MUZIChinese Matrix
Soy milk steams in a great cauldron, a worker lifts curds in a cloth over a wooden frame, white tofu is pressed in wooden boxes and cut into blocks, and a basket of golden fried tofu and bowls of silken tofu with scallion stand beside them.
Soaking, grinding and setting beans with brine gave East Asian farming communities a low-cost plant protein; an early Song text already called tofu "little mutton".
Beans and PulsesSoybeans and the other pulses: mung, adzuki and broad beans.
TofuTofu set from soy milk, in soft, firm, dried, fried and frozen forms.
Soy Milk and YubaSoy milk, and yuba and bean-curd sticks made from it.
Vegetarian CuisineMeatless cooking, from monastery vegetarian meals to dishes made to imitate meat and fish.
Bean SnacksSnacks made from soy products, such as stinky tofu.The soybean originated in China, was anciently called shu, has about five thousand years of cultivation, and is the raw material of tofu, soy milk and sauces. The Book of Songs has the line "in the central plains there are beans, and the common people gather them". This class starts from the beans themselves and, besides the soybean, includes mung beans, red beans, broad beans, peas and other pulses.
Tofu is made by soaking beans and grinding them into milk, which is brought to the boil and then set with a coagulant. The coagulants in common use are brine, gypsum and glucono-delta-lactone, and different coagulants give a different texture. The finished product takes forms such as soft tofu, firm tofu, dried tofu, fried tofu and frozen tofu. Soy milk is made by grinding soybeans, straining and boiling, and is drunk sweet or salted; a thin film forms on the surface of heated soy milk, and lifted off and dried it becomes yuba, while the film hung up to dry and shrink into long strips becomes dried bean-curd sticks.
Bean products reach into other kinds of cooking. Vegetarian cuisine means cooking without meat or aquatic animals, and includes temple vegetarian meals, vegetable dishes in restaurants, and imitation meat dishes made from bean products and wheat gluten; imitation meat dishes are also called "tuohun", and vegetarian goose is one example. Bean snacks are snacks made mainly from bean products, and stinky tofu is one of them, fried or roasted; roasted stinky tofu is a common snack at night markets.
Tofu and Soy Foods is the class on beans and bean products in the chapter on the Cuisine. It starts from the soybean and takes in tofu, soy milk and yuba, together with vegetarian cooking and bean snacks. Tofu, made by setting soy milk with a coagulant such as brine or gypsum, is the centre of the class; fermented bean products belong to the classes on fermented curd and douchi, and on sauces and pastes.
This account starts with the bean and then turns to tofu.
The soybean, anciently called shu, has about five thousand years of cultivation, and the Book of Songs already has the line "in the central plains there are beans, and the common people gather them".
On the origin of tofu there are different views, such as a Han origin and a Tang or Song origin, and the question is unsettled. The Qingyi lu of the early Song (attributed to Tao Gu) records tofu being called "little mutton" by local people. Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica (1578) of the Ming describes tofu-making in detail and records the tradition that "the method of tofu began with Liu An, Prince of Huainan, in the Han"; this is one account the book sets down.
Vegetarian eating in Han Buddhism is traditionally traced to Emperor Wu of Liang, who promoted it, and the imitation meat dishes of vegetarian cooking, also called "tuohun", are often made from bean products and wheat gluten. Later, soy milk, yuba, dried bean-curd sticks, vegetarian dishes and snacks each became a class of their own, while fermented tofu belongs to the class on fermented curd and douchi.
A tofu workshop hums: a stone mill grinds soaked soybeans, brine curdles the milk in a cauldron, a press squeezes out the whey, and slabs of silken tofu are carried to market. An inorganic chemical coagulation technique delivering an accessible plant protein revolution.
Early in the morning a family made tofu in the kitchen. The beans had been soaked soft the night before, and now they went into the stone mill spoonful by spoonful and came out as white soy milk.
The mother strained the milk and poured it into a pot to boil. The daughter stood watching and asked: how do we get it to turn into blocks? The mother took a small bowl of brine and dripped it slowly in along the edge of the pot, saying: a little at a time, it cannot be hurried.
The milk in the pot slowly drew together into soft white curds. The mother said that scooped out as it was, it was tofu pudding, and some of it would be made into soft tofu and firm tofu. The daughter tasted a mouthful and said: it is good hot.
Tofu is a bean food made by setting soy milk with a coagulant, the coagulants in common use being brine, gypsum and glucono-delta-lactone; set tofu pudding is counted under tofu. On the origin of tofu there are different views, such as a Han origin and a Tang or Song origin, and the question is unsettled; the Qingyi lu of the early Song (attributed to Tao Gu) records tofu being called "little mutton" by local people. (This is an illustrative story, not a historical account.)
