There is a famous saying in Li Bai's "Jianjinjiu": Cooking sheep and slaughtering cattle is a pleasure, and you will have to drink three hundred cups at a time.
The joy of the banquet has been described.
Meng Haoran's "Passing Through the Old Friend's Village" "The old friend brought chickens and millet and invited me to Tian's house" makes us feel that the simple years are peaceful and peaceful.
Chicken, as the most photographed common delicacy from ancient times to the present, has the broadest mass base.
During the holidays~eat chicken, distinguished guests~eat chicken, sick and injured~eat chicken, confinement~eat chicken, fortune comes from heaven~still eat chicken.
When I was a child, we could only eat chicken and fish during the Chinese New Year.
There is no live fish in inland cities, so the only way to cook it is to braise it with thick sauce.
Chickens are available fresh.
But even though we are in the city, if we want to eat fresh chicken, we still have to go to the wet market to buy live chickens and kill them ourselves.
Otherwise, you can only buy the frozen chickens piled up like mountains outside the vegetable market. Those stiff corpses have a cold light on their bodies, and their scorched yellow claws are stretched out straight with a little black armor.
? I was still a little kid at that time, and my participation in work was very limited, but it was undoubtedly a happy New Year memory.
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My house is on the first floor, so my father built a chicken coop with red bricks under the balcony.
Use thin wire to circle the outside.
Every New Year, my parents would go to the market to buy two or three hens, tie them to the legs of a chair with a string when they got home, and enjoy two meals.
If the egg can be laid within a day or two, send it to the henhouse and replace it with an old tenant who is not performing well and kill it.
If nothing is produced within two days, it will become a dish on the table that year.
The changes in the old and new chicken coops in my house are basically in this way, directly skipping the stage of raising chickens from childhood and waiting for eggs to be laid.
Just like every company now likes to recruit skilled workers, they do not need an internship period and can go directly to work after a little adaptation.
? I still remember many of the processes: Killing chickens is usually done in collaboration with my father.
Before killing a chicken, you usually pour a small bottle of white wine into the chicken, then go to the mound in the yard, cross the wings of the chicken back so that the chicken can't run away, and then step on the chicken's feet so that it can't struggle.
, pull the chicken head back with one hand, pluck a piece of chicken feathers from the chicken neck, and then use a knife to cut the chicken neck, so that the chicken blood drips to the ground.
The bleeding chicken is thrown to the ground, sometimes flopping a few times, and then begins to twitch until it becomes limp.
At this time, I felt very accomplished and went over to take the two chicken legs together and carried them home.
At home, my mother boils a large pot of boiling water in advance, and every time I throw the chicken into a large aluminum basin for washing clothes.
Mom poured water on it, and a stream of hot steam steamed out, giving off a particularly unpleasant "chicken" smell.
When it is slightly cool, take it out and pluck out the hair all over the body, then clean the internal organs and so on.
In addition to watching, I also participated in the second stage of plucking, using tweezers to remove the fuzz and unplucked remnants.
Later, when I was eleven or twelve years old, I could complete it by myself.
? When I came back and discussed it with my husband, he said these were just minor cases.
My mother-in-law's family owns a small hotel and grocery store in the village.
Every year before the Chinese New Year, the logistics personnel from the nearby garrison would go to a nearby village to collect chickens, which would then be eaten at his hotel.
The live chickens collected were handed over to my husband and his sister.
The three siblings, all in their early teens, each wielded a sharp knife and put a cage of chickens in front of them. Male or female, big or small, black or white, they were grabbing, pressing, wiping and throwing them mechanically.
The chickens with severed tracheas were thrown directly into the yard in front and left to flop to death.
A chicken costs five cents, and children can make a dime from it.
It is said that hundreds of chickens turned into naked white-striped chickens in a few days and were loaded into trucks and taken away.
Probably because of too much killing, my husband still doesn't like chicken, thinking that the smell of chicken feces always lingers.
I secretly speculated whether it was Brother Chicken who had a spirit in the sky and asked the Pleiades star official to punish him. This is unknown.