People who love snacks are called “Chanlaochong” (Shanghai dialect meaning “Greedy Bugs”) in Shanghai. Around the City God Temple, there are snacks of too many varieties to number. As the paradise for snacks of local tastes for hundreds of years, this is the “Holy City” for spelled snack pilgrims. Rib rice cakes, Nanxian small steamed buns and crab shell yellow cakes are the favorite snacks of Shanghai people while hickories, spices bean and sesame crispy candies are typical of popular local specialties. One of them is the pear paste sugar, a very extraordinary local specialty, made from fresh snow pears and Ya pears mixed with some Chinese herbal medicines before simmering to make crispy and fluffy lumps, each about half centimeter in thickness and 5-6 centimeters of square. These are often seen as snacks and appetizers at teahouses and storytelling performing houses. Most people, after getting a cold, would keep them in mouths one by one to relieve continuous coughs and to moisten their throats against phlegm. Visitors would bring these local specialties back hometowns as gifts.
Pear Paste Sugar Passed Down Through Ancient Times.
The processing of Pear paste sugar has a long history and its popularity in the Southeast China, as said, could be back as early as the Tang and Song dynasties. During the period of Qing Dynasty when financing and trading were rapidly developing in Shanghai, some pear paste sugar mills came to set up shops around the City God Temple, each with its unique secret recipe for products of their own specialty. By the year 1956, the Chinese government started to implement the policy of state-private ownership, merging different mills into Shanghai Paste Sugar Food Factory. In recent years, the company has gone public and their markets and sales vastly expended with pear paste sugars packaged in more diversities. Pear paste sugars vary in ingredients and with efficacies. Pears are essential materials and have their own medicinal efficacies after peeling, core removed, cut in lumps and turned into paste by simmering. Its efficacies to relieve cough and resolve phlegm intensifies if mixed with almonds, ginkgoes, campanulaceaes, kumquats and fritillaria. Further mixed with poria, tangerine peel, amonum and rose, this is the enlivening medicine for Qi and stomachs. Most recently, the Chinese government made it clear in its decree that medicines are prohibited for use as ingredients in food processing such as pinellia and coltsfoot in the pear paste sugar of similar products of strong medical attributers, while Chinese yam, almonds and tangerine peels are still allowed because they are food ingredients of homology. Thus, the medicinal value of pear paste sugar diminishes greatly. Emerging afterwards by market needs are a series of new products from the traditional mills, with shrimps, hams, mea floss, peanuts, bean pastes and son on as new ingredients, characterized as “taste” pear paste sugars. I believe these products will become the favorites of some new “Chanlaochong” (“greedy bugs”) followed by “the antique players” passing through ancient times although it’s painstaking for the latter to accustom themselves to new flavors. Another cough relieving food commonly see in the Chinese markets is Eight Immortals Fruit or Licorice Menthol, a product categorized between snacks and medicines too. What makes a difference is that Eight Immortals Fruits are made from grapefruits dried and diced, and then mixed with Chinese herbal powder.
Cream Decoction Being Very Popular in South China
Traditional medicines were made into forms of pills, powders, creams, Dan, dews, wines etc. and in modern time developed into granules, tablets, capsules and syrups etc. Aside from for their convenience in storage and carrying, the selection of medicinal forms is well related to symptoms and treatments. Pills are good for long time service for the palliative treatment of chronic diseases while powders are quickly absorbable in gastro intestines for dissemination of pathogenic accumulation (tea of rhizoma ligustici helps relieve hemicranias and march powder cures vomiting and diarrhea well). Nourishing tonic medicines are suitable to be made into creams for use (say, Leonora cream and deer placenta cream). Dan is a kind of pills to be made often from exquisite precious herbal ingredients (Top Treasure Dan) while drug dew (Yaoluduo) is distilled from fresh medicinal pieces containing volatile oils (Honeysuckle Dew used in my childhood to relieve heat stroke in summer). In recent years, there has been on the trend in South China “the Nourishing cream” the use of which is thought in Shanghai as identical with winter nourishment. Around the Beginning of Winter, almost everyone is eager to have one’s pulse diagnostically taken by Chinese medicine practitioners, indulging themselves in nourishments with donkey-hide gelation as influenced by the popular TV dramas, or just not to let the chance go to get a prescription or a nourishing cream that is kept in the refrigerator for a spoonful use a day. By so doing for one or two months, they think their bodies can be strong enough to be free from any infection from flu in the rampant even though they are not expected to be so strong as to “kill tigers in the mountains”.
Chinese Cinnamon and Tangerine Peel Decoction – A Soup for Health Care
While it is inconvenient to make a homely cream for the health of all ages, it is easy to cook a pot of tasty soup for physical fitness. Here is a simple medicinal diet I recommend for health replenishment.
10 Grams of astragalus, 6 grams of cassia, 6 grams of tangerine peel, 2 slices of fresh ginger and 3 red jujube.
Put the clean washed ingredients in 3 bowlfuls of water to cook to boil, keep them simmered for another 20 minutes, and then mix them with whatever your favorite meats or vegetables together with flavors to make a delicious soup for health care. The astragalus and Chinese cinnamon in the prescription enhance the preventative function of our body surface while the small amount of tangerine peel, red jujube and ginger work to improve the digestive and absorptive function of the gastrointestinal tract. Together, they can improve the immunity and reduce the chance of the onset of colds.
