"In Nanjing, almost every street has a duck restaurant, which also sells salted geese." This is a sentence written by Xue Bing, a Nanjing writer, in his food monograph "Hungry for Food". Yan Zhengyi, a food expert and general manager of Nanjing Anleyuan Restaurant, told the Zijinshan reporter, "The processing method of salted duck and salted goose is the same. In the 1980 s, we also sold roast geese and salted geese in Anyuan, as long as we could get the goods. " Before the 1980s, it was a planned economy. How many ducks and geese are provided by the commercial department to Nanjing Catering Company, and how many ducks and geese can be sold in restaurants and braised dishes shops? In addition to Nanjing's time-honored brand selling salted geese, street stalls in Nanjing also sell salted geese.
In addition, in the past, there was a folk saying that "the poor eat geese and the rich eat ducks" and "the family has a thousand kilograms of grain and does not raise a flat mouth king (referring to ducks)". As long as geese are fed grass, they belong to "looking up to heaven" culture, but duck culture is different. It is important to feed concentrated food. Because geese are cheaper than ducks, in the 1980s, some braised dishes stalls in Nanjing used salted geese as salted ducks.
Why does Nanjing market gradually stop selling salted geese? Yan said that the supply of geese is not as good as that of ducks. Shi Zhendan, deputy director of the Animal Husbandry Research Institute of Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told the reporter that Yangzhou Goose and Taizhou Goose, which are raised in Jiangsu in large quantities, only lay about 50 eggs throughout the year, and lay eggs from June 10 to April of the following year.
Because no eggs are laid in summer, there are no young geese, which eventually leads to a small number of geese, and geese have extremely high requirements for feeding environment. For many reasons, the price of goose is higher than that of duck and chicken. "Goose production is low, and the supply is not enough, so it is impossible to form a consumption trend." Shi Zhendan remembers that when he was a college student in Nanjing in the 1980s, he could still buy salted geese at the Nanjing State-run pot-stewed restaurant next to Dahua Cinema. When he came back from studying in Nanjing, he could only buy salted duck.