Su Qingluan's expression was very regretful: "Because the season is a little late, the 'Four Seasons' cannot be made."
Zhang Ma frowned and looked very unhappy: "What do you mean by this?"
In her opinion, Su Qingluan either had no real ability and relied on his luck to get a piece of jam, which happened to please the old lady; or he was greedy and disliked the one hundred taels of silver note being too small. Wanted more so deliberately declined to bargain here.
I have to say that in a sense, Zhang Ma’s second guess was correct. Su Qingluan was indeed “greedy” and wanted more, but it was different from what she imagined.
Su Qingluan didn't know what Zhang Ma was thinking. But maybe the other party now thinks that she is just a country girl, and no matter how hard she looks, she can't read her face, so there is no need to pretend, so she doesn't hide her expression in any way.
In short, the expressions of disgust and disgust are like lice on a bald head—it’s obvious.
Xie Zian, who had been watching, naturally understood what kind of character Su Qingluan was before, and had also seen her "acting skills". Seeing how unusual she was today, I knew she must be secretly planning something.
But for Xie Zian, he didn't care what happened to Zhang Ma. He is afraid of Zhang Ma, essentially because Zhang Ma serves his grandmother and is a useful old man, not because he is in awe of Zhang Ma herself.
So now he only knows that the jam he used to please his grandmother has been used, and he may be able to go back to celebrate the New Year in the twelfth lunar month of this year.
Therefore, even if Zhang Ma looks down on Su Qingluan now, Xie Zian will not do anything to Su Qingluan - after all, no matter how useful Zhang Ma is, she is still a servant after all, and she cannot surpass Xie Zian, the master.
And Xie Zian is now thinking about how to make Su Qingluan his own exclusive cook - there are not many people who can cook and make sweets like this!
Su Qingluan is not in a hurry - in a sense, if she is despised by the other party, it may not be a good thing for her now.
So as if she didn't notice the negative emotions of the other party, Su Qingluan continued to maintain the feeling of "a country girl with little knowledge": "Hey, Ma Zhang, you know that this wild fruit is different from the fruit in the garden. When it comes to flowering and bearing fruit, the timing is pretty much the same. If it’s a wild fruit, it’s still growing here, but it’s ripe there.”
Zhang Ma is not a person who is industrious and indifferent to food and grain. She has climbed up step by step from being a rough girl.
She also knew that Su Qingluan was right. The difference in light temperature in the mountains is very large, even to the extent of a season. Even if it is the same kind of wild fruit tree in the same area nearby, the fruiting time of the sunny side and the shaded side will be very different.
Zhang Ma asked calmly: "Even so, so what?"
"Not so, not so much," Su Qingluan waved her hand, "It's just that even if they are both wild fruits, the aroma and taste of different ripeness are slightly different. Especially for the nobles in the capital, their tongues must be nourished by the delicacies of the mountains and the sea. One has to be sharper than the other!"
Su Qingluan raised her head and looked at Zhang Ma: "For example, you, a golden noble, must taste better than us country folk."
No one dislikes compliments, and Zhang Ma is no exception. Although she expressed with a sullen face, "How can an old woman be like the master's family?", the previous expression of disgust and disgust towards Su Qingluan was visibly faded.
Su Qingluan saw the change in the other party's expression and continued: "We don't know the taste, but our eyesight is pretty good. So each kind of jam is made from the specific maturity of a specific type of wild fruit. The taste of the cooked jam is naturally different - and to ensure the taste, it is also given to those with keen tastes.”
Of course, the people who "took early adopters" were mainly members of the family. However, since we want to "expand the industrial chain", it is not impossible to hire specific people for the "taste" part - but only those with a truly sensitive taste.
"Because of this, each jam is actually 'unique' and needs to be picked during the short ripening period of the fruit to quickly make jam. If you miss this period, it will naturally disappear. And the production of 'Four Seasons'" The main ingredient of jam has been overripe during this time."
Overripe fruits are naturally edible, but because they are too sweet, some of them have even fallen off their branches. Therefore, unless you are particularly sweet, you cannot add too much sugar for flavoring or as a preservative. Naturally, it is not as good as the sweet and sour fruit.
But what is ripening now is another kind of wild fruit.
"If Zhang Ma wants to order the folk girls to make new jams, of course she can; but if she wants to make the 'Four Seasons' series, I'm afraid she will have to wait until the end of next summer."
Therefore, if you want to taste the same style of "Four Seasons", you may have to wait for a year - this is what Su Qingluan meant in his words.
With Su Qingluan pushing back and forth like this, is it really impossible to achieve the "Four Seasons"?
How can it be! I just mentioned that the maturity time span of wild fruits is very long. Su Qingluan believes that as long as he searches carefully, he will naturally find fruits with the same maturity as the wild fruits nearly a month ago - after all, they are only a dozen or two years apart. For more than ten days, the same kind of fruit can definitely be found in the shade.
