A Field Guide · sister to The Reel and the Recluse

At the Mouth of the Min 閩江口

Fishing and preparing the catch in eleventh-century South China
sourced · Twinkie-scanned · ● ready for your read
Before West-Curtain Hill the egrets fly;
peach-blossom, running water, the mandarin-fish fat.
西塞山前白鷺飛，桃花流水鱖魚肥 — Zhang Zhihe, Fisherman's Song, the Tang lyric that founds the genre. [attested] The hill is in Wu; the fish it names runs in our river too. Out here the song you actually fish by is the croaker's — see below.

This is a working guide to the fish of the Min estuary around the year 1050: where to stand, what swims there, how it was taken, and what the kitchen did with it. It stands on its own. The painting essays it keeps company with sit inside a recluse's abstract cold lake; this one steps off that boat onto a real coast, the one the rest of the cave's scholarship already lives on — post-Min, now Song, and busy. Where it brushes those essays — the tackle, a method — it gives you what you need on the spot and points to them only as further pleasure, never as homework. Where the record is thin, it says so.

The model for a guide like this is local and exact. 蔡襄 (Cai Xiang, 1012–1067), a Putian man who governed Quanzhou and Fuzhou in these very years and built the great stone sea-bridge, wrote a treatise on the prefecture's lychees and another on its tea — cultivation, varieties, drying, the red-salt cure — the practical cataloguing of good local things.1 [attested] What follows is the same impulse turned from the orchard to the water.

✦

The water

The Min comes down past Fuzhou and meets the sea in a wide brackish mouth, and that mouth is three fisheries stacked in a few miles. Where you stand decides everything — the species, the gear, and the dish all change with the salt.

Above the salt line is fresh river: slow green water, carp country, the spring spawning-runs. The estuary flats are where salt meets sweet on the tide — mud and stone, the shellfish ground, the fish that move in and out with the water. Off the mouth is open sea, and the great seasonal shoals that come and go by the calendar. A fisher reads the tide first and the water's colour second, and works the band that suits the day.

The gear

Little of it is elaborate; most is old. On the river, the rod with its centre-pin reel 釣車 — the same wheel the recluse turns in The Kit — gives line to a running fish; a baited hook holds in the current. Across a channel goes the weir 魚梁, a fence of stakes and stones that funnels fish into a trap as the water drops; on the tidal flats its coastal cousin, the weir 滬 — a fence set across the shallows — fishes by itself on the falling tide, the catch left stranded behind it.2 [attested · Tang] There is the square lift-net 罾 dipped from a bank or boat, the cast-net thrown over a shoal, the basket-trap 筌 set in the reeds, and the cormorant 鸕鶿 on its tether. On the rocks at low water, the oysters are simply split off where they grow. [attested]

And one method is done by ear, because the fish is rightly named: the croaker croaks, drumming with its swim-bladder — faint in the hand, and carrying far better in the water — and a spawning shoal turns thousands of small drums into one low resonance you can feel through a planked hull. The old way to find a run is to lay a hollow bamboo to the water, or an ear to the bottom of the boat, and listen for that before the net goes down.3 [attested · the technique recorded later; the resonance is a constant of the fish]

The fish — the fresh river

Above the brackish line: carp water, and the spring runs.

鯉 carp. The staple, netted or hooked the year round; the milky soup, the steamed fish, and the classic quarry of the raw slice 膾 (see Preparing the Catch). [attested]

鱖 mandarin fish. The fish of the peach-blossom freshet in the song; an ambush hunter, taken on live bait; squirrel-cut and fried, or steamed. [attested]

鰣 shad. The late-spring prize, running up from the sea to spawn; netted only at the run, steamed with its scales left on, and eaten strictly in its few weeks. [attested]

鰻 eel. In the mud and stone; trapped or lined; suited above all to the red lees (below) or a long braise. [attested]

the four carls — 青 草 鰱 鱅. Black, grass, silver, and bighead carp: the pond-and-river bulk, raised as much as caught, on the oldest aquaculture in the world. [attested]

The fish — the estuary flats

Where salt meets sweet on the tide: the shellfish ground.

