Memories are strange disks that can not only record sounds and situations, but also smells and feelings. The French writer Alphonse Dude once recalled the journey on a French train: "I will never forget the ...... of my trip to Paris in a third-class carriage."It smells of pipe, brandy, garlic sausage, and wet straw. ”
If you have ever ridden the green train of the 10s of the 20th century, if you recall it today, the first thing that comes to mind is probably the smell of food in the carriage. "Beer, drinks, mineral water, peanuts, melon seeds, eight-treasure porridge......"The salesman pushes the cart and magically sells it back and forth in a crowded car with almost no place to stay. Passengers leisurely took out the food of their hometowns and began to eat, and the carriage was filled with the smell of various foods.
The journey on the Green Train is also a food journey. When the train passes through a larger station, passengers go to the platform to stretch their stiff bodies and breathe some air. At this time, the vendors on the platform push small carts and walk briskly from one train window to another, selling local specialties. Among them, there are Suzhou dried tofu, Wuxi pork ribs, Daokou roast chicken, Harbin red sausage, and the famous Texas grilled chicken. If there is a passenger in the carriage who is eating grilled chicken, it is simply hatred for the other passengers who are hungry and swallowing saliva.
Early platforms around the world seem to be similar. Food columnist Sharon Huggins' book The Flowing Table: A Journey to the World Railroad Diet describes stations in India as follows: "Vendors at larger stations would put food on paper plates and sell it to passengers through the train windows. This style of selling continues to this day, and is especially popular with second-class travelers. There are also a number of resident food stalls in the station, most of which are equipped to prepare hot food. Omelets, chai, coffee, plain potato chips, and biscuits (cookies) have long been popular at these stalls. ”
Those local specialties were taken by train to the north and south of the world, and finally became household names, and the stomach of passengers is the best advertisement. For example, Texas grilled chicken was born as early as the Kangxi period, and it really made it famous throughout the country by tourists from the south to the north. Another example is Jiaxing zongzi, the painter Ye Qianyu once wrote in his travelogue: "Travelers who have taken the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo train, passing by Jiaxing, will not forget to buy a string of zongzi and taste the famous food in the south of the Yangtze River." This affordable, filling regional cuisine has also become nationally known for being a popular among passengers.
Proust, in his book Reminiscences of the Past, mentions a soft scallop-shaped pastry called madeleine: "I broke a piece of madeleine cake and put it in the tea, ready to soak it and eat it, and the spoonful of tea with the dregs of the pastry touched my palate, and I immediately shook my whole body, and I noticed that there was a great change in me, and a pleasant pleasure spread throughout my body, and I felt otherworldly." The taste of the madeleine cake reminds the author of his childhood and serves as a mysterious clue to retrieving those lost moments.
Madeleine Cake was born in the mid-19th century in the city of Comersey in the Lorraine region of France, where a young maid named Madeleine Pommier made a cake according to the secret recipe left by her grandmother, and the guests who tasted it were full of praise.
Madeleine cake was originally a local delicacy, and the reason why it became popular all over France is inseparable from the railway. In the mid-nineteenth century, a railway was built from Paris to Strasbourg, which passed through the station of the city of Comersey. So many housewives dressed in local costumes and peddled large square baskets full of madeleines around their necks. When the train enters the station, they walk briskly, shouting loudly or shaking bells to greet guests.
Eventually, the madeleine cake became a major property in the city of Comersey, and its quality became better and better, but it was cheap, and the train brought the cake to Paris, where it became the custom of the aristocratic class to eat it after dinner. In this way, the madeleine cake gradually became an iconic dessert of French cuisine.
Writer Malcolm Gladwell said in "The Tipping Point" that for a product to detonate popularity, it often depends on one or a few charismatic key people. In fact, it can also be things that detonate popularity, such as trains and rail networks. With the improvement of the French railway network in the 19th century, it was not only the madeleine cake that became popular, but also those sweets that could only be eaten locally and were not well-known, and became famous all over the country with the word of mouth of passengers. Among them are the Canaré in Bordeaux, the Corissson in Provence, the Funudo cake in Limousin, the plum pie in Anjou, the macarons in Nancy, ......
A history of railways has also become a history of gastronomy.