After helping put out the fire in the commercial street, a few people with a slightly smoky smell just felt that it was time, so they quietly retreated while the locals on the street continued to deal with the funeral affairs, and went to a place a little further away where food was the main food. Another main street for dining.
Nanman people in Xinjing have been interacting with outsiders for a long time. In this food street, which is adjacent to a residential area specially designated for foreigners, as expected——
It's filled with all kinds of overpriced and unpalatable food that's used to rip off people.
These shops, which cover a large area and often have two or three floors, mostly have signboards in the Japanese language, but they also employ Lamanite people who work locally to write the subtitles in Lamani. These large stores are eye-catching, but they tend to be expensive and the food in them is mostly average.
——This is a polite way of saying it, and to put it more bluntly: most Kazuto himself, and even the clerks and owners of restaurants, are not used to it. And the reason why they did this was, as the sign suggested, that their main customers were from Nanban.
"Most of the southern barbarian cuisine has a rough taste, unlike me, Otsuki, who is very sophisticated and meticulous. It contains a lot of oil and salt, which makes you frown when you first taste it. Eating it every day is poisonous to the body and mind."
This passage was written by an upper-class member of Kazuto who had tasted Rigar's food. To put it bluntly, Kazuto felt that Rigar's cuisine was too heavy, and by extension, he believed that the Nanban people did not understand what good food was. , superficial and poorly informed.
Therefore, the food itself can be taken care of, and the energy and funds are put on the decoration of the store and the promotion of the sign. Use these high-end and luxurious appearance to attract wealthy Lamanite businessmen and ignorant foreign travelers to come in and spend money.
Since the store is so gorgeously decorated, the food there is naturally a delicacy with excellent taste. People with this idea pay high prices but taste food that is not as good as home-cooked food in every aspect.
Ironically, this approach was a huge success.
Laman businessmen like to talk while eating, and this kind of high-end and magnificent restaurant is their first choice. And people have a herd mentality. Seeing so many foreign companions coming in and out, naturally more Nanman people will follow to this place.
This is a microcosm of the complex intertwined relationship between the Moon Kingdom and the Southern Barbarians. While people gain vanity and money here, they also gradually deepen their prejudice against each other.
Yu Heren: The impression that the Southern Barbarians are really crude and superficial barbarians who don’t know food is confirmed.
Yu Nanman: I think the food tastes bad and the price is very expensive.
But let’s get back to where we started.
Naturally, our Mr. Sage and his entourage did not follow the crowd. They skipped the most gorgeously decorated restaurants without slowing down their pace, and walked into the alley with ease.
The winding path led to a secluded place, and suddenly it became clear that it was a residential area of peaceful people that had little connection with prosperity and foreign countries, just like other places. Most of the people coming and going here were city residents, and the group arrived at a much smaller noodle shop.
"Maido (welcome), ah, it's Hengrui Khan and Milai Khan." The old and a little fat lady boss tried to pronounce the names of the leader of the sage and the Luoan girl with a Japanese accent. They were already used to it. , during the period of living nearby, because the food in the hotel was mediocre, they often visited this shop and have become regular customers.
But it was the first time for the other people to come together.
"The same old noodle soup, is there any New Year speciality?" The sage communicated with the proprietress skillfully, while our Luoan girl went to the back kitchen to have a look, and Lulu followed suit.
"Oh, Hengrui Khan, you must eat buckwheat noodles in the New Year of Otsuki." The proprietress with a strong local accent is from Fuso. The Kazuto dialect of the old capital of Xinyuezhou has many different usages compared to Xinjing. It seems very distinctive to the ears of others who are used to hearing the northern dialect of the Qingtian family.
Adding the nickname "Khan" after the name is a unique expression of intimacy among Fuso people. It is one thing that they come here quite often, and the unique enthusiasm of people in the old capital is also another aspect.
The diligent and enthusiastic landlady provides affordable and plentiful food, and in addition to Henry and his party, nearby residents also come here often. It was when Mira and Henry were the only two people out for a stroll that day that they followed the smell of food to the neighborhood and saw the residents queuing up, so they discovered this store.
It's just that these days are the Lunar New Year, and friends and relatives visit each other. For Kazuto, most of the time, they stay at home for dinner.
The husband of the landlady is a medicinal materials merchant and is searching for various medicinal materials all year round. Her son had a family and opened a similar noodle shop in Fusang, so when their group arrived, she seemed sincerely happy to have the companionship of more people.
Although their faces and cultures are different, thanks to both parties' goodwill and attempts to understand each other, within a very short period of time they were even closer to the noodle shop proprietress than the Qingtian family who had traveled side by side for a year. .
The girl from Luoan leaned over to watch the proprietress cooking, and the other party took a sniff, and the white-haired girl had a sweet smell on her body. She frowned: "Mi Laihan just ate apple candy, can you still eat it? "
Mira nodded sharply: "Okay."
The short and powerful answer made the landlady's brows widen again. Although she was in a foreign country, this narrow shop gave people a sense of atmosphere because of the presence of the landlady and the warm light of the Moon Country-style paper lanterns. feel like home.
Even though it was their first time coming together, the others seemed very comfortable and relaxed.
Who invented the food noodle earlier between the Kazu people and the Lamanites has been a topic of endless debate since the two civilizations came into contact. But that won’t be discussed for now.
As the current capital of the Big Moon, Xinjing has a wide range of natural food products from the Big Moon continent.
