China News Agency, Fujian Yongding, March 7th, title: Yongding Whole Cattle Banquet: "Yongding returns without eating cattle"
Author Zhang Jinchuan Liao Zhenmei Huang Yuangui
"Hakka ancestral land" Yongding District, Longyan City, Fujian Province, has a history of eating cattle for hundreds of years.
Local people are good at cooking cattle, and one cow can cook hundreds of delicacies.
"Yongding Whole Beef Feast" includes braised beef steak, fried beef brisket, salt and pepper beef hooves, stir-fried beef crispy, yellow braised oxtail, bullwhip and Morinda officinalis soup, beef soup, taro bun , beef balls and other 10 beef series dishes.
Cai Lan, a famous gourmet, once praised the Hakka cuisine represented by "Yongding Quanniu Banquet", which has exquisite materials, unique craftsmanship, and ingenious production, which is completely comparable to the eight major Chinese cuisines and is not inferior.
According to records, since the establishment of Yongding County in the 14th year of Chenghua in the Ming Dynasty, the two towns of Xiayang and Hukeng in Yongding, which are located at the junction of Fujian and Guangdong, have had active bull market transactions; live cattle that have not been sold are often sold to locals cheaply. Fresh beef is on the market around 1:00 p.m., and over time, a popular local cattle-eating culture has been formed.
"It's not easy to make beef balls, and it's a physical effort." Shen Bo, executive vice president of the Tulou Hakka Food Association in Yongding District, told a reporter from China News Agency that the fresh beef shoulder meat was beaten into a puree with a 6-jin hammer, and then cassava flour was added. Mix it with salt and knead it into balls. It needs to be beaten more than 10,000 times, which lasts for forty to fifty minutes.
Yongding beef balls are well-known both at home and abroad for their crisp taste and not greasy taste, and have also won the Special Gold Award in the Hakka Cuisine Competition on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
However, what is little known is that Yongding beef balls are also related to the construction of earth buildings.
Yongding is one of the core areas of the world cultural heritage "Fujian Tulou", and is known as the "Hometown of Tulou".
In ancient times, building the rammed earth wall of an earth building was the most labor-intensive. The owner of the building would buy the best beef, beat the beef to make meatballs as the master rammed the wall, and served the soup with noodles to comfort the master ramming the wall.
The master worked harder as he ate the crispy and sweet beef balls.
In Shen Bo’s view, Yongding is a purely Hakka settlement. The Hakka people’s character of hard work and hard work is in line with the handmade beef balls.
Yongding is also a key hometown of overseas Chinese in Fujian.
According to the local people, as early as the beginning of the 20th century, an overseas Chinese returned to Yongding to visit relatives.
Hearing that he is used to eating steaks, people from his hometown specially invited the best chefs in the city to make steaks, but the people from his hometown couldn’t tell the difference between this steak and that steak.
After eating, the overseas Chinese praised that the hometown steak is more delicious than the Western-style steak.
The braised steak has been integrated into the good customs of Hakka people's hospitality, and has become a famous dish in the "Yongding Quanniu Banquet".
The "Yongding Quanniu Banquet" is full of rich Hakka cultural connotations, and there are many gourmet stories with rich Chinese flavors.
"The nostalgic memories of relatives are the delicacies of hometown." The 65-year-old Li Fuxiang is a local overseas Chinese family member. Since his grandfather went to Singapore, Indonesia and other places to run pharmacies, his clan has spread all over Southeast Asian countries.
In an interview with reporters, he recalled that when he went to Indonesia to visit his uncle in 2016, his uncle specially asked him to bring delicacies from his hometown before the trip. "I brought him 40 salt and pepper beef hoofs in one go."
Salt and pepper beef hoof is a must-have dish for Hakka travelers in Yongding when they go out to see off.
According to legend, Hu Wenhu, a famous overseas Chinese leader whose ancestral home is Yongding, accompanied his parents to Nanyang when he was a child. On the eve of going to Nanyang with his parents, his grandmother specially made braised beef hooves for him to nourish his feet.
Later, he became a well-known overseas Chinese industrialist in Nanyang, and his career flourished like a wind under his hooves. Whenever he thought of his hometown, he asked the chef to cook braised beef hooves with Nanyang pepper and salt to relieve his homesickness.
The salt-and-pepper beef hooves were passed back to the hometown, making a gourmet story.
"There is a food street in Sumatra, Indonesia, and many of them are Yongding beef food." Li Fuxiang, who often visits relatives abroad, found that Southeast Asia has a special liking for Yongding food.
He said that the Hakka people are spread all over the world, and the Hakka on the tip of the tongue is entrusted with the nostalgia and friendship of overseas folks.
On the basis of inheriting the traditional beef cooking methods, Yongding strives to create a "whole cow banquet", and innovatively develops beef medicinal food to meet the needs of health-preserving people.
Zhu Yongping, executive director of the Tulou Hakka Food Association in Yongding District, said that the "All Cattle Banquet" has become a beautiful business card of Yongding, one of the top 100 tourism counties in China, and has aroused the response of Hakkas and tourists at home and abroad to "come back from Yongding without eating cattle".
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