Oil is one of the six nutrients needed by human body, and it is also a complete list of children of princelings. It plays an important role in human daily diet. It can not only provide people with calories and essential fatty acids, but also make food more delicious. There are many kinds of edible oils on the market now. What oil did our ancestors eat? How do they get oil?
animal fat
At first, oil was extracted from animal fat. It was not until the hunting age that people discovered that meat would exude liquid when heated, which is probably the most primitive understanding of oil by ancestors. Since written records, oil was originally called "grease" or "ointment". According to Shi Ming, "wearing horns means obesity, and having no horns means ointment". That is, fat extracted from horned animals and cream extracted from hornless animals. For example, butter is called fat and lard is called cream. There is another explanation for "cream" and "fat", which is recorded in the Book of Rites. When cooking, "onions are used to fertilize and leeks are used to paste." Gao Chen, a scholar in Song and Yuan Dynasties, commented: "Fat is fat, and fat is cream. "Solidified into a solid is called fat, and melted into a liquid is called cream. Now we call solidified fat and melted oil "ointment", and the word "ointment" is basically out of use, but now we still have a common idiom that keeps these two words: human fat and human ointment.
The application of animal fat in cooking has been recorded in many documents, such as "Zhou Li Tianguan Zhongzai": "Anyone who uses birds will use lambs and porpoises in spring, and the food paste will be fragrant; Summer, embarrassment, embarrassing food paste; Autumn calves, eating cream; Fresh feathers in winter, cream in food. There are birds and animals and cooking oil dedicated to the emperor in the four seasons. The words "cream", "cream", "cream" and "cream" have different meanings, but they are all animal fats such as butter, sheep oil and lard. The diet in the pre-Qin period was very good, and most of the vegetables at that time tasted bad. Among them, only a few varieties such as radish, leek, onion and garlic have survived to this day, and the rest have basically withdrawn from the ranks of vegetables and become weeds. Most of the vegetables we eat now were gradually introduced from foreign countries in the long history. So, at that time, you were the son of heaven, that is, you ate animal fried meat every day.
At that time, animal fat was used not only for cooking, but also for lighting. Record: "Take mermaid cream as a candle, and it will last for a long time. 1968, Wang Jing of the Western Han Dynasty in Mancheng County, Hebei Province and Dou Wan, the wife of Liu Sheng, unearthed the Changxin Palace Lantern. According to a small amount of wax residue on the upper part of the unearthed lampshade, experts speculate that the burning substance in the palace lantern is also animal fat.
vegetable oil
Oil crops have a long history of planting in China, and there are many varieties. For example, soybean, called bean skin in ancient times, was listed as one of the five grains in the Spring and Autumn Period, but at that time, these crops were mainly used as food and vegetable crops, and they were really used as raw materials for oil extraction, which probably only appeared in the Han Dynasty. At first, the raw material used to extract oil was not soybean, but sesame. Soybean was used as a raw material for oil extraction very late, for reasons that will be explained later.
During the period of Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty, Zhang Qian went to the Western Regions to expand his territory. At the same time, he brought the seeds of many western crops to the Central Plains: grapes, alfalfa, pomegranate, sesame and so on. Sesame, formerly known as "flax", was brought back by Zhang Qian from Alakazam. Used in the Han Dynasty to extract oil, the oil produced is called "sesame oil" or "sesame oil". According to records, when Wei Chong resisted Sun Quan's attack, he "turned pine branches into torches, poured sesame oil on them, set fire to the wind, and burned the thieves' attack tools. "Recall the battle. On the one hand, there is war, and on the other hand, there is fragrant sesame oil. I wonder if the soldiers on both sides of the war are drooling while fighting.