When the topic of food is mentioned, we will think of a family gathering together to taste a variety of delicious food. So, do you know what the ancients ate every day, and how they processed food and enjoyed it? Let's find out the answers to these questions in kanji.
First, the use of primitive tools and the initial processing of grains.
China has been a traditional agricultural country since ancient times, and the cultivation of crops has a long history in China. As early as the early Neolithic period, our ancestors began to cultivate "millet" and "rice".
Millet is commonly known as "millet" in northern China, and is called "millet" after peeling, which is an annual herbaceous plant, and the seeds are round or oval small grains. The character "millet" is shown in the figure below. The word "millet" in the oracle bone inscription is a pictogram, like a seedling with many seeds on it, and some of the seeds have fallen off. The small seal writing of the word "millet" has become a morphophonetic character, which is composed of two parts, the upper part is the word "halogen" to indicate the pronunciation, and the lower part is the word "rice" to indicate that millet is a crop. The regular script replaced "halogen" with "west", so the character "su" was finally framed as a combination of "west" and "rice". The original meaning of "millet" refers to "millet", because the grain is very small, so it also extends to mean very small, such as "a millet in the sea".
"Rice" is one of the important food crops for human beings, and it is called rice or rice after being hulled. The evolution of the character "rice" is shown in the figure below, it is a morphophonic and ideographic character, the left "hemu bian" indicates that it is a crop, and the right "scoop (yǎo)" character indicates pronunciation, and also has a semantic function. The "爫 (claw prefix)" above the word "scoop" means hand, and the "mortar" below is a pictograph, which is based on the pictogram of a bowl-shaped utensil hewn out of stone, and "mortar" is an ancient rice pounding utensil.
The ancients put millet or rice in a mortar, and held the "pestle (ancient word for 'noon')" in both hands to smash it vigorously in order to remove the hard shell of the grain and pound out the edible grain, this process is called "舂", and the evolution of the word "舂" is shown below. The process of taking out the rice in the mortar by hand is called "scooping", so the original meaning of "scooping" is "taking out", such as "scooping water". The ancients designed the word "rice" as a combination of "he" and "scoop", which not only used "scoop" to indicate its pronunciation, but also indicated the process of processing rice into rice.
The ancients would put the rice in a round clay pot with a conical lid on top to wait for consumption, so that a new Chinese character was coined - "food". Its regular script is based on the small seal glyph, the glyph above the word "food" indicates the lid of the rice jar, and the "liang" below is based on the pottery pictogram in the shape of the word "bean".
The word "食" is also a side word, and the simplified word "饣" next to the word "food" is developed according to the cursive writing of the word "food". The words next to the word "饣" are all related to food, such as "cooking, rice, drinking, feeding, cake" and so on. "Cooking, rice, feeding, and cake" are phonetic characters. The original meaning of "cooking" is to cook food until it is cooked well. The word "drink" is a word that will be meaningful, its evolution process is as follows, the original meaning is drinking, the lower left corner of the word "drink" in the oracle bone inscription and the golden inscription is a "unitary" word, indicating the jar of wine, and the right side is a person who is bending down and opening his mouth to drink. The small seal writing of the word "drink" has become standardized, the upper left corner has become the word "today" (indicating pronunciation), the lower left corner is still a "unitary", and the right side has become a "owed" word, and later the left "today" and "unitary" merged into the word "food", after this change, the word "drink" finally became the Chinese character next to the word food.
2. The origin of the "culinary kingdom".
China is known as the "Kingdom of Cooking", and the origin of cooking in China is very early, and there are many ways and types. In fact, China's ancient planting industry is relatively developed and animal husbandry and breeding industry are relatively backward, so the type of food is relatively single, so the formation of traditional food customs with Chinese characteristics, that is, plant ingredients are the mainstay, the staple food is grains, and the supplementary food is vegetables, plus a small amount of meat. In ancient times, eating meat was a luxury, and ordinary people could only have a little meat during the New Year and festivals, while those high-ranking princes and nobles could often eat meat, so in ancient times, "meat eaters" were used to describe people in power. In ancient China, when food was relatively scarce, the working people in China could only make a fuss about the processing methods of ingredients, so they produced a kaleidoscopic variety of cooking methods and formed various cuisines with local characteristics.
