Kunlun Purple Gourd

  A short while later, Shangde brought another piece of rice paper with the problem "Chicken and Rabbit in the Same Cage": "Chickens and rabbits are in the same cage, but it's unknown how many. Thirty-six heads are exposed from the cage. The total number of feet is fifty pairs. How many chickens and rabbits are there?"

  Su You smiled slightly, wrote two equations on his notebook and solved the answer in less than half a minute. This time, however, he didn't need to explain it as Chefu and Shangde were already impressed by his confidence. In fact, such quadratic equations would only be taught in junior high school in later generations, but Su You had no problem with them even before he was ten years old.

  About half a stick of incense later, Shang De brought another question about a cubic equation, called "Han Xin's troop counting". It is said that Han Xin, a great general of the Han Dynasty, used a special method to count the number of soldiers. His method was: first, let the soldiers line up in three columns, then in five columns, and finally in seven columns. As long as he knew the approximate number of soldiers, he could infer the exact number based on how many soldiers were left in the last row of each lineup. If Han Xin saw that the last row of soldiers in each lineup had 2 people, 3 people, and 4 people respectively, and knew that there were approximately 300-400 soldiers, can you quickly calculate the exact number of soldiers?

  Such a question would certainly not stump Su You, and if he didn't intentionally drag out the time to save face for the person who came up with the question, he could have given the answer within one minute.

  However, Su You was no longer an innocent child who didn't know the ways of the world. So he deliberately spent more than ten times the effort pretending to struggle with this problem that wasn't difficult in the first place, lest his intelligence be too astonishing and shocking.

  Destruction is always easier and faster than construction. Fortunately, the young master was only copying from an ancient book or hearsay, and wasn't the one who came up with the question. When Su You finally solved the correct answer, he couldn't help but feel a mix of surprise and delight, as if he had stumbled upon a treasure. He then ordered the carriage to stop.

  Su You descended from the carriage and first went to the side of the road for a bout of dry heaving, but nothing came out. When he thought about finding water to drink, he saw that just several hundred meters away was a river. On the other side was a small hill several li square, with scattered thickets of shrubs faintly visible after the rain had cleared up. Several dozen soldiers had already rushed over to surround and hunt, leaving only four or five guards beside Yang Su.

  The women also got off the bus, setting up the awning, arranging the soft couches, obviously wanting to have a belated spring outing by the Wei River. Isn't that right? Now that the season has already passed Lixia, in another two months, it will be time for autumn outings.

  "What else can you do?" Shang De smiled and nodded at Su You, while Yang Yu acknowledged his cleverness from a distance without inviting him to come forward. Su You naturally understood that, whether for safety reasons or due to their different identities, how could the prince possibly swarm around him like bees to honey?

  "What else can I endure? Does cooking and burning dishes count? How about painting? Maybe it's just a hobby. Su You didn't tell Shang De that his job was actually a photographer, and most of the time he would add some travel notes to the pictures and send them to certain donkey friend magazines. Later someone said that only Guan Xi teacher understood photography art, while others were just playing with equipment; inspired by this, Su You also started to increase writing and painting in his travels."

  In a sense, he is still a foodie, and for someone who pursues high-quality life, it's inevitable to flip through some cookbooks.

  Shang De heard the sound and just smiled, Su You didn't mind either; then he squatted down by the water's edge, scooped up two handfuls of water to drink, and started washing his face.

  The river water doesn't care about him either, it just flows eastward, day and night.

  "Our best chef here got a cold yesterday and probably can't move his hands, can you help out a bit?" Shang De went back and forth, hesitated after saying such a request to Su You. "A gentleman does not enter the kitchen", such a request is of course a kind of insult, but Su You just didn't have this awareness.

  "Want me to cook? Let me try." Su You nodded in response.

  In his lifetime, the phrase "a gentleman keeps a distance from the kitchen" had already been given a new interpretation. Or rather, after more than two thousand years, the original era was no longer ancient, and they no longer had the values and moral views of the Spring and Autumn period. - A gentleman stays away from the kitchen, out of sight, out of mind, but still eats meat, how hypocritical!

  Su You tied up her hair, washed her hands clean, and several helpers had already lit the fire. She only remembered that one of them was called "Qing Wei", and another was called "Zi Su". The youngest was not yet thirteen or fourteen, while the oldest was over thirty or forty. They were dressed in simple clothes, and their faces didn't have any remarkable features.

  As soon as he thought that the old man was Yang Guang's son, Su You felt relieved about the appearance of the two women. It was only natural, according to tradition, that the Yang Guang family did not have beautiful maidservants. In order to obtain the position of crown prince, Yang Guang often wore coarse clothing and used simple furniture, even the servants were either disabled or had average looks.

  Yang Guang's second son, Yang Ye, was a rare talent, not only outstanding in his behavior, but also deeply favored by his parents Yang Guang and his wife, as well as his grandfather Yang Jian.

