falling in love with a city is like falling in love with someone. Sometimes it's love at first sight, sometimes it's low temperature and slow heat that moistens things silently. Almost everyone has had such an experience. Afterwards, I think of it as an encounter with the opposite sex when I was young, and as a doomed fate. For me, a persistent but not stubborn and eclectic foodie, to really fall in love with a city must be related to the taste, and it must be an unforgettable taste and feeling for the city in taste. All the ups and downs are tastes, but also stories related to this city.
"The sense of belonging of food memory is a deep cultural force, and it is the strongest emotional connection between wanderers and their hometown besides family ties".
My hometown Longchang, where I stayed for nearly six years since I was born, is definitely a special place for me.
My hometown Longchang is a small county, located in the southeast of Sichuan Basin, which is the junction and bridgehead of Sichuan and Chongqing. In the first year of Zhenguan in the Tang Dynasty (627), the county was set up, and it was named after the Ming Dynasty. Since ancient times, it has long been an important transportation hub connecting Sichuan and Chongqing and radiating Yunnan and Guizhou. Since ancient times, it has been known as "Qinlong in the north, Yunnan and Hainan in Nantong, Xuma in the west and Jingxiang in the east, and it is the impact of six roads with bullets, and it is connected to all directions in the south of Sichuan".
? Historically, Longchang was also a large-scale "hometown of immigrants". Its history, culture, customs and people's feelings have strong Hakka characteristics, and its food is also rich and varied, such as Longchang mutton soup, roasted duck, hot pot, griddle, glutinous rice, Ciba (glutinous rice, Ciba is Hakka food), old duck soup and so on. But what really haunts me is the "taste of memory" that is unknown, unpretentious, and perhaps only old Longchang people know.
When it comes to this memory smell, the first thing to bear the brunt is the "soybean oil" that Longchang people said. In my memory, my grandmother often told me to take a glass bottle and go to the street to hit a catty of soybean oil. At that time, all the soybean oil was sold in bulk, and the price was thirty or forty cents a catty. Look at the reddish-brown liquid scooped out by the boss from the jar and then transferred to my glass bottle through the funnel, smelling the smell of the sauce, and the little greedy bug in my stomach came out. Thinking of the delicious bean oil bibimbap, my stomach is even more hungry. I think this heartless kid can actually sweep up a bowl of bean oil bibimbap in a few minutes without any food. What a delicious soy sauce! At that time, grandma used soy sauce instead of salt, and the salt pot on the stove was hardly used. MSG is unheard of. The taste of the dishes made with such simple seasonings is the height that the exquisite seasonings on the tall now can't reach. Old Longchang people like my grandmother have a special liking for soy sauce. As an essential condiment in life, in the past, many families could not find a grain of salt all year round, but their kitchens and stoves were full of soy sauce bottles. Hakka diet pays attention to the original taste of the juice, and does not use too much seasoning. It is light and delicious, which is conducive to digestion. Therefore, the soy sauce produced by the soy sauce workshop run by Hakka people is natural and natural, with strong sauce flavor and outstanding ester flavor. The soy sauce is reddish brown in color, which is an essential condiment for Hakka cuisine and has a high reputation at home and abroad. Li Yingfa, a professor at Sichuan University and deputy director of Sichuan Hakka Center, described Sichuan Hakka culture as very suitable for Longchang soy sauce: "It originated from the Eastern Jin Dynasty and spread delicious food in the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, and inherited the skills of the Central Plains to brew exotic fragrance from Sichuan, Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi."
With soy sauce and a little lard and (huo) rice, it has been a popular traditional food for all ages here for hundreds of years. Both dignitaries and ordinary people are "good at this."
After leaving Longchang for many years, I often think of soybean oil and rice inadvertently. Perhaps, the meaning of bean oil bibimbap to me, besides its delicious taste, also contains too many childhood memories and tastes ...
? When I really can't think of it, as a persistent foodie, I just used the original soy sauce and rice that I bought at home and smelled better. I finally ate this delicious food that I have been thinking about for a long time, and later I made several upgraded versions of soy sauce fried rice.
As a result, the soy sauce rice tastes good, but it's not what it tasted like when I was dreaming. Maybe it's not authentic Longchang soybean oil? Or is it that not all the delicious food in memory can be copied? The warm childhood when trying to be at grandma's knees is gone forever after all!
I clearly remember that in that summer, adults and children were most eager for Aunt Shi to carry the burden around 4: 3 in the afternoon. Yellow bean jelly, cold cake and ice powder on the burden are all our favorites.
? Yellow bean jelly was originally a very common snack, but after going through many places, the tasted yellow bean jelly was always not as delicious as this. Finally, under the guidance of my grandmother, I finally copied the delicious food in my memory, which turned out to be exquisite in materials and processes. Write down the recipe specially.
