“Liang Xiang” chestnuts are well known. Here, “Liang Xiang” refers to the former county of “Liang Xiang”, which is equivalent to part of the mountainous area of Beijing’s “Fangshan” district, and is not the county of “Liang Xiang” village. “Liang Xiang” chestnuts are really “Chinese Fangshan chestnuts”. It’s a bit confusing, even for many Chinese.
There are many ways to eat chestnuts, but the most popular are sugar roasted chestnuts.
As soon as the chestnuts are harvested in the fall, you will see cauldrons being set up on every street corner. Mix the chestnuts with sand, sprinkle with sugar syrup, fry until the sand turns black. The chestnuts will look shiny and shiny as if a coating of oil has been applied to the shells. The smell of burning flutters everywhere. People like me who have a craving for chestnuts would come to buy without the vendor calling them. People used to use a shovel to fry, now the process is electric.
The history of Beijing sugar roasted chestnuts is quite long.
Elder “Zhitang” copied others’ quotes from Lu You’s “Old School Notes” in “Roasted Chestnuts”, talking about a history of chestnut roasting – the best-known and best-selling chestnuts in the Northern Song Dynasty Kaifeng they were roasted by Li, HeEr. Others tried their best to imitate, but no one succeeded in the end. During the Shaoxing years of the Southern Song Dynasty, the Song ambassador came to present-day Beijing. Suddenly, two people, calling themselves “Li, HeEr”, sent 20 bags of sugar-roasted chestnuts and then left in tears.
This chestnut-frying expert wandered destitute in Beijing after the Jin people invaded Kaifeng, expressing his homesickness with several packets of roasted chestnuts. Perhaps Beijing’s sugar-roasted chestnuts were passed down because of this, just like Hangzhou’s Song sister-in-law’s fish soup, they were all ancient customs of the Northern Song dynasty.
Standard sugar roasted chestnuts require the shell to be supple and crisp. The outer shell, inner membrane, and nut should effortlessly separate when you open it. The pleasure of eating roasted chestnuts would simply vanish if one had to go through the trouble of tearing off the outer shell, and then more effort is required to tear off the inner membrane. Nuts should not be crunchy, soft, or worse, hard (gen). It is supposed to feel damp in dry, sandy, mealy, and the smell should be strong and sweet.
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