Chapter 18: The Song of Cooking Meat

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  ……

  Roasting fork from feeding to finished product takes about three hours. During this time, Li Anran began to guide the sugar simmering again.

  After seeing a better life coming, Zhao Dazhao and Zhao Er, who were not lazy originally, worked overtime to make many simple filters.

  After a series of procedures including dissolving miscellaneous sugars, preliminary filtration, secondary filtration, tertiary filtration, simmering and crystallization, rock sugar is obtained. Due to the poor color of miscellaneous sugars and losses during processing, at most six taels can be extracted from one catty of miscellaneous sugars, generally only three or four taels.

  But compared to the output ratio of only 50%, the price of rock sugar is at least ten times that of brown sugar, and may be even higher. The most critical thing is that it has not been sold yet.

  While busy stirring the sugar, Li Anran also didn't forget about the cha siu in the oven. After continuous flipping and adjusting positions, to make the meat hanging in the oven heat evenly, so that there is no place that is not cooked, and some places are already charred.

  When the first batch of sugar was finally done, Zhao Da Tou had used up all the miscellaneous sugar he bought back yesterday, leaving only the last batch of rock sugar still being cooked.

  "It smells so good!"

  "It's really delicious!"

  "This meat looks pretty good."

  "That's right, that's right."

  "Hmmph..."

  "Hmmph..."

  Just as Zhao Da and Zhao Er were surrounding the freshly roasted fork, with joyful expressions on their faces, expressing their respective opinions, a loud rumbling sound started to echo repeatedly.

  Having been busy for a whole morning, there was no time to cook. So Li Anran simply used up the remaining big bone broth and made ramen noodles for everyone.

  This time, the accompanying dish is no longer smoked meat, but freshly roasted cha siu. As for the Zhao family of four, they were initially reluctant to eat it. After all, this meat not only looks good, but just smelling its aroma makes you know it's delicious. Such good meat should be sold, eating it themselves would be a waste.

  Fortunately, Li Anran finally succeeded in roasting the meat this time. If he couldn't even taste the flavor, how could he roast well in the future? He managed to get through to the Zhao brothers' two families with this excuse. The thick meat block was at least one centimeter thick, with a crispy outer layer and tender inner flesh. Due to the proper marinating, the full-bodied meat juice was perfectly sealed inside by the charred outer layer.

  The only thing that made Li Anran a little dissatisfied was that the wild boar meat still had a strong gamey smell. Although he had tried his best to get rid of it, some of it still remained. Fortunately, the char siu was roasted, and the sauce made from various spices and fermented bean paste the day before had been marinated, so this little flavor could not be detected if one did not carefully savor it.

  After lunch, under the expectation of Zhao's four family members, Li Anran finally ordered to load the roasted cha siu and cooked rock sugar together.

  Because Zhao Dajia's cow has already recovered, but is still in the recovery period, they can only borrow a cattle cart from Zhao Qingshan's house again. For this reason, Li Anran also specially let Zhao Da send two skewers of roasted tofu and a small bag of rock sugar. Although the four members of the Zhao family have some heartache about this approach, none of them raised any objections.

  Soon, Zhao Da, who went to borrow a cart, drove the cattle cart back smoothly. In no time, they loaded a basket of roasted chestnuts and a bag of rock sugar onto the cart, and then Zhao Da and his wife drove the cart towards Lantian County Town.

  Li Anran had wanted to do some other things, but considering that Zhao Dazhao's family had almost all their funds invested in the barbecue and sugar business, he could only temporarily put those other plans on hold. However, this didn't mean he relaxed, instead he brought Zhao Er with him and started digging caves along the mountain slope, preparing to build a simple charcoal kiln.

  At the same time, she also asked Zhao Erniang to take out the river clams that had been soaked in clean water for several times and had spit out dirty things for two days, cut them open one by one, and wash the meat inside clean.

