dog days and Mairener soup

Jian Chen

The dog days are coming, and I think of the years when I drank Mairener soup. A few days ago, the one in my family pulled his finger and calculated that it was time for my family to send Mai Rener. I can see that her mood is very urgent.

Mai Rener is called "Maisan" in the countryside of Feixiang, which is a delicious food in summer. Especially when boiling wheat kernels, put some elders' pumpkins into the pot-in fact, our hometown is called Beigua, which tastes better. Cooked Mai Rener chews very strongly, and a unique fragrance lingers in his mouth for a long time, which is much more delicious than rice. The soup is sticky and particularly sweet. In the dog days, although the more you drink Mai Rener soup, the hotter it gets, and everyone is as hot as if they were fished out of the water, but they are not willing to put down their bowls and chopsticks, and they are just a few bowls at a time.

The old people said: It is good to use fresh wheat to make Mairener, but not old wheat. As for why old wheat can't work, no one has made it clear. Now I understand that in those poor times, old wheat could not eat new wheat, so I comforted myself with "old wheat can't crush wheat."

nowadays, people usually have everything they eat, but in those days, they ate a meal and worried about the next meal, and there was nothing. The dog days are hot and sweaty, so you need soup and water to supplement it. Xiaomi is far away and can only appear in autumn. Rice didn't even dare to think about it, so she chose Mai Rener in desperation.

The man coming from there has a special complex for Mai Rener. A leader of the Municipal Party Committee fought guerrilla warfare in our area during the war. He was my grandfather's superior, and Mai Rener's soup of the people in Feixiang was saturated with his feelings. In the 1981s, when the wheat harvest season came, he asked people to send money to buy Mai Rener to cook soup. He said that when he saw Mai Rener, he could think of those years and the people in this area.

The processing of wheat kernels has no technical content, that is, fresh wheat kernels are soaked with water, slightly ground on a stone mill, and a layer of skin is ground off. Soak it in water once, because the wheat is dried thoroughly, and it will break when it is ground, which will affect the appearance and taste. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why old wheat can't crush Mairener.

Because every household needs to eat Mairener, during the period when the wheat is harvested, the most busy thing in the village is the stone mill. There are many people in the family who have to grind three or five liters, most of them have to fight, and there are few people who have one or two liters. It was a scenery at that time that the female neighbors, old and young, lined up to grind Mairener and showed some happy smiles by the stone mill. Because Mai Rener only made a simple rough processing, it lost less nutrients and retained more protein, minerals, vitamins and rich dietary fiber, which was beneficial to health.

Mai Rener can match many ingredients. Besides the pumpkin mentioned above, you can also cook mung beans and rice together. And there are many ways to do it. Mai Rener puts more porridge and more water is soup, but in our hometown, it is mostly soup.

Mai Rener is very difficult to cook. It is best to soak it for a few hours first. Until today, as long as we talk about eating Mai Rener, my family soaked Mai Rener at lunch until five o'clock in the afternoon. Bring it to a boil, then simmer it. Add pumpkin or sweet potato until Mai Rener is boiled and the soup is sticky. If you accidentally put less wheat kernels, the soup is very clear, and then mix some finely ground white flour bumps, which is also delicious.

Many rural delicacies are superstitious, just like eating jiaozi on the winter solstice, steaming hedgehogs, flower cakes and paying tribute on the New Year. Mai Rener actually has a saying. That night, enjoying the cool in the courtyard, I asked several elderly people older than me why they wanted to eat Mai Rener in the dog days. Besides talking about food shortage, they also said: if you eat Mai Rener, you won't feel sick if you eat flies again. Scared me into a cold sweat, so good and delicious, it was actually mixed with something annoying. It makes sense to think about it. In those days, every family in the countryside had a dung heap, a toilet, a pigsty and a chicken nest, all of which were the hardest hit areas for breeding flies. In summer, they always ate in the courtyard and aisle, and it was dark. In case … yeah … yeah …, I can't imagine it.

Now, after leaving the countryside for decades, Mai Rener has not been wiped off our dining table in dog days, but it is much easier to grind Mai Rener now. Mechanization has replaced the stone mill in those days, and it only takes a few minutes to finish.

In the eyes of ordinary people, the dog days and Mairener soup are just the bond of giving up constantly, as if there would be no dog days without drinking Mairener soup. Me, too. Now the soup is so rich in water, but I still want to drink several meals of Mairener soup.

Mairener soup, a simple delicacy, shows the wisdom of our ancestors and engraves my homesickness ...