in the dispute over the flavor of the sea. In fact, it is a consensus in the circle that the hairtail and yellow plum head in the East China Sea are better than those in the South China Sea, but the complex nurtured by the taste always makes people look forward to and watch.
I thought that the most magnificent seafood wave in the last century was the fresh seafood led by Cantonese cuisine, but in the new century, the new seafood trend is the small seafood fashion led by Zhejiang catering. After watching the food documentary "Small Seafood" shot by a local TV station, I couldn't help but sigh: It seems that I have to try a new way of eating.
Before Master Wang's delicacies were served, the menu alone made me daydream -
Grilled cuttlefish, chopped crab, jumping shrimp, monkfish, flower seed fish, hairtail jelly, yellow clam crab, moldy fish, Qianhu snails and sixteen pieces, just the introduction of the ingredients is enough to arouse my imagination, which is completely different from the two sides of the Pearl River where I often linger and drink.
I once had a kind of river shrimp with huge claws in Nansha District, Guangzhou. Locals call it "drum shrimp". The cooking method is the common Cantonese cuisine of blanching. This evening, I ate this kind of shrimp again at the Dongqian Lake. It was renamed "jumping shrimp" and the cooking method was home-cooked with rich soup.
When the soup was served, I wondered if it was the pepper pork tripe soup common in Cantonese cuisine? After a few sips, I found that the pepper pork tripe soup base was indeed fake, but there was also monkfish fish belly in it. Looking back on the past, the monkfish I ate in Shanwei area was mostly stewed with pickled cabbage.
It is also common in Guangdong to steam fresh fish with salted fish, which is called "life and death love" or "human ghost love". There was a saying in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River that "the shad comes and the bream goes". Now that wild shad is nowhere to be found, bream has become a rare commodity. It is hard to say who borrowed from whose method to steam fresh bream with plum-flavored salted fish made by three exposures to the sun. I just think that the ancients thought bream was a low-grade product. It is really not as good as it used to be!
The family-inherited dish that Master Wang personally performed in front of the opposite sex is called "flower seed fish". After listening to the introduction, I finally realized that it was actually the horse friend fish that I photographed and tasted many times this year. Shandong Laozhang's Spanish mackerel took advantage of the spring to swim into the Sichuan Wu on the banks of the Huangpu River, and then became pregnant and became a once-in-a-lifetime flower seed fish on the banks of Dongqian Lake.
The method of home-cooking should come from Master Wang's muscle memory. The so-called "sixteen pieces" is a kind of bream similar to the golden drum fish on the coast of Guangdong. I have eaten many steamed tangerine peel methods, and it is naturally home-cooked when it falls into Master Wang's hands.
This is not "Silent Spring", but a joyous feast. Even Mr. Jin Yong's son and a world-class pianist were invited to the scene. The so-called small seafood is ambitious. I wish Dongqian Lake a fortune.