People of Shanghai are very particular about foods and tend to light tastes, biased by tradition to slightly sweet tastes. Meat or vegetables, fresh ingredients are their preferred choices. Gongdelin Vegetarian Restaurant is a restaurant nationwide famous for its vegetable buns, the fillings of which are made of dices of green vegetables, oil gluten, shiitake, winter bamboo shoots, blended and stirred up together. The buns, just coming out of steaming, look snow-white fresh with meticulous textures. Peeling off the dough comes the greenish oily aroma dribbling from the vegetarian fillings. This is one of the author’s favorite snacks. Shanghai people including the very ordinary families would take pains to clean the ingredients. The two ends of the bean sprouts must be removed. Leek buds must be cleaned piece by piece and cut in equal length. Pork chops are lightly hammered by the cutting knife blade and then marinated with flavors before cooking. Almost every family has the workmanship to make neat wontons and dainty dumplings of bean paste fillings. Compared with people in the north, Shanghai people usually have less appetize or meat in their daily diets. In my recollection of childhood, our family kept the tradition to meal only with vegetarian diets at the time of Lunar New Years and the Lantern Festivals. This was just a family habit with no particular reasons at all. In more than thirty years since I came to live in Canada, vegetables have been dominating my diets in summer, only with some meat in winter. I think this suits my personal physiological needs well and has gradually become my new diet.
Relieving Cough and Resolving Phlegm with Pear Paste Sugar
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.