There is a popular saying in Sichuan: "Hot pot is a group of people's hot pot, and hot pot is a person's hot pot." When you first hear this sentence, you may think it is a bit "nonsense", but if you taste it carefully, it is not only It tells the relationship between hot pot and cooking, and also shows the contrast between solitude and joyful gatherings.
I haven’t eaten Maocai for a long time. When I passed by a Maocai stall, it instantly brought my memory back to my college days. My roommate just came to Chengdu from Hebei. One day not long after school started, she suddenly asked me seriously: "What kind of dish is Maocai?" I laughed. So I took her to see what Maocai was. Later, when I graduated from college in my senior year, my roommate had gone from being a novice who could only hold a few dishes in a small bamboo basket to being a master at making dishes. At the same time, she also changed from a northerner who was so spicy that she cried even if she took a bite of maocai in the original soup, to a spicy girl who needs to add millet pepper to eat maocai.
Maocai is actually not a name, but a verb. The key is "to take", which means to put the vegetables in the pot, cook them and then pick them up. There are many snacks in Chengdu, but why is Maocai so popular? The secrets are all in the bottom of the pot. The soup pot of Maocai is made by stir-frying various spices and butter until fragrant, and adding stock and various Chinese herbal seasonings. In terms of the taste of the pot base and the preparation method, Maocai and hot pot are similar. The aroma of a delicious maocai can often be smelled from a long distance away.
Speaking of what kind of dishes Maocai is, I think it can be understood as a "mini version" of self-service hot pot. The boss cuts all kinds of vegetables, puts them into baskets by category, and then hands the diners a bamboo basket. There are big and small bamboo baskets, with different sizes and different prices. The diners can put whatever dishes they want into the bamboo baskets themselves, and they can put more or less according to their own abilities. Some people can use small bamboo baskets to make them weigh as much as big bamboo baskets, while others can use big bamboo baskets to make them weigh as much as small bamboo baskets. Here I have to talk about a set of "pretending to cook" skills summed up by my roommate. Place hard vegetables such as tofu, duck blood, and meat at the bottom of the small bamboo basket, followed by mushrooms; place them in a circle around the edge. Lettuce slices, potato slices, lotus root slices, the purpose of this is to increase the height of the small bamboo basket; on top, place space-consuming vegetables such as hot pot noodles. In this way, you can get a large portion for a small price. In response, our roommate also held a "skills training session" for us. Looking back now, making maocai once became a great pleasure in our student days.
Let’s talk about what we mentioned at the beginning: “Maocai is one person’s hot pot.” There is a joke that there is nothing in the lives of Chengdu people that cannot be solved by one hot pot. If one meal is not enough, then two meals. There is really no hot pot. Mao Cai is also ok. Maocai perfectly solves the problem of a person wanting to eat hot pot, but ordering one portion of the pot is exaggerated, ordering several dishes is a waste, and sitting alone in a hot pot restaurant is a mess. Maocai not only has the taste of hot pot, but also can eat hot pot dishes, and one person can eat as much as he wants without wasting it, and everyone can share the table together and it will be lively. In the fast-paced urban life, Maocai really helps busy people realize "eating well alone".