1. Preparation of raw materials:
1g of dried pea powder, 5g of wet pea powder, 8g of salt sauce, 2g of red pepper, 1g of homemade sesame sauce, 16g of ginger and garlic juice, 1g of pepper noodles and 5g of chopped green onion.
2. Production steps:
(1) Making bean jelly:
a. Selecting white peas to remove impurities, and hulling with a rice thresher;
b, processing into fine pea powder with a stone mill (in the form of dry flour, the finer the better);
c, soaking white peas in water and grinding them into fine slurry with a stone mill;
d, evenly mixing with cold water according to the ratio of 1 part of wet pea powder to 2 parts of dry pea powder;
e. pour clear water into the pot to boil, and pour the well-mixed pea powder slurry into the pot to stir evenly:
f. bring it to a boil with strong fire, turn to low heat for about 2 minutes until it is cooked, scoop it into a pot covered with salad oil, and cool it to obtain bean jelly.
(2) Self-made seasoning:
A. Red pepper: 1 part of Chili powder is fried with 5 parts of vegetable oil (more fragrant with rapeseed oil);
B. Sesame paste: white sesame seeds are fried and ground into fine powder, which is made by adding 4 times of vegetable oil;
C. Ginger and garlic juice: peeled ginger and garlic are mashed and mixed with 25% cold boiled water.
D. salt sauce: stir-fry salt in a pot, and add a proper amount of boiling water to thicken it.
(3) Bowling: Take out the yellow bean jelly in the bowl, cut it into long pieces with a thickness of .5cm with a knife, then cut it into thin strips with a length of 15-18 cm, evenly put it into a bowl to form a small bun, and add the above seasonings in turn.
3. Tips:
(1) Choose white peas carefully, and there will be more starch;
(2) The dried pea powder should be ground to be finer than flour, and the good proportion with wet pea powder must be 2/1, so that the bean jelly made is soft, tender and won't break;
(3) When stirring bean jelly, the spatula can't touch the crispy rice, so as to avoid a bad taste;
(4) Sesame can't be fried, so it has crisp and fragrant taste;
(5) When cutting bean jelly, avoid using iron knives to avoid the smell of rust; Can choose copper knife or stainless steel knife.
? As for ice powder, we once bought ice powder seeds on T-treasure, and the ice powder made by the method described above feels good! Later, I found that there was actually Liangshuijing Lianggao powder sold in the supermarket. Just follow the method on the packaging bag. It's really convenient! Personally, regardless of ice powder or cold cake, the brown sugar used in your own brown sugar water is very important, so you must use that kind of home-made brown sugar block. Sprinkle this thick, sticky red syrup on the noodles, which is the proper ancient taste, add some fragrant peanuts, sesame seeds and some mint water, and the cool breath of summer will come to my face.
Small dishes are also a feature of Longchang. Cold carrot rolls, cold kohlrabi, cold kohlrabi ..... all have to drool at the rhythm. Longchang red tofu pays attention to tenderness, delicacy, thoughtfulness, hemp and spicy, and grandma's cooking is delicious. The process is exquisite and complicated. First of all, you must choose the bean curd with bittern, not to mention the choice of the following materials ...
Speaking of this, I think of the rice that I ate in the past, and it always feels more fragrant than the rice cooked in any pot now. The so-called retort is also an appliance that can make rice cooked thoroughly. Unlike the current rice cooker, it has to go through several manual processes: for example, people in the city now basically eat old rice or organically produced rice, like the rice that farmers have worked hard to grow one by one, and then steam it with retort, which simply doesn't taste good.
One of the best by-products of Zanzi rice is "rice soup", which can be said that many people have never eaten before meals. The hot rice soup is slightly sweet and delicious. It is said that this rice soup contains a lot of nicotinic acid, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, inorganic salts such as phosphorus and iron, and certain nutrients such as carbohydrates and fat. Rice soup is sweet and has the functions of benefiting qi, nourishing yin and moistening dryness. Drinking rice soup regularly is beneficial to children's health and development, and helps digestion and absorption of fat. It is also ideal to give rice soup to babies as an auxiliary drink. Such a good thing, it is no wonder that even my children will always be thinking about it after drinking it once, and deliberately dig out the little retort that I bought at home in Zhuhai to make retort rice. As a result, the dinner was much more than any other meal.
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Of course, there are some wild vegetables that can be seen everywhere in my hometown, such as cocklebur root, horsetooth cold, wormwood, etc ...
? Being in the Jianghu is the most unforgettable taste of hometown. Perhaps, no matter what kind of lingering memories, yearning for thousands of things, or copying delicious food, it is far better to go back and see my grandmother who has reached the age of 9, listen to her talk more, seize those moments when she is getting old, taste the taste of her hometown all over, and stay in every detail in the future. Those fading flavors seem to linger in front of me all the time.