Do people eat crabs in the Tang Dynasty? A kind of

# Twelve Hours in Chang’an#The Tang Dynasty diet.,[Do the Tang Dynasty people eat crabs?,🦀️ 】 The answer is yes, and the choice and eating of crabs is also very different from modern times.
The Tang Dynasty section highway book Beihulu mentions that there is "sugar crab method" in "Guangzhi people’s food": "Take female crabs in water in September, don’t let them hurt or die. If they stay in the abdomen for a long time, they will vomit yellow, but it’s not good to vomit yellow. Boil thin bait first. Bait, bait also. A night in cold candy with live crabs. Boiled Polygonum soup, and white salt, extremely salty, to be cold, urn half juice, take crabs in sugar, containing Polygonum salt juice, then die. Polygonum should be fewer, more rotten. On the twentieth day of mud seal, the crab’s umbilical cord was covered with ginger powder, and the umbilical cord was restored as before. The umbilical cord was restored to its original position, with Sizhong and Baijuan (which should be called "Ge") in it. It was watered with Polygonum salt juice before, so that it was sealed and not leaked. As we can see, the general procedure is as follows:
Every September of the lunar calendar, dilute syrup is boiled and soaked in it by living crabs that spit out all the silt after being cooled. So soak overnight, the next day, boil Polygonum soup, put a lot of salt in the soup, then let the salted Polygonum soup cool, then turn all the candied crabs into the soup, and seal the container with mud, and let it stand for 20 days. Next, take out the pickled crabs one by one, uncover the umbilical cap, and put in a proper amount of ginger. The last link is that every 100 crabs are put into a big pottery jar, filled with rice-washing water. After entering the jar, some Polygonum salt soup is poured into the jar, which means that sugar crabs are soaked in rice-washing water and Polygonum salt soup, and then the jar is sealed up, that is, the finished product.
It is worth noting that before the Tang Dynasty, the production scale of sucrose was limited and belonged to luxury goods. Therefore, more often than not, crabs were salted with honey. During Emperor Yangdi of Sui Dynasty, sugar crabs were shipped to Luoyang as tribute along the way in the south of the Yangtze River. "Daye Zaji" records that when Emperor Yangdi of Sui Dynasty, "Wu County offered 3,000 honey crabs, honey holding four urns of sword, as the method of sugar crab". Marinating seafood with honey or sugar not only facilitates people’s lives in the producing areas of seafood, but also enables seafood to be transported over long distances to inland areas.
In the book, the author explains that "holding swords" in "holding swords four urns" immediately, "holding swords like crabs is small, but one claw is bigger", which seems to be a small crab. One peculiar thing is that a crab clamp is so big that it looks like walking with swords. The Tang Dynasty’s eaters gave the crab a powerful name "holding swords". So it seems that the fiddler crab fits this characteristic very well.
Tidal crab, widely distributed in Hainan, Fujian and other places of China, mostly lives in the intertidal zone of seawater. The biggest feature is that the male crab has a pair of large and small cheeks, which are placed in the front chest like a warrior’s shield. It will make the action of dancing the big cheetah, which is called the "tide" movement, in order to intimidate the enemy or courtship. In addition, the crab has a pair of matchstick-like eyes, very cute.
It is said that the honey crab will be taken out from the grand altar one by one, wipe the soup clean, and then paste a piece of golden foil on the surface of the crab shell to cut the dragon and Phoenix decoration, before it can be served on the royal banquet of Emperor Yangdi of the Sui Dynasty. It can also be seen that in the deep inland Luoyang, even in the court, the honey crab is also considered as a high-grade cuisine, which is highly valued.
According to Youyang Miscellaneous Figurines, places like Pingyuan County are not only far away from Chang’an Road, but also by land transportation. Under the traffic conditions at that time, transportation was very difficult. Containers containing sugar crabs were packed in thick felt, tied to the back of the post horse, and run all the way by the official post horse. The post station will be replaced by a post horse, so that the "express" of the journey can reach the Beijing Normal University within the "shelf life" without spoilage. On luxury and arrogance, in fact, it is not inferior to Princess Yang’s flying litchi.
After entering the Song Dynasty, people invented a new method of crab fermentation. Sugar crab and honey crab gradually withdrew from the stage of life. Lu You declared unexpectedly in Lao Xue’an Notes: "Before the Tang Dynasty, all candy speakers were bad ears, such as candy crabs, candy and ginger." It is a natural misunderstanding to think that sugar crab is bad crab.# Understanding the Tang Dynasty#