Riding the wind of rebirth

As the dishes were served one by one, Ye Xin asked, "We've been in Shanghai for several years now, and we always hear them talking about 'Shanghai cuisine.' Do you know why Shanghai calls its own cuisine 'Shanghai cuisine'?"

Without Zhou Zhi's prompting, everyone had already started eating. Ye Xin and Zhang Xinyi never held back when Zhou Zhi was around, and Mai Xiaomiao was even more so.

Zhou Zhi smiled as he taught Mai Xiaomiao how to eat shrimp, saying, "Actually, the term 'bangcai' came first, and then the name 'benbangcai' came about. Most merchants in the Qing Dynasty existed in the form of merchant guilds, such as the Huizhou merchants and the Shanxi merchants. When these merchant guilds did business abroad, they would bring chefs from their hometowns and open guild halls."

"Is it like the Hunan Guild Hall we saw in Huili?" Mai Xiaomiao asked.

“Yes, these guild halls all have chef teams that prepare the delicacies of the merchants’ hometowns.” Zhou Zhi nodded: “After Shanghai opened as a treaty port in the late Qing Dynasty, merchants from all over the country flocked to Shanghai and brought this naming method into the catering industry, thus forming the concept of ‘guild cuisine’.”

"Foods from other places are called Hakka cuisine, food from foreign countries are called Fanbang cuisine, and local cuisine is naturally called Benbang cuisine."

"Like the development history of many cuisines, Shanghainese cuisine also started from the bottom. After Shanghai opened as a treaty port, dockworkers, rickshaw pullers and other laborers needed cheap and flavorful food to fill their stomachs, which gave rise to a cooking style that mainly used pig intestines, pig liver and river fish scraps as ingredients. During the Taiping Rebellion, after Li Xiucheng's troops captured Pudong, a large number of people from the Sanlintang area fled to the Shanghai concessions."

"The Sanlin area has a long-standing 'three-knife culture,' which refers to a kitchen knife, scissors, and a razor, representing the main livelihood industries of the people of Sanlin—catering, clothing manufacturing, and hairdressing."

"In order to make a living, the people of Sanlin who fled gradually carried forward the culture of the three knives in Shanghai. The kitchen knife, one of the three knives, used for making a living, together with the spatula, formed a catering guild called the 'Spatula Gang'."

"Through mutual assistance among fellow villagers, these people from Sanlin who made a living by shovels gradually formed the 'Sanlin Gang Food Stalls' in Shiliupu and formulated three rules: the first rule was that apprentices were limited to fellow villagers from Sanlin; the second rule was that the recipe for braised pork caramel coloring was a secret and not to be shared with outsiders; and the third rule was to collectively resist other gangs from lowering wages. In the early days, this almost formed an industry monopoly."

"This is it?" Zhang Xinyi picked up a piece of braised eel incredulously: "I remember you were good at making braised pork."

Mai Xiaomiao nodded repeatedly: "The braised pork knuckle is made with black pork from Lianhe Township and braised with chestnuts from Lianhe Township. It's so delicious! I always use the broth from the braised pork to mix with my rice."

"Little Miao, you need to be careful not to get fat," Ye Xin laughed, "because you have a boyfriend whose cooking skills are comparable to a chef."

"At that time, the Sanlin chefs had a lot of influence in Shanghai, mainly at Dexing Restaurant. Later, there were also Renhe Restaurant, Yijiachun, Dexing Restaurant, Tongtaixiang, and Laofan Restaurant. In order to distinguish them from restaurants of the Suzhou, Yangzhou, Anhui, and Sichuan cuisines, they all called them 'local cuisine'."

