Once a year, here in Beijing comes a hot trend and tradition again to eat “hot” mutton.
On an increasingly chilly night, how amusing it is to invite a handful of friends to an instant-boiled mutton hot-pot restaurant where we can fan fires up for a coal pot, order two plates of mutton and several little-bottled “Erguotou spirits”, and then relish them while tittle-tattling. As tipsiness arrives, disquietude, however mounting, will vanish into thin air.
As recorded in The Compendium of Materia Medica, among all types of meat, pork tastes bitter, slightly cold-natured, and slightly poisonous; mutton smells bitter, sweet, largely heat-natured, and nonpoisonous; the yellow cattle boast sweet, warm-natured and non-toxic meat.
Since mutton is hugely heat-natured, the Beijinger in the past paid particular attention to feasting on mutton in winter. For example, instant-boiled mutton hot-pots were served only in the wake of the Start of Autumn. Posterior to the Start of Spring, however, there was no place to savor them. This custom also complies with Master Confucius’s indoctrination: Never eat unseasonal food!
(From Wang Zengqi’s article “Stir-fried, roasted or instant-boiled mutton in Beijing”)这是汪的