However, she didn't intend to look for it.
The reason is very simple. As the saying goes, "things are rare and valuable." What delicacies have you never seen or tasted among the wealthy people in the capital? In this case, the rarer the ingredients, even if they are not so delicious, they will brag about them in order to show their worth.
For example, in her previous life, Su Qingluan's chef often took her to taste delicious food around the world in order to let her taste authentic food from various places - not only common ingredients, but also unpopular ingredients.
It has to be said that there are many that are so hyped that they even use ingredients, such as elephant trunks, bear paws, monkey brains, etc. Su Qingluan has also tried it by various chances. Her evaluation was - not as delicious as pig's mouth, pig's trotters and pig's brain.
The master once told her: If those so-called "games" were really so delicious, they would have long been domesticated by people - especially the descendants of the Yan and Huang Dynasties who depended on food for their livelihood - and then become their meals.
For example, crustaceans such as crayfish and crabs are, frankly speaking, very troublesome to eat, and if you eat ten pounds or more, five pounds or more would have to be shells.
Such troublesome and "uneconomical" ingredients are just because they taste delicious. Countless diners still take the trouble to figure out how to eat them - steamed, minced with garlic, raw pickled...
So if those "delicacies from mountains and seas" are really so delicious, how could humans not raise them?
It’s not delicious enough!
But because they are rare enough and even forbidden to be eaten, when you can serve these "ingredients" as a meal, you seem to have won some kind of "privilege".
This is why, from ancient times to the present, there are many dishes that are obviously unpalatable, yet people always flock to them.
What they eat is not food, but status, privilege and symbol.
So Su Qingluan was sure that not only would Mother Zhang not be angry because she had to wait a year to eat the 'Four Seasons' series again, but she would feel that her master had eaten the only 'limited edition', and that was the 'only portion'. "What?"
As expected, Su Qingluan's words made Zhang Ma not only not disappointed, but also brought a smile: "It turns out that the 'Four Seasons' jam is so rare."
"Eh, isn't it?" Su Qingluan winked in an exaggerated manner, "Originally, the making of marmalade is troublesome. Even if everyone can be called on to make it together, it will only be done according to the 'Four Seasons' method. There are more than a hundred sets, so I just make one to please the nobles, and no one wants to make this jam into an industry."
Although it is true that no one makes jam in this town, it doesn't matter how much the output is - according to the amount of wild fruits in the mountainous forest near Huaxi Village, large quantities of jam can naturally be made.
However, because the production process of jam itself is complicated and a large amount of sugar is added to keep it fresh, the cost is high, so it is not a food that ordinary people can afford.
Therefore, Su Qingluan simply took this "unaffordability" to an extreme and planned to turn Huaxi Village's jam directly into a "luxury product", exclusively for those wealthy families who have money and nowhere to spend it.
Although "luxury goods" are superficially "the cultural heritage of a brand", to put it bluntly, in a sense, they mean "only providing services and goods to specific customers."
Su Qingluan was an ordinary person no matter in her previous life or in this life. She did not understand or understand those so-called "luxury goods". In her opinion, those "luxury goods" are inferior to some mid-range brand mass products in terms of durability and beauty, and some of them only have "affordable prices."
Although Su Qingluan himself is a pragmatist, he feels that "five thousand to buy steel balls" and "three hundred to buy paper cups" are simply too much money. However, this does not prevent her from turning her mediocre jam into a "luxury product among jams", allowing the money of wealthy people to flow into her and her fellow villagers' pockets.
In this case, Su Qingluan's jam must have "style".
In a sense, the first element of having "style" is that it cannot become a common fast-moving consumer product on the street.
It must be niche enough and have its own degree of irreplaceability.
Su Qingluan has absolute confidence that the taste of jam is "irreplaceable", so all that's left is to make these ordinary jams "extraordinary" through various packaging.
The first step is to make them "rare" enough.
"Mama Zhang, you don't know something. This wild fruit is ordinary, but after all, it has absorbed the spiritual energy of heaven and earth." Su Qingluan pointed outside, "Although we are far away from the capital and even the state capital, it is It’s because the beautiful mountains and clear waters have their own aura, and the wild fruits look so bright and translucent when they grow!”
As he spoke, Su Qingluan used very exaggerated adjectives to describe the preparation of these four small portions of jam, from the strict selection of the ripeness, color, and size of the raw fruit to the number of complex seasonings added later - of course, She didn't say the specific types and proportions - in short, she described every step as "selecting from thousands" and choosing the best from the best.
Zhang Ma was so excited when she heard what Su Qingluan said that she didn't dislike it anymore. She just smiled and said: "It seems that this jam is really rare to make and is worth thousands of gold."
Su Qingluan saw Zhang Ma's "I'm proud of you" expression, and sighed in her heart: Yes, she was deceived.
