Chapter 17 Tea Fighting

Mrs. Cheng thought for a while and said: "This child has different personalities from Zizhan Ziyu, but as long as he is kind-hearted, nothing big will happen. The things he did in the village were all due to his clever temperament and excessive energy.

Caused."

"Then let's follow the current path. Don't you like to work hard? Just let him do it. Just guide him to use his intelligence on the right path. It happens to be his interest."

Cheng Wen said urgently: "The imperial court selects scholars based on articles. My daughter, you can't delay this child."

Mrs. Cheng smiled slyly: "We can't delay it. Didn't he say that Yanyan wants to transform the printing technology? He also proposed to save the characters by radicals for easy retrieval."

"Hahaha, he probably doesn't know that my Song Dynasty has more than 50,000 words, so I don't take it for granted."

"The study of rhyme is the first obstacle for me as a scholar in the Song Dynasty, so I will teach him personally and test his character by the way!"

Cheng Wenying pondered for a while and said: "How about sending it to Tianqingguanbeiyuan? Zhang Daozhang teaches rhyme well, and Zizhanziyu is all read there."

Mrs. Cheng said: "Daozhang Zhang is old and does not easily accept disciples. I will teach him first. After Xiaoyou officially opens his apprenticeship, he will have a foundation. When the time comes, it will be easier to go to Daozhang Zhang and talk easier."

Daochang Zhang, whose name is Zhang Yijian, was the first teacher of Su Shi and Su Xun Yunxue. He himself was unknown. In history, he seems to have done one thing to teach students. One of the students he taught was named Su Dongpo.

Well, actually there was another one, Chen Taichu, a classmate of Su Dongpo, who later, uh, became an immortal.

In addition to normal scholar-bureaucrats, the cultural knowledge of the Song Dynasty was also in the hands of three types of people: Taoist priests, monks, and prostitutes.

Taoist priests and monks are not engaged in production and recite scriptures professionally, and they have plenty of time to spare.

If a prostitute wants to have a reputation, she must be decorated with culture, music, poetry, tea ceremony, etc. There must be someone who can do it. There are historical records of the Hanlin prime minister losing to a famous prostitute in a tea fight. That is because there are many things.

.

Let's go back to Shijiazhuang. The weather was still hot at this time. After dinner, there was a period of rest. The twenty-seventh mother took the eighth mother to play the tea fight that she just mentioned.

In the Song Dynasty, everyone from the royal family to the peddlers and servants took tea drinking as a lifestyle. The so-called "gentlemen, like Wei Bu, bathed in ointment, cultivated virtues, promoted elegance and admiration, and engaged in tea drinking."

"

Twenty-seven mothers regained some pride because she discovered that Su You didn't know how to do this.

But Su You didn't have time to watch them play, and he didn't know that a disaster was waiting for him at Mrs. Cheng's place in Meishan City.

He is currently busy drawing drawings for Shi Da.

He drew two types of containers. One was a small-mouthed jar with a rim three inches below the mouth of the jar. There was also a lid similar to a flat-bottomed bowl, which was turned upside down so that it could be placed on the rim.

There is also an inverted plate on the mouth of the altar, which can just cover the mouth of the altar.

Its function is to prevent water from dripping into the jar when the lid is lifted, contaminating the inside.

The edge of the mouth can hold water, and the bottom of the lid can be submerged underwater, isolating the air inside and outside, inhibiting the growth of ordinary bacteria, and cultivating anaerobic bacteria such as lactobacilli.

This is the must-have kimchi jar for every household in Shuzhou in later generations.

Another kind of container is an open basin, which also has a lid, but there is an extra ventilation tube in the middle. When the lid is closed, steam enters the container through the air tube, and the food can be steamed. At the same time, the water vapor condenses on the lid.

The water droplets will drip into the container and form soup.

The signature cooking utensil of later generations of Yunnanese is the steam pot.

These two things are not difficult at all. With the level of craftsmanship of Shijia Pottery, it is completely possible.

In fact, historians don't really pay much attention to the fact that a farm cow breaks its leg. The price of a calf is around five guan, and based on the calculation of three hundred kilograms of meat from a cow, the price of one hundred kilograms is thirty thousand kilograms.

Yes, just selling beef can make huge profits.

Therefore, there are officials in the history books who suggested to the central government to forcibly raise the price of live cattle to make the butchers unprofitable.

However, this was a big mistake. Fortunately, it did not happen during the spring plowing period. Otherwise, everyone from the county government to the historian would punish the village head and the person involved, and they would not let it go as lightly as now.

Coupled with Su You's clever operation, bad things turned into good things. Maybe in a year's time the reputation of the historian will have undergone earth-shaking changes in Meishan City.

Where is the dock? A place where all directions converge, the best place to gain reputation! Compared with the other three families, this is where the Shi Family is inferior. This is why Twenty-Seven Mothers are so interested in Su You's suggestion.

