Winter melon candy-a specialty of Wangcheng-a specialty of Changsha-Wen winter melon candy: honeydew melon appeared as early as before the Ming Dynasty, and it was recorded in Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica that "honey can be fruit". In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, most of the winter melon candy sold on the streets of Changsha was cooked with stuffing candy from nearby villages and also made of honey stains. Because of its fragrance and unique flavor, it is often used as sacrifices and gifts for the people. Later, with the expansion of market demand and the improvement of people's taste requirements, candied workshops were mostly changed to white sugar stains, which gradually became the fist product in candied products and sold well in urban and rural markets. Production should go through peeling, cutting, hardening, rinsing, boiling, sugar dyeing, sugar boiling and other processes. The finished product is square and long. White color, crystal clear, tender and crisp texture, with the unique fragrance of wax gourd, cool and sweet, refreshing. It also has the effects of quenching thirst, diuresis, detoxification and benefiting qi, and is an ideal health food.

Fresh wax gourd should be used, the shape should be neat, and the individual weight should be 10 ~ 15 kg. Specific practices.

1. Wash the wax gourd with water, peel it, remove all green parts except white meat, remove the central pulp, and cut it into wax gourd strips with a length of 8-9 cm and a width of 1 ~ 1.5 cm.

2. Hardening treatment uses quicklime to prepare about 0.6% lime milk solution. Soak the cut wax gourd strips overnight to make the texture of wax gourd more solid. After taking it out, rinse it with clear water to remove the residual lime solution.

3. Boil the hardened wax gourd strips in boiling water for 20 minutes, remove and drain, and let cool for later use.

4. Boil sugar with about 65,438+00 kilograms of clean water for every 50 kilograms of fresh winter melon. Boil the water first, add 7.5 kilograms of white sugar to boil, then add the wax gourd strips for a little longer, add 7.5 kilograms of sugar every 30 minutes, add * * * for three times, and fry until the sugar is thick and dry. When the melon strips become hard and tough, take them out of the fire and put them on the bamboo grate.