There are four or five main types of noodles commonly eaten by Japanese people, and the raw materials of different types of noodles are mostly different. The local noodles most commonly eaten by civilians are mostly plain noodles and soba noodles. Among these two types of noodles, the former is usually made of whatever flour is available, and is the most popular and homely type.
It is like most home-cooked dishes, each family has its own recipes and methods, and there is no very unified standard. Some people use yam to make plain noodles, while others use arrowroot powder.
Wealthy nobles and merchants also had their own versions of somen, which were usually made from ground rice. In order to distinguish themselves from common people, they often did not call it plain noodles, but used all kinds of fancy words to describe it. For example, the nobles in Xinjing would call noodles made of thin threads of rice flour "can". ", this word means crystal clear, extremely beautiful and high-quality food in Kazuto language.
The latter kind of buckwheat noodles uses a crop that is a specialty of the Crescent Continent. This crop is almost impossible to see in Rigar because it is not widely cultivated even in the Crescent Continent.
In addition, there is wheat-based pasta that is more familiar to the people of Rigar, generally called udon in the Japanese language. Its history also goes back thousands of years. Considering that wheat is almost the most common crop in Rigal, perhaps the communication between the two continents was much earlier than people know.
But many things have been lost in the long river of history.
But when we look back to the present, one of the important factors why Kazuto prefers to eat soba noodles during the New Year is also the reason why this crop is not common. It is that noodles made from buckwheat flour are easier to break.
It is difficult to scoop it up completely, and the cutting process after rolling out often leaves broken noodles alone. But this inconvenient characteristic has become an advantage in the Japanese culture that pursues ritualization and symbolism in all aspects.
On the occasion of the New Year, bid farewell to the old and welcome the new.
When eating a bowl of soba noodles, the noodles that break when picked up with chopsticks symbolize that all the bad things of the past year have been cut in two. Bad things don't carry over into the new year, the new year is a fresh start.
This highly symbolic feature makes eating a bowl of soba noodles a New Year tradition for Kazuto, and following the local customs, Henry and his party decided to have such a meal for lunch today.
The fragile buckwheat pancakes were flipping around in the hands of the landlady. She sprinkled them with flour to prevent them from sticking, then kneaded them and rolled them flat, then folded them and cut them into long, flat brown noodles with a knife.
After putting it away for storage, the soup is the essence of Kazuto noodles.
Most of the soups used in folk home-cooked dishes are relatively simple. There is a very important step in the process of making Kazuto's noodles called "dashi", which refers to boiling the soup with ingredients such as bonito flakes and kombu.
In addition, miso is mixed with water to make a diluted miso called miso miso. Miso, a raw material fermented from soybeans and salt, plays a vital role in the Japanese diet, especially in many soups and noodles.
The difficulty in this step is to control the temperature without boiling the water. Kazuto pursues umami, and miso mixed with water will turn into a soup with rich umami under the action of temperature, but the temperature cannot be too high, otherwise the taste will be destroyed.
After proper cooking, use gauze to filter out the miso and the kombu and bonito flakes used to make the juice.
Then the noodles are cooked quickly, scooped out with a bamboo sieve and soaked in a bucket of cold water, then taken out and set aside for later use. Then add mustard greens, green onions and eggplants, cut them into slices, boil them and remove them and set aside.
The landlady does all this at the same time skillfully and efficiently. After most of the preparations were done, she poured the miso paste into the juice, heated it until it was about to boil but was not yet boiling, then added the noodles and cooked them together.
After half a minute, he took out the noodles, poured them into a bowl, poured a ladle of soup over them, placed boiled green vegetables on top, and then brought them to the waiting group.
Fermented miso has a salty and umami flavor, while kombu and bonito flakes, which are also from the sea, provide the taste of fish and ocean. Green leafy vegetables and eggplant are added on top, and some powder mixed with pepper and sansho pepper is sprinkled on top. Although it is not a food that anyone here is familiar with in the past, its color and aroma are enough to dispel any doubts they may have.
Satisfied was their unanimous thought after finishing the meal.
And since he came to this store more than once or twice, Henry naturally also told the other companions who were not together for the time being where to look for them if there was something they couldn't find in the hotel.
"Rebirth of the Great Era of Fighting Waves"
So just when they were finishing their meal and paying the bill, the Doctor and the Grand Miko, whom they had not seen for a long time, entered the noodle shop one after another.
"What's the situation?" The two of them would come to the door in person, which was the result of what Henry had informed and entrusted to report before.
"Xinjing." The sage paused for a while, waiting for the two of them to enter the noodle shop and lower the curtain before continuing.
"Are you willing to send manpower to deal with the rift problem?"
He asked this, and even though he didn't answer, the great witch and the doctor gave some answers with helpless expressions.
"It's quite difficult." Ling said with a sigh, and then glanced at the bowl they had just finished. Mira noticed this move and hit Galeva several times with her elbow. She was stunned for a while. When he realized what he was doing, he ran over to the boss lady and asked for two more bowls of noodles.
"Sit down and let's talk after eating."
Although they were both in Xinjing, it still took a lot of time to get from Tiange Academy and the shrine to the civilian area, and the two of them were obviously very hungry.
The landlady saw that the visitors were two big shots, but she didn't ask much. Although there were many Nanman people in Xinjing, they would come to the door and their conversation showed that they knew the local area very well. However, she had only seen one person in such a long time. Bit.
She had already guessed the uniqueness of this group of people, but here they were diners and she was the shopkeeper. Not asking too many questions and not pursuing too many questions was the key to maintaining a good relationship.
The noodles are cooked again and have been prepared in advance so they are served faster this time than before.
