Give priority to coarse grains, add fruits and vegetables, meat, eggs and milk, and put less seasoning.

Recently, porridge has been pushed to the forefront because of a remark by Zhang Wenhong, director of the Infectious Diseases Department of Huashan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University, and even rose to the level of Chinese and Western cultural standpoints. In fact, Zhang Wenhong's remarks were made against the special background of preventing COVID-19 and improving immunity. Its core meaning is that simple rice porridge can hardly provide enough nutrition to improve immunity. If you want to improve the nutritional value of porridge, you may wish to follow the example of the ancients, cook porridge with japonica rice, and then add some other ingredients to porridge.

Most ancient people cooked porridge with fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and milk.

Li, a professor and graduate student at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, conducted a literature search and found that there were 6 16 kinds of porridge recipes among 33 kinds of recipes from Tang Dynasty to Qing Dynasty, among which * * * involved 294 kinds of ingredients, and more than 70% of porridge was composed of various ingredients.

For example, there are radish porridge, carrot porridge porridge, chopped green onion porridge, sunflower porridge, leek porridge, bean sprout porridge, pear porridge, lotus seed porridge, lily porridge, persimmon porridge, walnut porridge and so on, as well as chicken liver porridge, rabbit liver porridge, mutton porridge, deer kidney porridge, yellow hen porridge, crucian carp porridge, carp porridge, meat, eggs and milk chicken porridge and so on.

Fan Zhihong, an associate professor at the College of Food Science and Nutritional Engineering of China Agricultural University, said: "There are many things that can be added to porridge, such as meat, fish, eggs, milk, vegetables, potatoes, nuts, oilseeds, dried fruits and vegetables, which are not allowed to enter porridge. Preserved egg lean porridge or raw rolled fish porridge, with some fish and eggs inside, the protein content will increase. "

The rice used by the ancients to cook porridge was very rough.

The ancients cooked porridge not only with fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and milk, but also with rougher rice than now. Fan Zhihong said that there was no electric rice mill in ancient times, and the staple food for ordinary people was very low-grade grain, which was close to whole grains. In ancient times, most areas in the north drank millet porridge. At that time, millet was thicker than that in the supermarket now. Southerners drink rice porridge cooked close to brown rice.

Li said that modern people ate polished rice in rice porridge, while ancient grain processing only involved frying and grinding. All kinds of rice and flour should belong to whole grains, with all natural nutrients such as husk, aleurone layer, endosperm and germ.

So we might as well use coarse grains instead of flour and rice when cooking porridge, for example, use brown rice instead of rice.

No or little seasoning is added to keep the original flavor of the ingredients.

When cooking meat porridge or vegetable porridge, it is inevitable to add some condiments. According to Li, Cao Tingdong, a medical scientist in the Qing Dynasty, wrote a book "Ancient Heng Yan", which advocated "eating a little porridge on an empty stomach every day". The so-called light porridge is porridge with no or little seasoning. Reducing the interference of condiments can better highlight the natural taste and eating habits of goods, which is what Cao Tingdong said: "Light is the truth of things."