"However, the local Shanghai cuisine at that time was not well-known. Although the locals were all from Sanlin and were relatively united, their overall strength was not enough to compete with other regional cuisines. Apart from imitating the Suzhou and Yangzhou cuisines, they had not yet created their own unique signature dishes and were still stuck in the category of 'home-style local dishes.' "At that time, literati recorded what the local Shanghai restaurants looked like. They would never be like the Cantonese restaurants with their carved beams and painted rafters, gilded and inlaid with silver, and famous calligraphy and paintings everywhere. Instead, they had a few square tables and long benches, and the walls were just painted with whitewash. They were jokingly called 'bare-chested tables and bamboo chopsticks' by Shanghainese. Even if there were elegant seats on the second floor, there were actually not many private rooms. The ground floor was the territory of peddlers and vendors, playing drinking games and shouting."

"Isn't this just a hole-in-the-wall restaurant?" Mai Xiaomiao laughed.

"Wow, Xiao Miao is really something!" Zhang Xinyi praised. "You even know the term 'fly restaurant,' you're practically a Sichuan native!"

“Indeed, they were hole-in-the-wall restaurants.” Zhou Zhi laughed. “Back then, scholars recorded that the restaurants in this area were mostly derived from those in Ningbo. They were all very small, the so-called ‘home-style meals.’ At the west end of the Nanjing Road ball court, in what was commonly known as the restaurant alley, there were rows and rows of restaurants… Stewed pork hock, braised shredded pork, stir-fried pork intestines, braised mutton, stir-fried pork with vegetables, etc., and everything was served in small portions, very cheap. Ordinary dishes cost only three or four cents per person… The decor of these restaurants was quite shabby, but there were also car owners who went there. Many ordinary business employees preferred to patronize them because it was affordable and cheap.”

"Then how did it become like this?" Ye Xin pointed to the current decor and layout of the old restaurant.

"The true rise of Shanghainese cuisine occurred after the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan, during the period when Shanghai was isolated. Restaurants specializing in Shanghainese cuisine became popular in the foreign concessions and Chinese-controlled areas. This was due to two main reasons: first, the influx of refugees from surrounding areas significantly increased the number of 'local' diners, while Hakka diners fled the war to their hometowns or migrated west with the government, creating a balance; second, wartime resource controls made it difficult to obtain ingredients for other regional cuisines, while Shanghainese cuisine utilized relatively readily available local ingredients and its advantage of 'refining simple ingredients' allowed for the full utilization of pork offal and common river seafood."

"But most importantly, renowned chefs from the Suzhou and Anhui schools sought refuge in Shanghai and hid in the foreign concessions. In order to make a living, they integrated their techniques with those of Shanghai cuisine. This led to the great development of Shanghai cuisine."

"This is thanks to the two restaurants that struggled to survive at that time: Zhengxing Restaurant and Dexing Restaurant."

"During the war, Dexing Restaurant combined its signature dish, stir-fried clover, to create the famous dish 'clover rings'. Because the Japanese blocked the river and there was no seafood, the head chef of Dexing Restaurant asked his apprentices to cook more clover rings and bowls."

"The grass is alfalfa, which is wild, and the pen is pig intestines. Poor people can't afford meat, but they can afford these two things, and they became very popular. Even 'office workers in the French Concession came to eat them'."

"Because the chefs at Lao Zhengxing couldn't get curry and soybeans weren't on the list of controlled items, they created the famous Eight Treasure Spicy Sauce. They used leftover chicken gizzards, pork belly, and bamboo shoots, along with fermented bean paste brought to Shanghai by refugees from Sichuan, and stir-fried them together. It became their signature dish. Because it was cheap and flavorful, other local restaurants rushed to imitate it."

"The dish 'Zao Bo Tou' was originally called 'Zao Za Hui' (糟杂烩). During the isolated island period, the Japanese closed down butcher shops, so the chefs of Dexingguan and Laozhengxing restaurants sent their apprentices to the black market to buy pig offal. Two catties of rice could be exchanged for a set of large intestines, or 25 cents of legal tender could buy a catty. After buying it, they used five parts: liver, intestines, heart, lungs, and stomach, along with bamboo shoots and fried tofu. Because the ingredients were readily available, the process was simple, the taste was excellent, and it was very filling, it became a popular choice for laborers and office workers. Both Dexingguan and Laozhengxing restaurants saw booming sales." (End of Chapter)