鱸 sea-bass. Comes into the brackish reach on the tide and fattens in the autumn wind — the perch a man once resigned his office to go home and eat (see The Perch); steamed whole if it is fresh enough. [attested]

鯔 mullet. Grazes the brackish mud in schools; netted; the flesh plain, the roe pressed and dried into a delicacy. [attested · roe-drying widespread, local locus to pin]

鱭 coilia. The thin silver knife-fish that runs into the estuary in spring; taken in numbers; salted and dried, or eaten fresh and bony. [attested]

蟹 crab. On the flats and among the stones; trapped or hand-caught. The everyday swimming crab 梭子蟹 goes to the pot, steamed or wine-cured (see Crab and Wine); but the heavy mud crab of the brackish mud — the 蟳, the 紅蟳 — is a dish to dazzle, and waits below. [attested]

蟶 razor clam · 蚶 blood cockle. Dug and gathered from the mud at low tide; cooked quick and barely — the cockle scalded, the razor flashed in heat — or dried for keeping. [attested]

蠣 oyster. They build the “oyster-mountains” 蠔山 on the tidal rocks — Su Song, a Fujian man of these years, describes them piling up like chambered houses — split off where they grow.4 [attested] At our date they are gathered wild from the rock; growing them on planted stakes is documented later. [cultivation later]

The fish — the open sea

Off the mouth: the seasonal shoals.

黃魚 / 石首 yellow croaker, the stone-head fish. The star of the coast, and the strangest entry in the guide. It carries two stones in its skull — the ear-stones that gave it its name — and it spawns in shoals that stretch for miles in the fourth month, drumming loud enough to hear through the hull. Found by ear, netted across the current; red-braised or done in the red lees while fresh; the swim-bladder dried into prized fish-maw 膠, and the glut salted down.3 [attested]

帶魚 hairtail. A long silver ribbon of the cold months; netted or long-lined; fried or red-braised, and salts and keeps as well as any fish in the market. [attested]

鯧 pomfret. Flat and fine; steamed plain, with no sauce to mask it — the test of freshness. [attested]

烏賊 / 墨魚 cuttlefish. Inshore in season, with its bone and its ink; eaten fresh, but above all split and dried — the dried form a staple that travels. [attested]

鯊 dogfish. Small sharks taken off the mouth; the flesh salted, the skin and fin kept; a coarse fish put to thrifty use. [attested · modest]

The kitchen

One preparation belongs to this coast before any other: the red lees, 紅糟. They are the dregs left when the region's red-yeast-rice wine is pressed off — glutinous rice fermented with red 麴 — and rubbed on a fish or stewed with it, they turn the flesh rose, lift the smell of the sea off it, and hold it a few days longer than it would otherwise keep. It is the local hand on eel, on croaker, on nearly anything.5 [attested]

The rest is plain method, and the estuary cook keeps a short, sure repertoire. Steam 蒸 the freshest and finest — the pomfret, the bass — where nothing can hide behind a sauce. Cook the bony crucian down to the milky soup 羹. Keep the raw slice 膾 for carp and mandarin, though even here it is passing out of fashion. Red-braise 紅燒 the heavy-fleshed croaker and the hairtail. And against the glut of a good run, the keeping arts: wind-dry it into 鯗, salt it hard, ferment it down to 鮓, render the small fry to fish-sauce 魚露, and dry the croaker's bladder for glue. [attested]

Each of these is a craft in itself — the knife-work of the slice, the slow building of a 鮓 — and each is given room of its own in the companion essay Preparing the Catch. Here it is enough to know which fish wants which hand.

One rule governs all of it, the same as on the lake: catch the fish at its moment and cook it at once. Everything in this section is what you do when you cannot.

