What is Shanghai Paofan?

Shanghai paofan is leftovers overnight.

There are two kinds of pickled rice in Shanghai. White soaked rice refers to cold rice boiled overnight with water, or you can simply eat it with boiled water. Salted rice is overnight cold rice cooked with overnight vegetables or even eaten with rice. Hot water and cold rice originated from past living habits. At that time, most people didn't have gas at home, so it was very troublesome to cook with a briquette stove early in the morning. So it's convenient to boil water for a few bites overnight.

There are fewer and fewer overnight dishes now. If there is an occasional overnight meal, many people will still ask for a side dish for nothing. Sufu, various pickles, such as snails, kohlrabi, radish head, pickled melon and oil-soaked peanuts, are the side dishes for many people to soak in rice. However, for the sake of health, fresh vegetables and high-quality protein are recommended when eating rice in soup.

Time stamp of soaking rice in Shanghai

In the recipes of Shanghainese, the definition of soaking rice is very simple. Cold rice overnight, boiled, or soaked in boiling water, ready to eat. Someone read a subtext from this definition: shabby. Yes, the poor history of Shanghainese is quite long, stretching for several generations, but it is not the fault of Shanghainese. On the contrary, in the memory of Shanghainese, paofan is full of warm details. It can even be said that a seemingly unremarkable bowl of pickled rice has created the collective character of Shanghainese.

Soaking rice has a strong grassroots nature, which is a portrayal of a cold life and a mark of difficult times. Eating rice in soup is not the active choice of Shanghainese. In the process of Shanghai's rapid expansion from a small county to a metropolis, a large number of immigrants were introduced, and the influx of immigrants pushed Shanghai to bid farewell to the agricultural society and enter the industrial society. In rural areas in the south of the Yangtze River, like Shaoxing, my hometown, we eat dry food in the morning, and farmers in the suburbs of Shanghai also eat dry food in busy farming hours and thin food in leisure time.

In Shanghai, working-class people rush to work by bus early in the morning and have no time to cook and cook porridge. Most of the houses in the hutongs are also blocked by gas. It is not only troublesome but also wasteful for old people to make briquette stoves early, so housewives will cook more rice the night before yesterday and get up early the next day to soak in boiling water, so that a young man can grab a few mouthfuls and wipe his mouth clean. It's time for work and school.