What is a potted vegetable and how to cook it?

Pot dish is a traditional food in the New Territories of Hong Kong, which has a history of hundreds of years and is a kind of hodgepodge. Traditional potted vegetables are put in wooden or antimony pots. Pot-dish banquets are held in villages in the New Territories on festive days such as the occupation of new homes, the opening of ancestral temples or the lighting of Chinese New Year.

At the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, the Yuan Army went south, and Min joined hands with Lu Xiufu, Zhang Shijie and others to extricate themselves. When they passed by the walled village in Jintian, New Territories, Hong Kong, they were warmly received by the villagers. But in a hurry, the villagers couldn't find enough utensils to hold food, so they had to put the dishes together in big wooden pots and develop them into pots. Since then, every major festival, the villagers will enjoy potted vegetables.

There are no special regulations on the materials used in pot dishes, but they usually include radish, bamboo shoots, squid, pigskin, mushrooms, chicken, herring balls, pork and so on. Now many pot dishes may even include donkey-hide gelatin, prawns, Nostoc flagelliforme, oyster sauce and dried eel. Chinese pork is the essence of the whole pot of dishes, and it takes the most time to cook.

The food of potted vegetables will be placed from top to bottom in a certain order. On the upper floor, there will be some expensive things that need to be eaten first, such as chicken and shrimp; Put some materials that are easy to absorb juice at the bottom, such as pigskin and radish. When you eat potted vegetables, you will eat them layer by layer from top to bottom.

Although potted vegetables are traditionally held in wooden pots, most of them have been replaced by metal pots or ceramic pots to facilitate heating and disinfection before eating.