Beautiful articles about life in Jokhang Temple: butter tea and sweet tea

The Old Guangming Tea House near the Jokhang Temple is more famous, and the Magpie Pavilion on Barkhor Street is more suitable for ordering a pound of butter tea in the morning when there are not many visitors in this old Tibetan house, and drinking it slowly all morning. Sweet tea is made with milk, while the butter used in butter tea is the butterfat separated from milk, which is cheese.

Eating milk and cheese is a long-standing habit of nomadic people. Hui Hui Husi Hui Ji of the Mongolian and Yuan Dynasties wrote about the method of making cheese, which is to boil cow and goat milk and stir it frequently. After boiling and letting it cool, the floating skin is plundered. If you think it's crispy, add a little old cheese, seal it with paper, and it's ready. According to the quotations from Taiping Yulan, it is mentioned that during the Han and Jin Dynasties, there were also records of raising sheep to sell cheese and paying for it, and Qi Min Yaoshu also had various methods of making cheese. At that time, people in China even believed that consuming milk had magical effects similar to those of gods.

The biography of Emperor Mu mentioned that people from the Jusou Kingdom asked King Mu of Zhou to drink the blood of white swans and bathe his feet with cow and goat milk. It is written in the Ten Questions on Silk Books in Mawangdui that drinking the milk of beasts can make you grow old and strong. In other words, drinking milk of cows and goats can live forever and rejuvenate you. Therefore, if conditions permit, milking cows to make cheese is popular in frontier fortresses or palaces. In the Han Dynasty, there was an official title called Maoma. The official name came from the action of grabbing the floating skin when making cheese from horse milk.

Horse cheese tastes like wine, and drinking it can also make you drunk, so it is called horse wine, and horse wine is what people now call kumiss. In the border area, Han tomb stones from Sunjiayuanze Village, Dangcha Township, Hengshan County, Shaanxi Province, include images of people milking goats, and images of people trying to milk horses but being kicked by the horses.

Butter tea has its own peculiar smell, but if you are in the far west where there are few people inhabiting it, even lukewarm butter tea can drive away the cold and relieve hunger like the rain in the desert, even if the tea maker throws in the cow dung he just grabbed The hands of the stove grabbed the tea leaves and threw them into the water pot. The tea that was served was still floating with wool. This was undoubtedly a delicacy.

Now that I can’t drink butter tea, I make milk tea. Sprinkle sugar into the pot, heat until it becomes a brown melt, be careful not to let it clump, pour in the milk, add tea leaves, and add water according to taste. Because I have no income for a long time, I often add a lot of water. After all, milk is not cheap. , slowly boil over low heat, and you can drink milk tea, which is similar to sweet tea. When drinking it, you will occasionally think of the deserted wilderness that makes people despair.

The author of this article: The Fool.

(Public account: Chubu Reader)

This article is an original article, the copyright belongs to the author, and may not be reproduced without authorization!