  Although there was a lot of wild boar meat left over from before, the vast majority had been used to make cured meat, smoked meat and roasted kebabs. For Li Anran, what he needed most right now was money, so eating meat was something that could only be done some other way. Fortunately, in these two days, the young ones of the Zhao family hadn't been idle either. In the riverside and ditches, they had fished out quite a few river clams, eels, loaches and suchlike freshwater delicacies.

  As for why there are so many river delicacies but no one comes to catch them, it's actually very simple. The main reason is that nobody knows how to eat these things deliciously. Take the wild boar meat I got before, for example. Although it was a big one, if I just dragged it into the county town to sell, it would actually be sold for not much money at all.

  Who made people in this era not even eat pork, let alone the Tang Dynasty, even in the Song Dynasty, pork was also considered cheap meat because of its strong odor, only ordinary commoners would eat it. The old saying goes that those who are righteous often kill dogs. In ancient times, dog meat was more popular than pork. Moreover, it is said that Zhang Fei from the Three Kingdoms period was a dog meat seller.

  Of course, it's just hearsay here, and what kind of meat is being sold isn't important. But the fact that pork has always been neglected is true; otherwise, there wouldn't be a poem written by Su Shi.

  In "Notes from the Pool of Qi", Su Dongpo wrote a poem called "Ode to Boiled Pig's Head":

  "Clean and wash the pot, add shallow water, press down the firewood tightly so it doesn't rise. Yellow pig is cheap as dirt, rich people won't eat it, poor people don't know how to cook it, sometimes I make a bowl myself, fill my belly and ignore others."

  "When exiled to Huangzhou, this literary giant once wrote a poem called 'Meat Stew': 'Huangzhou has good pork, cheap as dirt. The rich won't eat it, the poor don't know how to cook it. With gentle fire and little water, when it's done, it's delicious on its own.'"

  At the current price of pork, a 200-pound domestic pig is worth around 1,000 to 1,200 yuan. On average, that's about 5-6 yuan per pound. To say whether this price is low or not, it's actually not considered low. But let's not forget, we're currently in the first year of the Zhenguan era, and the Tang Dynasty's economy has yet to fully recover from the impact of the Sui dynasty's war turmoil, so prices are still far higher than they will be during the prosperous Zhenguan period later on.

  Fortunately, Li Anran had a solution to the problem of pork being too smelly. The reason why the pork in later generations was milder in flavor all depended on one word: stir-frying!

  Just castrate the boar, not only will the pungent smell of pork be reduced, but its temper will also become more docile, and it won't fight every three days. Considering that this method was still unthinkable in ancient times, Li Anran had Zhao Da buy a half-grown pig at the county town market to come back and prepare for experimentation.

  With a considerable amount of river clams, loaches and eels, even if the money earned from pork and rock sugar needs to be reinvested, Li Anran doesn't have to worry about only having plain tea and rice to fill his belly.

  Digging a cellar is naturally not something that Li Anran would do personally. Zhao Er, who had eaten his fill at both breakfast and lunchtime, was filled with the joy of an impending "bumper harvest" and dug away with all his might, feeling utterly carefree and exhilarated.

  The earth kiln for burning charcoal will be dug out soon, and Li Anran thought about whether to burn the brick kiln as well. He could build more houses with even inferior bricks. But thinking twice, it's better to take things one step at a time. After all, it's still summer now, and there's no need to consider this for the time being. Moreover, currently, only the four members of the Zhao family can be used, and they are already overwhelmed with work.

  After finishing the charcoal pit, Zhao Er didn't idle around either. He hastily picked out the most suitable ones for burning charcoal from the firewood pile at home and then started to work busily for the charcoal needed for roasting meat later on.

  Everyone seems to have something to do, while he is left idle with many plans, but due to the lack of sufficient start-up capital. Li Anran couldn't help but feel a mix of anticipation and tension about Zhao Da's trip to the county town.