We can find the mystery of how ancient working people cooked food by analyzing many Chinese characters with the word "next to fire". The word "burn" is a huiyi word, the top is the word "moon (a variation of the word meat)", and the bottom is the word "fire", the original meaning of "burn" is to skewer meat on the fire to smoke or grill, and later extended to mean burning. In ancient cooking, "searing" was a relatively simple and ancient method, and it was only suitable for processed meats.
When the ancient ancestors learned to make and use pottery, a new cooking method emerged - "boiling". The small seal writing of the character "boil" consists of three parts, the middle "鬲 (lì)" is a cooking vessel for cooking rice, and the fire can be burned below, it is a rice pot with three legs; The curves on both sides of the word "鬲" resembling the shape of the word "bow" represent boiling steam; The "者" above was originally an ancient character for "槠 (pronounced zhū, tree name)", which indicates pronunciation in the character "boiled" (replacing the "者" on the word "boil" with "rice" on the word "boiling" in the small seal becomes the ancient character for "porridge"). It can be seen from the small seal writing of the word "boil" that our ancestors have mastered the steaming method a long time ago, and the food processed in this way tastes better and is more conducive to digestion. The reason why the character "灬" has become its current appearance is because its small seal writing method is more cumbersome, and the ancients merged the "鬲 (lì)" below it and the curved pens on both sides to form "灬", indicating that there must be "fire" when cooking rice, so the word "boiling" became the current appearance and became a pure shape and sound character.
Before the Wei and Jin dynasties, people mainly used cooking utensils to boil water and cook food by steaming or boiling, and later with the popularization of metal cooking utensils and the maturity of oil extraction technology, the ancients mastered the method of cooking food with vegetable oil and animal oil, such as "frying, stir-frying, cooking, frying" and other cooking skills were only after the Wei and Jin dynasties.
3. The ancients' preference for food.
Chinese characters not only tell us how the ancients cooked, but also reflect their preferences for certain foods. From the word "Xian" (as shown below), we can understand that "fish" and "sheep" were the two favorite meals of the ancients. At first glance, the word "Xian" gives us the first feeling that the ancients used the taste of fish and sheep to describe the deliciousness of food, which is a knowing word. However, in "Shuowen Jie Zi", the interpretation of "Xian" is the shape and sound character, which originally denoted a kind of fish produced in the northeast of China. In the word "Xian", the character "fish" on the left serves as a side to express meaning, and the character "sheep" on the right is a simplification of the character "羴 (shān)", which is next to the sound in the character "Xian". No matter which explanation is more in line with the original intention of the ancients, we can feel the preference of the ancients for fish from the word "fresh".
As for "sheep", the ancients spoke more highly of it, and the reason can be found in the words "shame, lamb, beauty, soup" and so on. The word "shame" is shown in the figure below, and the left side of the oracle bone inscription is "sheep", and the right side is "and (the original meaning is the right hand of a person)", and the two parts together indicate the meaning of holding mutton and offering it. Therefore, the original meaning of "shame" is to make offerings, which shows that sheep have been a delicious food given to each other by people since ancient times in order to communicate their feelings. The word "lamb" is also a word, the original meaning is to roast sheep on the fire, the ancients liked to put the lamb on the fire to roast, and the big sheep in the pot to cook, so, "lamb" is also extended to "lamb".
The original meaning of the word "soup" is a thick soup mixed with five flavors, which generally refers to the thick juice boiled with food, the word "soup" is a "lamb" at the top, and the word "beauty" is at the bottom, which means that the soup stewed should be a fat lamb in a way that knows, which shows that the sheep occupies an important position in the recipes of the ancients. In addition, in the minds of the ancients, "sheep" is also a symbol of auspiciousness and kindness, such as "auspicious, beautiful, good" and other words have the word "sheep", they are all praise words representing happiness and beauty. The original meaning of the word "beauty" is beautiful and beautiful. As shown in the figure below, from the glyph, this character looks like a person dancing with a sheep's horn mask, and now this kind of mask dance is still popular in Gansu and other places in China, because the ancients took dance as beauty, so they used pictograms to create the word "beauty".
Different foods produce different flavors, and different cooking methods can make a difference in food. For thousands of years, we have followed the methods of processing and cooking food taught to us by our ancestors, forming traditional food styles and eating habits, which have silently influenced every Chinese, so much so that they have become a part of Chinese culture.