Therefore, a few jars are nothing. Even if the young master of the Su family burns them and smashes them for fun, that's up to him!

After Su You finished drawing the two drawings, he came to Ba Niang and Erqi Niang, where they had already been fighting for three rounds.

Twenty-seven Niang greeted Su You: "Xiao You, come and comment, whose tea is better, me or Eight Niangs?"

Su You walked over and took a look, and couldn't help but be stunned: "Match... matcha or... cappuccino?"

In the Song Dynasty, tea fighting was mainly based on the color of the tea soup and the tea foam. The color of tea was "pure white, green and white, then gray and white, and yellow and white."

It is better to "bite the cup".

Correspondingly, tea that can produce foam, has a fine texture and is white in color is designated as top-grade tea. The small piece of dragon tea produced by Cai Xiang during the Qing Dynasty is worth as much as two taels of gold per kilogram, or as much as eighteen guan.

Nowadays, the price of Longyuan, Shengxue and other exquisite teas among them is as high as ten guans and one liang.

Later, the first tea presented to the royal family by Jianzhou every year was called "Beiyuan Test New". The small tea cake was about one inch in size, about the size of a small mahjong tile. One cake was only enough for several cups, and the price was 400 guan.

Calculated into the current price of goods in the Northern Song Dynasty, it is still as high as sixty or seventy dollars.

Fine tea, like other high-end luxury goods for literati and ladies in the Song Dynasty, is completely expensive.

The good tea that people in the Song Dynasty drink now is called "Tuancha". The tea leaves are picked and steamed into tea cakes through complicated processes.

As for the loose tea that became popular in later generations, it was a discarded product, something that only satisfied traffickers and barbarians.

Of course, the two processes are different. Later generations of loose tea used stir-frying to destroy the waxy layer, allowing the tea flavor to be easily released. This technology does not exist yet.

Back to the present, when making tea, first grind the Tuancha into tea powder, place it at the bottom of a bowl, and then use boiling water to brew the tea soup. At the same time, use a tea spoon to quickly whisk the tea soup to make it foam, and the foam will float on the surface of the soup. This process is called "pointing"

Tea".

Later generations of Chinese people who traveled to Japan were often amazed by the tea ceremony experience in Kyoto. In fact, it was just this.

The white tea powder is the best quality, and the finer the grinding, the better, so that when you order tea, the tea powder can "go into the soup lightly" and fully foam.

For water, mountain springs are the best, and "well water from wells that can be fed regularly is the second best."

The heat is even more important. It is said that "it is the most difficult to wait for the soup. If it is not cooked, the tea will float, and if it is overcooked, the tea will sink."

Jian'an is the best tea set, as the saying goes: "Tea is white in color, so it's better to have black tea sets. Those made in Jian'an have cyanotic black lines like rabbit hairs, and the tea sets are very thick. They are hot and difficult to cool down for a long time, so they are most useful."

Finally, the tea soup ordered should be pure white in color, with bright white foam, and last for a long time.

This elegant technique was brought to its extreme and evolved into a more advanced tea art.

Many doctors and ladies are excellent masters of tea separation. They can use tea powder and boiling water to create various patterns in tea bowls.

The images of objects, animals, insects, fish, flowers and plants are delicate and picturesque, but they will be disillusioned in a moment. This change of tea is what people at the time called 'a hundred plays of tea'."

Cappuccino and Su oil have been seen a lot in later generations, but they are static patterns. In the Song Dynasty, tea distribution was completed in the dynamic changes of the tea soup. It was definitely more difficult, and it also had a phantom and fleeting Zen feeling.

A large number of cultural celebrities, such as Cai Xiang, Fan Zhongyan, Su Shi, Su Che, Mei Yaochen, Song Huizong, and Li Qingzhao, are all masters of this art.

This is actually the pursuit of a better life, the improvement of cultural quality and spiritual cultivation, and is also inevitable after the improvement of material life. It cannot be said to be wrong.

My fault is that I spend too much energy on this aspect.

When the foreign enemies were not at peace, the surrounding areas were not at peace, and the people's burdens were still heavy, they actually had the courage to pursue these things. From the local government to the imperial court, they were accustomed to reporting good things but not bad things, singing and dancing to bring peace, and this was how they developed such a luxurious and leisurely atmosphere.

Who gave them the confidence?!

Twenty-seventh mother glanced at Su You: "What are you talking about? This is the first gold of founding the state. I spent a lot of effort to get it from Jiangling Mansion. It costs 800 yuan per catty and can be sold for two thousand yuan in Jiazhou!

"

Transportation was indeed a terrible thing in the Song Dynasty.

There were two cups of tea, one looked like a three-legged cartoon cat with a head bigger than its body, and the other looked like an animal, but Su You still couldn't say it.

No one in the Song Dynasty has ever seen a plesiosaur.
Chapter completed!