How did crabs become a delicacy?

The autumn crab map of Pan Tianshou is now Huangshi. Crabs have been a delicacy on people's plates for thousands of years. But in ancient records, crabs are just a kind of monster in the north; Ancient Jiangnan people ate it because they hated it ... In the eyes of the ancients, crabs were a strange thing, so in the Northern Song Dynasty, some people used crabs to scare ghosts. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Shen Kuo recorded such an anecdote in Meng Qian Bi Tan: Guanzhong people don't know crabs. Some people got a dried crab, and some people got malaria, so they borrowed it and hung it on the door. Ancient Guanzhong people thought that people suffered from malaria because malaria ghosts were at work, so a strange crab was hung on the door. When malaria ghosts see crabs, they must be too scared to go in. Meng Xi Bi Tan also said that for crabs, Guan Zhong is "not only ignorant of people, but also ignorant of ghosts". Shen Kuo is a native of Qiantang, Zhejiang and Jiangnan. He was an official in Yan 'an, northern Shaanxi, Guanzhong area. It seems that hanging crabs on the door to eliminate malaria ghosts is by no means empty. People in the hinterland of Guanzhong have never seen crabs until the Song Dynasty, but in areas with rivers, lakes and coastal areas, crabs have long been recorded. Zheng Xuan, a famous Confucian scholar in the Eastern Han Dynasty, once made textual research on crabs, saying that there were crabs in Qingzhou during the Western Zhou Dynasty sacrifice. Ancient Qingzhou refers to the Bohai Sea area east of Mount Tai. Crab sauce, also known as crab sauce. It can be seen that in the Western Zhou Dynasty, the ancients not only knew about crabs, but also regarded them as delicious and ate them with relish. However, the popularity of eating crabs was after the Western Zhou Dynasty. In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, there was an official named Bi Zhuo. He likes drinking, and he is an alcoholic. He also likes eating crabs. He often misses work because of drinking. Seeing that the wine brewed by the neighbor was good, I went to the neighbor's house to steal wine in the dark and was caught by the neighbor's servant on the spot. It was not until dawn that the neighbors discovered that the thief caught stealing wine turned out to be the official department minister, so they quickly took out the newly brewed good wine and drank it with Bi Zhuo, and got drunk. Bi Zhuo once said such a grandiloquence of drinking and eating crabs: "If you have a hundred barges full of wine, it will be sweet at four o'clock, holding a cup in your right hand, holding a crab claw in your left hand and patting a floating wine boat, it will be enough for a lifetime." Holding wine in his right hand and crab in his left is the highest pursuit of Bi Zhuo's life, and he is a typical drunkard and crab addict. But in the Book of Jin, Bi Zhuo actually has a biography. Perhaps historians think that Bi Zhuo, a drunkard and crab lover, is a lovely person. Ancient northerners were deeply surprised by Jiangnan people who ate crabs. According to Luoyang Paper Expensive, Yang of the Northern Wei Dynasty once laughed at Chen Qingzhi, the general of the Southern Liang Dynasty in the south of the Yangtze River, and said, "Jiankang has the ghost of Wu people. Small crown hat, short clothes. Calling yourself Nong is like a thunderbolt. Eat rice, drink tea as pulp, and sip soup with crab roe. Hold cardamom and chew betel nut. When I first arrived in China, I missed my hometown. Go in a hurry and go back to Danyang. " The "oh" in this record means sucking; "Shua" is the voice of the mouth. Describing eating crab roe is very vivid. It can be seen from this record in Luoyang Galand that northerners at that time were not interested in Jiangnan people's customs of eating rice, drinking tea and eating crabs. After the Tang and Song Dynasties, northern Renye Fang began to eat crabs. In the Song Dynasty, Meng Fu said in "Dream of Tokyo" that eating crabs has become a daily thing in the Imperial Palace of the Northern Song Dynasty: "The market outside Donghuamen (Bianliang City) is the most prosperous, and trading is prohibited here. Regarding diet, fashionable flowers and fruits, fish, shrimp, turtles, crabs, quails, rabbits, candied fruit, wax, gold, jade, antiques and clothes are all wonders of the world. If there are dozens of flavors, guests will have one or twenty flavors of wine, and they will have it now. " The "forbidden" here is the imperial palace, the emperor of the Song Dynasty is a northerner, and the capital city of Bianliang is also in the north. At that time, the emperor in the palace also wanted to eat crabs, which shows that the wind of eating crabs has spread to the north. Ancient rice was mostly planted in the south of the Yangtze River, where the wind of eating crabs was the strongest. Crab is a kind of thing that hurts farmers by eating rice, which once caused serious harm to rice in the south of the Yangtze River. Until the Yuan Dynasty, the harm of crabs in the south of the Yangtze River to rice was also called "crab -e". "History of the Yuan Dynasty" records: "Wuzhong crabs are like locusts, Mitsuru Hirata, and rice is exhausted. There is a saying called crab shortage and crab chaos, which is exactly what it means. " If there are too many crabs in rice fields, they will bring devastating disasters to rice like locusts. Farmers in ancient Jiangnan hated crabs that harmed rice. I hated them and went to eat crabs. In A Dream of Red Mansions, Xue Baochai's "Crab Fu" wrote: "What good will it be if the pot falls today and the moon is fragrant?" It says that eating crabs can save crops.