Dishes to dazzle

Almost everything above is for eating — caught at its moment, cooked at once, set down without ceremony. A few dishes are for showing: built to stun a table, worth the trouble and the cost, the ones a host brings out to be admired before they are touched. Here the guide slows down and lets the prose off the leash. The rest of it keeps its voice down; this is where it does not.

The red crab in its own roe 紅蟳

The estuary's aristocrat, and the one crab a Fuzhou table sets down to be looked at. It is the 蝤蛑 of the old books and the 青蟹 of the coast — the blue-green crab — a heavy, saw-edged mud crab that dens in the brackish flats at the river mouth and turns so fierce in the eighth month that the Tang naturalists swore it could meet a tiger and the tiger would lose.6 The common swimming crab is good eating; this is not that. The prize is the roe-laden female, the 紅蟳, her whole shell packed tight with orange curd — rated along this coast above any other crab, and carried up the road as tribute.

Steam her plain, so nothing stands between the eater and the roe; crack the snow-white claws; and take her as Su Shi would take her a half-century past our date, in the one couplet that holds the whole pleasure of it — half a shell of roe, fit to take with wine; the two claws like cut snow, urging another bowl of rice.6 Or give her the local hand: bed her in the red lees and let the shell go rose over the fire. Autumn for the roe, spring for the flesh — 七蟳、八蠘、九毛蟹, as the old calendar runs the crabs off month by month. [attested · Su Shi, Youmou; the tiger from the Tang Youyang zazu; tribute per later Fuzhou gazetteers]

Golden relish, jade slices 金齏玉膾

The supreme dish of the raw slice, and by 1050 already a little elegiac — the high point of an art the table was starting to set down. Take the estuary's sea-bass at its whitest, after a frost, when the flesh runs pale as snow and clean of any smell, and lay a practised knife to it: thread it into slices so fine the old poets pretended a breeze could carry them off the board — the phoenix-knife flying, as they wrote it. That is the jade.

The gold is the relish set beside it in its own dish, never poured over: garlic, ginger, and salt pounded with sour white plum, tangerine peel, and cooked chestnut — the chestnut carrying both the colour and a low sweetness — loosened to a paste with good vinegar. Strew the white slices with the cut leaves of an aromatic herb and its purple flower-spikes, and the plate comes up white and green and wine-red at once. Handed it on his progress south, made of Wu's famous perch, the Sui emperor is said to have called it the finest flavour of the southeast and left it this name. It is the same fish, and the same homesickness, that once made a man resign his post and go (see The Perch).7 [attested · relish from the Qimin yaoshu; the emperor's line via the Song Taiping guangji; the slice fading by Song]

The whole croaker of the run 黃魚

The open sea's prize, worth a feast at the one moment it earns one: the great spawning run of the fourth month, when the stone-head fish come in shoals that drum through the hull and a boat that listens well rows home loaded. The grand way is to leave the fish whole — one heavy croaker, scaled and scored, steamed clear so the white flesh stands plain, or given the coast's own hand and stewed rose in the red lees, the skin taking the colour of the wine. A humble thing, found by ear in the mud-brown water, set down in honour at the head of the table.

And nothing of the great fish is thrown away. The swim-bladder is lifted whole, washed, and dried to a pale translucent leaf — fish-maw, 魚肚, the croaker's 花膠 — put by and, another day, soaked back into a stew it thickens to silk. It was already a delicacy of the great in the old books, though the grand cabinet of dried sea-treasures it would one day belong to was still filling out at our date; the odd part is that the very same dried bladder, melted down, is the glue that holds a wooden cabinet together.8 [attested · the run and the listening as above; the maw a luxury of the great, its grand canon later]

Whose feast?

One last thing, and it turns back on the guide itself. Everything above is a ranking — keeper and trash and bait, the dazzle dish and the salt-barrel surplus — and that ranking is this coast's, set at this coast's table. It is not in the fish. Carry the same net to another shore and the prize turns bait and the bait turns prize; you need not even leave China to watch it come apart. Han Yu, banished more than two centuries before our date to the far southern coast, was set before the oysters and octopus and horseshoe crab a Min table eats without a thought, and forced them down with salt and sour and orange, sweating, calling the smell rank — and balked outright at the snake.9 The southern feast was a northerner's ordeal. So take this for what it is: a record of how one estuary, at one table, in one century, sorted its waters into food and not-food and the merely useful. It sorts; it does not legislate. The fish never agreed to any of it.

