"This thing… could it be douhua?"
Lu Su tapped the end of his brush, thinking out loud.
Seeing everyone else turn to look at him, Lu Su straightened his expression and explained:
"In Jiangdong, I have seen something called douhua. It is said that the Prince of Huainan discovered it by accident while seeking an elixir of immortality."
"It looks like yellowish cotton clumping together. The taste is sour and fishy. It does not keep well, and the process is rather troublesome. It is mostly treated as a snack for children."
What he said matched perfectly with what the light screen had described.
Comparing Lu Su's douhua with the tofu displayed by later generations on the screen, the difference was obvious.
The later tofu looked like jade and was exceptionally tender and smooth. Its color resembled congealed cream, yet without any greasy heaviness. No wonder refined scholars were said to love it.
Pang Tong gave a small sigh and said:
"It is clearly food, yet it is named with the word 'rot.' No wonder people say it is hard for this thing to enter elegant halls."
Just from the name alone, it really was not very refined.
Fa Zheng strongly agreed and began discussing with Pang Tong what kind of better name might suit it.
Liu Bei, however, was looking at the title of a book written by people of a fallen Northern Song, and a faint melancholy rose in his heart.
Emperor Guangwu continued the Han mandate and set the capital at Luoyang, yet he still honored the Former Han capital of Chang'an.
Thus from that time on, people called Luoyang the Eastern Capital, and Chang'an the Western Capital.
In his youth, Liu Bei had studied in the Eastern Capital, racing horses, fighting dogs, competing in fine clothes.
Now he governed people near the Western Capital. He could not help but wonder how much life still remained in the Eastern Capital, which Dong Zhuo had once burned to the ground.
So when he looked at books like Records of Splendors of the Eastern Capital and Dreams of Liang, written after the fall of the two Song, Liu Bei felt even more sighing in his heart. He felt a faint sense of resonance with their authors.
If it were possible, how could he not wish to live a mediocre life in the Eastern Capital, never needing to shoulder the weight of Heaven and Earth?
If there had not been so many calamities, then in the Eastern Capital today, Mengde would probably still be peeking over beautiful women's walls and getting chased and beaten.
Yuan Benchu would surely laugh loudly, yet in the end still reach out a hand to pull him up.
Gongsun Bogui would return to Youzhou after finishing his studies to guard the frontier with the White Horse troops.
And he, Liu Bei, if he grew tired of staying in the Eastern Capital, might also take his second and third brothers north to Youzhou to open up the borders.
For a moment, Liu Bei was lost in thought.
Kongming said nothing, but his hand never stopped.
The four simple steps for making tofu, described by later generations, were already written out neatly on paper.
And after every step, Kongming was trying to break those simple four characters into even more detailed, more practical sub-steps.
For example, in the simplest step of grinding beans and filtering pulp, should the beans poured into the mill be dry beans or soaked beans? If soaked, how long should they be soaked?
Later generations said that depending on what coagulant was used, the resulting tofu would differ greatly.
But in Kongming's experience, such processes also followed the principle that a tiny difference could lead to a thousand-mile error. Just a small change in the very first step could result in a completely different final product.
So in his heart, Kongming was already thinking about who would be the most suitable person to entrust with the task of making tofu.
…
"Bianliang really was lost."
Zhao Kuangyin's dark face now showed clear signs of fatigue.
They had not yet fully sorted out the issues of harsh taxes and military expenditures mentioned earlier, and now they were seeing the fall of the two Song and scholars writing in sorrow to remember their old capital.
From the way things were described, he had long suspected that the change from Northern Song to Southern Song involved a relocation of the capital.
But now, seeing with his own eyes that the capital was set at Lin'an, he still found it extremely hard to accept.
This place was not unfamiliar to him.
After all, the one who controlled the Kingdom of Wuyue was the Qian family of Lin'an.
Qian Liu had been a military governor of Zhenhai under the Tang, yet he successively submitted to Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, and Later Han.
When Zhao Kuangyin had once been full of ambition, he had mocked such people for only knowing how to cling to a corner and serve as submissive vassals.
He never imagined that…
Zhao Kuangyin suddenly felt his face burning.
Only now, recalling the sighs of Southern Song scholars shown on the light screen, did he gain a bit more understanding. His mood became extremely complicated.
"Indeed… a son should be like Sun Zhongmou…"
After all, the great emperor of Wu had set his capitals at Jianye and Wuchang, both cities by great rivers, still holding intentions to advance north.
But Lin'an lay five hundred li south even before crossing the river. Compared to Sun Quan, this kind of resolve was on an entirely different level.
Once the matter of relocating the capital was involved, Zhao Guangyi automatically fell silent, focusing fully on the light screen.
Zhao Pu stepped forward and softly comforted him:
"From this, although the nation met with disaster, the common people still remembered the court's governance and remembered the blessings of our Song."
"If there was failure, much of the blame may lie with Heaven, not with what men could control."
Although the disaster of paper money and the sins of foolish rulers were also mentioned, at this moment Zhao Kuangyin could only temporarily allow himself to believe this explanation.
As for this tofu…
Zhao Kuangyin raised his hand and casually pointed, giving an order to a eunuch:
"Copy down the method and send it to the Imperial Kitchen. Also, find one or two skilled tofu grinders from among the people and have them refine it, to add a dish for the New Year."
He had never eaten it, but since Dream Records of Liang could describe tofu, then folk methods must already exist.
Let them look up related records and improve upon them. It should not be too difficult.
[Lightscreen]
[From another angle, the reason Ming dynasty tofu technology could fully develop was not only because of time, but more importantly because agricultural techniques studied since the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period reached an initial level of maturity by the Ming.
In soybean cultivation, the Qin and Han already recognized the importance of fertilization.
During the Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties, the invention of the iron-toothed harrow made it easier for common people to level fields, and mixed cropping techniques also began to appear in this period.
In the Tang and Song, southern regions developed rice-upland rotation, while northern regions emphasized deep plowing and fine harrowing. Both approaches truly increased per-mu yields.
By the Yuan dynasty, things went a step further. People first recognized the importance of moisture retention and began using land leveling to compact the upper soil layer to lock in water and nutrients below.
In addition, although ancient people could not see or understand root-nodule bacteria, they still discovered that soybean planting was very good at preserving soil nutrients.
Increasing soil fertility and improving crop rotation systems did not require microscopes to understand. Combined with improvements in soybean cultivation, by the end of the Ming, soybean planting area continued to expand.
From the mid-Ming onward, soybean planting area exceeded twenty million mu, with annual production over three million tons, reaching a historical peak.
As per-mu soybean yields rose rapidly, tofu production techniques using soybeans were also improved. This food formally entered tens of thousands of households, eaten by both nobles and commoners alike.
And the residue left over from tofu production, soybean meal, led the Ming dynasty to climb to yet another peak for a traditional feudal empire.
Just as the Song inherited and expanded Tang papermaking technology, people of the Tang and Song had already discovered that soybeans could be pressed for oil.
And whether from oil pressing or tofu making, the leftover soybean meal and soybean dregs were extremely high-quality livestock feed.
For a Ming dynasty that did not lack soybeans at all, the greatest significance of this was that it made private horse-raising much easier.
Ming horse administration did not differ greatly from Han and Tang, but relying on extremely cheap yet highly nutritious soybean meal, by the mid-Ming, the total number of horses nationwide far exceeded that of Han and Tang.
Although how many of those were qualified warhorses is another matter, for the Ming, the rapid rise in soybean production truly lowered the threshold and difficulty of raising horses.]