  But the two names still made Su You swear at Yang Ye for a moment, calling him a "foodie". Thinking about it again, he secretly praised him, after all, even if their names were dish names, they still had a real origin. The sentence "参差荇菜，左右流之" in the Book of Songs has already made people think wildly, perhaps Su You was indeed too tired, a night of anxiety, plus half a day of escape, making him lose too much energy.

  Qing Wei and several other little maids were washing vegetables on the other side, the dishes were not complicated, just cabbage and eggs, etc. - Cabbage, also known as Chinese cabbage in later generations, - what was amazing was that there were even eggplants.

  "I'll just do this then." Su You pointed at those few water-soaked eggplants.

  "Ah, you know this?" Qing Wei's surprise was somewhat rare and strange.

  "Is this thing rare? I seem to remember eating it before, but maybe it was in a dream." Su You didn't know when the eggplant was introduced to China, but he did recall that its origin and sugarcane's should both be in Southeast Asia, perhaps Vietnam or Malaysia.

  Su You looked up the earliest recorded method of braising eggplant before doing it for the first time, which was in "Qimin Yaoshu", an agricultural book written during the Northern Wei dynasty, over a hundred years ago; In the early Song Dynasty, more than 400 years later, a scholar still had his first taste of eggplant and called it "Kunlun purple melon". ——This fully proves the preciousness of eggplant, probably only upper-class people can eat it.

  What Su You didn't know was that during the Jin Dynasty, when Tao Kan and Wen Jiao were putting down the rebellion of Su Jun, the place where their two armies converged was a field of eggplants. It had been nearly three hundred years since then from his current time.

  Suddenly, I thought of the famous "茄鲞" in "Dream of Red Mansions". "This isn't difficult. Take the eggplant that has just been picked, peel it and only use the flesh, cut it into small pieces, fry them with chicken oil, then use chicken breast meat and mushrooms, new bamboo shoots, mushrooms, five-spice dried tofu, and various dried fruits, all cut into small pieces, simmer them in chicken broth until dry, add some fragrant oil and mix well, put it in a porcelain jar and seal it tightly. When you want to eat it, take it out and mix it with stir-fried chicken melon."

  "You mean you've had this Nanhai purple gourd? And you know three ways to cook it?" Yu Zhang Wang couldn't help but be shocked, as he had bought over a dozen pots of this peculiar eggplant at a high price in Yangzhou earlier this spring, thinking it was a rare treasure to be offered to his imperial grandfather Yang Jian. Over the past few months, he had eaten it several times, but only boiled or stir-fried, and although he hadn't tasted anything special, he had always believed it was highly nutritious. Now, hearing Su You's words, he couldn't help but feel astonished.

  "Ah, doing this...this Nanhai purple gourd, in the agricultural book 'Qimin Yaoshu' it is recorded, indeed under the category of melons, but the name is 'eggplant', so many people overlook it, and some places call it 'Kunlun purple gourd'. Su You said while calculating the seasonings with his fingers, almost letting slip that in this era there was no white sugar or yellow sugar to speak of, and definitely no chili peppers, because the origin of chili peppers is on the American continent, and Columbus won't appear on the historical stage for nearly eight hundred years."

  More than ten minutes passed, Su You showed nearly perfect knife skills in front of Yang Guang. Two eggplants were cut into uniform thin strips, and various seasonings were prepared. Next was the stir-fry, this is the method for braised eggplant, unfortunately, the two eggplants seemed to be a small quantity.

  Another two eggplants had already been buried by Su You in the warm ash, with flames still burning on top. Just wait for the eggplant to be cooked through, then add fermented bean paste, garlic, oil, salt and other seasonings, mash them up and they can be eaten. This is a local method from Su You's hometown, but I don't know what it's called.

  The braised eggplant and steamed eggplant were both done to perfection, and everyone had already sensed the artistry in Su You's cooking techniques. How could they not be nearly flawless? Yang Ye and his wife finished their meal, exclaiming that it was delicious. When the hunters returned, Su You used a small deer to make a barbecue, and also made two wild ducks into "beggar's chicken".

  Those who used to just throw animals into a big pot and cook them wildly now know what delicious food is; after eating, everyone's praise for Su You was continuous, and Su You also filled his stomach with constant tastings.

  A group of people were eating with gusto, when several villagers came over, loudly condemning and protesting. It turned out that the soldiers had trampled their crops and fences during the hunt.

  "Give them a few taels of copper cash, and send them off properly. Warn them not to try to report to the authorities or try to find out who I really am." Yang Yu was enjoying his meal and didn't mind the chatter of the common people, but instead thought of using money to settle the matter quietly. However, he seemed to have overlooked that the flying banner of the Yu Zhang Wang was like a firefly in the dark night, deeply revealing his true identity...

  Fortunately, whether it is a stubborn people or an obedient people, condemnation and protest are just a performance of saving face; in the face of absolute power, and with Tongzi as a cover-up, they quickly chose to surrender and then dispersed, from then on they disappeared.