Sources

Frame and patron: 蔡襄 Cai Xiang (1012–67), Lizhi pu 荔枝譜 (1059) and Cha lu 茶錄 — the model of the local product-treatise; prefect of Fuzhou twice (1045–47, 1056–58) and of Quanzhou (the Wan'an/Luoyang bridge, 1053–59) — so c. 1050 sits in his Fuzhou years. Song: Zhang Zhihe 張志和, Yu ge zi 漁歌子 (Tang, genre source); Lu Guimeng 陸龜蒙, Yu ju shi 漁具詩 (gear, as in the angler essay). Croaker: the stone-head fish 石首 and its ear-stones in Song gazetteers (e.g. Baoqing Siming zhi 寶慶四明志) and, for Fujian specifically, the Ming Minzhong haicuo shu 閩中海錯疏 (Tu Benjun); the bamboo-tube listening and the thunderous fourth-month run as recorded in later fishing books, the run itself long predating them. Oysters: Su Song 蘇頌 on the rock-grown 蠔山 of Min. Red lees: 紅糟 / red yeast rice 紅麴 — red-yeast cooking in Tao Gu's Qingyilu (c. 965), the red wine tied to Min by Su Shi (NSong) and the Jilei bian (12th c.). Weir: the tidal 滬 named in Tang verse (Dai Shulun; and Lu You, Song). Cross-refs: Preparing the Catch (the kitchen in full); The Quarry, The Perch, Crab and Wine, The Crucian Carp, The Kit. [▲ source pass done: red lees, the tidal weir, and Cai Xiang's postings are now dated above. Two threads stay genuinely open — when deliberate oyster cultivation begins on this coast, and the earliest locus for finding the croaker by sound (the bamboo-tube description is Ming; the run is older). The species roster is sound; the residual softness is those two technique-dates, both tagged where they fall.]

