豆腐是谁发明的?
Who invented tofu? The legend of Liu An
Name: ________________ Date: ________
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 座 | zuò | constellation; zodiac sign (as in 巨蟹座) |
| 研究 | yánjiū | research; to study; to research |
| 结果 | jiéguǒ | as a result; in the end; result; outcome |
| 香 | xiāng | fragrant; sweet-smelling |
| 首 | shǒu | first (as in 首次) |
| 开玩笑 | kāiwánxiào | to joke; to kid |
| 留下 | liúxià | to leave behind |
| 叫作 | jiàozuò | to be called; to be known as |
| 幅 | fú | width (of cloth); size (as in 幅度) |
| 也许 | yéxǔ | perhaps; maybe; probably |
| 永远 | yóngyuǎn | forever; always; eternally |
| 成功 | chénggōng | success; to succeed; successful |
English (for the teacher)
Picture it: more than two thousand years ago, smoke hangs over a mountain, and a prince and a crowd of helpers are bustling around a furnace. They aren't cooking dinner; they're making a medicine: one that lets you live forever.
The prince was Liu An, Prince of Huainan in the Han dynasty. Legend says he was fascinated by the idea of living forever and invited many people to make elixirs for him on Bagong Mountain in Huainan. One day a pot of hot soy milk accidentally met some brine (some say gypsum), and slowly it turned into lots of soft, white little pieces. Everyone tasted it: fragrant and delicious. That was tofu.
The medicine for eternal life never came out right, but tofu stayed. The story was passed down in China for a long time. In the Ming dynasty, Li Shizhen wrote in his Compendium of Materia Medica that the way of making tofu began with Liu An of the Han. Centuries before him, Zhu Xi of the Song dynasty joked in a poem that if he had known the Prince of Huainan's trick, he could have sat at home and made money.
But did Liu An really invent tofu? The trouble is, the books left from the Han dynasty hardly ever mention the word “tofu”. The earliest record we can find today is in a book from more than a thousand years ago, the Qing Yi Lu. It tells of an official who was so honest he couldn't afford meat and bought only a few pieces of tofu each day. The locals joked about it and called tofu “little mutton”, as if tofu were his mutton.
In 1960, people found a picture carved in stone in a Han dynasty tomb in Henan. Some experts think the people in the picture are making tofu; others feel that even if tofu existed then, it was very different from tofu today. Still others think tofu may have been made by accident, when someone dropped sea salt into soy milk.
So who really invented tofu, nobody can say for sure today. The Liu An story may be nothing more than a good legend. But if it were true, it would be a nice twist: Liu An wanted to live forever and failed, yet the tofu he made “by accident” is still on our dinner tables every day, two thousand years later.