China's countless local snacks or snacks are either born out of the palace or made by the people. Chaoshan snacks, almost all of which are folk original, have been circulated among the people. This is determined by the fact that Chaoshan is located in the "corner of the country at the end of the province" in history, far from the national political center, the commercial society formed late and the social wealth was not high. Here are some Chaoshan snacks in hand: Xitianxiang Oyster Roast, Goose Goose, Elder Sister's Pig's Foot Rice, and Mother's Gong Zongqiu. Which name is not simple and straightforward, and the local flavor is tangy. Throughout Chaoshan snacks, there are roughly three channels for their formation.

1. Hail to God

With the hot and humid climate along the Chaoshan coast, people are prone to get sick. In addition, offshore operations are risky, labor and harvest are out of proportion, and there are many unexpected factors. When people can't predict their own destiny, they often pin their hopes on the blessing of the gods. In addition, in the era of material scarcity, people can also give themselves a reason to improve their lives with the help of worship activities. Therefore, the old Chaoshan folk custom has the characteristics of many seasons and many gods. Many Chaoshan snacks were originally sacrificial offerings, such as "colored head fruit" (meaning "colored head") and "sweet fruit" in the Spring Festival, "Mianxian" (meaning "longevity") in Mazu's birthday, "Zongqiu" in the Dragon Boat Festival and "moon cake" in the Mid-Autumn Festival. As the saying goes, "when the season is ripe, it is mature."

Step 2 supplement snacks for dinner

Unlike Cantonese dim sum, these Chaoshan snacks are refreshments for the leisure class to pass the time, but snacks for rural towns to work hard to satisfy their hunger. Hipsters are used to eating porridge, for one thing, there was not enough food earlier, and for another, the climate was natural. People who do rough work can't stand a sweat after eating several bowls of porridge in the morning. They were hungry before dinner. At this time, meeting a food stall porter coming across the street is like finding a savior. He can use a few cents to supplement his physical strength and meet his temporary needs. At that time, there were grass cakes (bean jelly), bean curd and various sweet soups in summer to cool off the heat. There are hot beef ball soup, leek and water chestnut in winter. You don't need a spoon to eat hay Pick up a shallow bowl, spin it around the bowl with your mouth and wipe your mouth with a cloth. Cool! Beef balls were originally Hakka snacks. After Shantou opened its port, mountain products went abroad, foreign goods entered the mountains, and the water traffic was busy. The Handi area of Shantou used to be the berth of Hakka cargo ships, and many Hakka cargo ships stopped there for the night. In the evening, a Hakka rowed a boat and sold beef ball soup as a snack to the cargo ship owner. Later, beef balls were reformed and innovated by Chaoshan people, and kway teow was added to the soup to become beef ball kway teow, which is still a favorite snack of Chaoshan people until now. Later, fish balls, shrimp balls, cuttlefish balls, pork balls and so on were cloned, creating the "meatball series" in Chaoshan. The "Xinxing Street Beef Ball" in "Chinese Famous Snacks" is made by Shantou people. Now when it comes to beef balls, everyone thinks it's a tide, but it's actually a product of the utility of hipsters. The ingenuity of hipsters is vividly displayed in a small ball.

3. Home-cooked snacks

The most delicious snacks are all kinds of home-cooked dishes made by Chaoshan clever wives to alleviate children's hunger. Such as pumpkin, autumn melon and tomato. In the old society, children clamored for "cakes" before the season, so the daughter-in-law at home had to find a way to send these greedy children away. Some farmers in Chaoshan rural areas have sweet potato powder. They picked the fruits and vegetables grown in their own fields, mixed them together and fried them in oil, which became a unique snack. When I was a child, I ate the "cold porridge" cooked by my grandmother with sweet potato powder mixed with cold porridge for the night. This is really unique.

There is a snack called "pig's head zongzi", which is said to be made unintentionally by Chenghai people. In the early years, Chenghai countryside had the custom of having a Lantern Festival pig race. Every seafood family has to kill pigs to worship their ancestors. After a ancestor worship, the rest of the pig's head could not be eaten for a while, so they chopped the pig's head meat and made it into "pig's head jiaozi" with seasoning, which was particularly delicious. So it spread and became a flavor snack.

Chaoshan snacks entered the market as commodities in the 1920s and 1930s, which was the heyday of Shantou's commercial economy. At that time, the small park was crowded with shops, restaurants and hotels, forming a typical consumer market. As a kind of food, Chaoshan snacks can naturally find their own place here, such as the time-honored Aixi Regan Noodles, delicious snacks, Xitianxiang oyster sauce and Malaogong dumplings, all of which entered the small park at that time. As mentioned above, snacks have more cultural significance in diet, so they can easily become symbols of local culture and are deeply imprinted in people's minds. Have you found that when many hipsters living overseas arrive in Shantou, the first thing they do is to go straight to the small park and have a delicious Chaoshan snack in the old snack bar, so as to overcome the lingering homesickness.

Chaoshan snacks are rooted in the people. They are not attached to officialdom culture and scholar-bureaucrat culture. Since their birth, they have spread among the people in a natural manner, which conforms to the natural law of natural selection. Therefore, we can taste so many local snacks now.

Second, the materials are simple and the taste is unique.

Guangdong dim sum is famous for its foreign flavor, such as cream buns, egg tarts and barbecued pork buns. Shanghai snacks are famous for seafood, such as crab roe soup packets and minced fish spring rolls. Northern snacks are mainly pasta. Chaoshan snacks are nothing without rice. A word "Guo" in Chaoshan dialect summarizes the main raw materials of Chaoshan snacks. In Chaoshan Dictionary, the word "fruit" is interpreted as a kind of fruit with rice flour as the skin and stuffing. Leek buns are called "rice-free buns" because the skin is sweet potato powder and the stuffing is vegetables, which shows the position of rice in snacks. Earlier, the ancestors of Chaoshan moved south from the Central Plains to Chaoshan. According to the custom of ancestral home, pasta is a fruit for ancestor worship, and wheat is not produced in the south, so rice can only be used as fruit. This is the origin of "country". Later, the raw materials and practices of sacrificial food continued to innovate and develop, and people called all sacrificial bags "pots". It's amazing that hipsters use rice as a snack. It can be a kind of raw material that is both skin and stuffing-"Bao Fan". If there is a snack called "Guo Tao", it is not only boring, but also delicious with glutinous rice flour as the skin and glutinous rice as the stuffing.