Held

Status: ● sourced · Twinkie-scanned · ready for your read

Notes

  1. 蔡襄 (Cai Xiang), 1012–1067, of 興化軍仙遊 (Putian, Fujian): Northern Song official, calligrapher, and connoisseur; twice prefect of Fuzhou (1045–47 and 1056–58) and of Quanzhou, where he drove the building of the great stone sea-bridge (萬安橋 / 洛陽橋, 1053–59) — so “around 1050” falls squarely in his Fuzhou years. His Lizhi pu 荔枝譜 (1059) is China's first lychee monograph — varieties, cultivation, and the drying, honey, and red-salt cures — and his Cha lu 茶錄 treats tea; together the model of the practical local product-treatise. ↩
  2. The weir 魚梁 is an ancient stake-and-stone fence that funnels fish to a trap; the tidal weir 滬, in origin a bamboo fence on the flats, lets the falling tide strand the catch behind it. The word is Tang — Dai Shulun, and later Lu You, name the 漁滬 in verse — so a tidal weir at the river mouth by our date is sound; the monumental stone 石滬, as on the Penghu coast, is a later elaboration, documented only from the seventeenth century. ↩
  3. The croaker is a 石首魚, “stone-head fish,” for the two otoliths (耳石, ear-stones) in its skull. Its name is also its voice: the family drums with the swim-bladder, a croak loud in the hand and carrying through water, and in a spawning aggregation the many drummers become a single resonance felt through a boat's bottom. It spawns in vast shoals in the fourth month — later fishing books describe miles of them, “a sound like thunder,” found by lowering a bamboo tube to listen before the net is cast across the current; the 閩江口 is a documented wintering ground. The bamboo-tube description is Ming and later, but the drumming is a constant of the animal, so finding a run by ear almost certainly long predates its record. ↩
  4. 蘇頌 (Su Song, 1020–1101), a native of 泉州, describes Min oysters growing fast to the rock and piling “connected like chambers,” craggy as hills — the 蠔山, oyster-mountains, split off at low water. Deliberate cultivation — oysters grown on planted bamboo stakes or scattered stone — is documented later, and the earliest secure date is hard to pin; so at 1050 the entry keeps them wild-gathered from the rock. ↩
  5. 紅糟 (hong zao), red lees: the residue left after the region's red-yeast-rice wine — glutinous rice fermented with red 麴 (Monascus) — is pressed off. Naturally red, faintly wine-sour, it colours, de-fishes, and briefly preserves, and is the signature of 閩 (Fujian) cooking. Cooking with red yeast is on record by the tenth century (Tao Gu's Qingyilu, c. 965); the red-yeast wine whose pressed lees this is was tied to Min by the Northern Song — Su Shi calls Min wine “red as cinnabar” — and a twelfth-century source (Jilei bian) reports Min brewing as red-yeast wine throughout. So the red lees were at home on this coast by our date. ↩
  6. The mud crab here is the heavy, saw-edged 蟳 / 青蟹 (Scylla), the 蝤蛑 of the old books, dearer on this coast than the swimming crab 梭子蟹; the roe-laden female is the 紅蟳. The Tang Youyang zazu 酉陽雜俎 reports the 蝤蛑 growing so bold in the eighth month that it will take on a tiger. Su Shi's couplet on it — 半殼含黃宜點酒，兩螯斫雪勸加餐, “half a shell of roe, fit to take with wine; the two claws like cut snow, urging another bowl of rice” — sits about half a century past our date, quoted for the pleasure of it, not as evidence for 1050. The crab calendar 七蟳、八蠘、九毛蟹 — mud crab in the seventh month, swimming crab in the eighth, hairy crab in the ninth — sorts the season; tribute status follows later Fuzhou gazetteers. ↩
  7. 金齏玉膾 (“golden relish, jade slices”), originally 鱸魚膾, raw sliced perch: the relish is the 八和齏 of the sixth-century Qimin yaoshu — garlic, ginger, salt, sour white plum 白梅, tangerine peel, cooked chestnut (for the gold colour and a sweetness), and cooked rice, pounded with vinegar and set out in its own dish. Given Wu's 松江鱸 on his southern progress, the Sui emperor is said to have called it 東南佳味, “the finest flavour of the southeast” (Tang Daye shiyi ji, carried in the Song Taiping guangji, 978). The herb strewn through the white slices was 香薷; the longing for perch-slice and water-shield is 張翰's; the fine threading is the 鸞刀, the “phoenix-knife,” of Pan Yue's rhapsody. ↩
  8. The yellow croaker's swim-bladder, dried, is fish-maw — 魚肚, the croaker's 花膠 — one of the prized dried sea-foods, the 肚 of the later 鮑參翅肚 quartet (abalone, sea-cucumber, shark-fin, maw). It is eaten in the record as far back as the Qimin yaoshu and was in antiquity a food of royalty and high officials, the grand banquet canon crystallising afterward. The same bladder, boiled down, gives 鰾膠 — the carpenter's isinglass glue. For the run and the listening, see note 3. ↩
  9. Han Yu, 初南食貽元十八協律 (“First Tasting Southern Food, for Collator Yuan”), written in his 819 banishment to Chaozhou on the far southern coast: he sets down the 鱟 (horseshoe crab), 蠔 (oyster), 章舉 (octopus), and 馬甲柱 (the pen-shell, 江瑤柱) put before him, eats them seasoned hard with salt, sour, pepper, and orange — face sweating, the smell rank — and frees the snake from its cage rather than touch it. A northerner's record of the southern coast's everyday food as an ordeal. ↩
A Field Guide · At the Mouth of the Min · sister to The Reel and the Recluse · first pass
a new breed of scholarship · ready for Dave's steer
Drawn from the cave — daveswavecave.com