#Memories# The most unforgettable smell for me is the smell of stewed hairtail fish that comes out of every kitchen during the Chinese New Year. That smell still appears in my mind from time to time. Stewed hairtail may seem like nothing now, but in the past, you couldn’t even eat it in Beijing during normal times. Hairtail was only sold during festivals and New Years. Every family has a clever way to stew hairtail, and every time at this time, you will smell the fragrance of various hairtail cooking.

Answer: The unforgettable fried rice cake.

1. During the Spring Festival of 1970, the "Chairman Mao Thought Propaganda Team" performed model plays day and night.

2. In the middle of the night in the second grade of junior high school, the performance ended. We were really hungry, so we went to the home of the "orphan" Chen Hequan to fry rice cakes (others had many families and were afraid of disturbing them)

3. Everyone gathered around the stove, eating simple rice cakes under the dim light of the "oil lamp".

4. The hut was very cozy. When Izumi saw me finishing my meal, Izumi stretched out his sleeves and said, "Rub it on here..."

5. That simple and honest behavior , it’s really touching, such a simple young man (I heard that his family members “starved” during difficult years)

We live in a very happy era now. Basically, we can eat any delicacies we want. Can be purchased. But at the beginning of the 1980s, it was an era of scarcity. Even if you had money, you couldn't buy the food you wanted.

When I was in elementary school, every time I passed by my neighbor’s house (a southerner) and the smell of fried hairtail wafted up, I couldn’t help but smash it in my mouth, looking forward to the Chinese New Year soon. At that time, you can eat the tangy hairtail fish.

Every Spring Festival eve, my mother would be busy at night preparing delicious food for the whole family. After my sister cleaned the hairtail, she cut it into sections. My mother sprinkled the meat with seasonings, wrapped it in batter, and fried it in a frying pan. When it was cooked, she took it out of the frying pan and waited for further processing. I was already so greedy that I took a piece of it secretly to satisfy my craving while my mother wasn't paying attention. It was still raw and cooked! The delicious taste of hairtail finally satisfied my long-awaited taste buds.

Time flies, 50 years have passed. However, the taste of hairtail I tasted at that time is deeply engraved in my mind. The tempting fragrance will be something I will never forget.

Of course. In the past, the Family Portrait dish had everything to go with wine, but unfortunately it is no longer available.

I am nearly sixty years old and have experienced the ups and downs of life. I have tasted it all. Of all the delicacies in the world, what makes me unforgettable is not the taste of life, let alone the natural delicacies, but the taste of the mountainous countryside when I was a child.

As soon as they enter the twelfth lunar month, the folks in the mountain countryside who have worked hard for a year begin to prepare for the New Year. Eating Laba porridge is a must. Making Laba porridge starts on the seventh day of the Lunar New Year. Home-produced yellow sticky rice, paired with sweet potatoes, jujubes, kidney beans, and pumpkins, add water and put it into a large iron pot, and slowly simmer it over a low fire using wild firewood. On the afternoon of the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, the small mountain village was filled with the enticing aroma of millet mixed with sweet potato, jujube, and pumpkin porridge. It was fragrant and sweet, and I still make my mouth water just thinking about it. The finished Laba porridge needs to be simmered in a big iron pot all night. In the morning, the Laba porridge is uncovered and the family puts it into bowls. They start to smell the sweetness and turn the bowl around to eat the hot, sticky, yellowish porridge. The red Laba porridge. I remember that I especially loved eating porridge dumplings shoveled from the bottom of an iron pot. After eating the porridge, I used a shovel to stick the glutinous rice dumplings under the pot with a shovel. It was a bit mushy and crispy, and it was delicious. It was not inferior to the millet rice crispy rice dumplings sold in the market now.

After eating Laba porridge, we started to kill the New Year pig. At that time, every family raised pigs. The pigs were fed with swill, bran, and pig grass, and they had to be raised for at least a year. As soon as you pass Laba, the small mountain village will hear the sound of pigs howling one after another. The aroma of roasted and boiled pork fills the streets.

What does that smell like? Imagine feeding a native black pig with natural pigweed and swill for a year without feeding any of the current synthetic feed. , after being killed into three-inch square pieces of meat, then stewed with sweet deep well water, local natural peppercorns, and home-produced onions, ginger, and garlic. What is the smell that comes out? When roasting the meat, the oil used is the pig's own suet. When coloring, no white or brown sugar is used. Instead, soft persimmons grown on local trees are peeled, crushed and smeared on the meat, then burned in a pan until it turns maroon. Think about it, what does it smell like? The oil used for cooking and boiling vegetables is either walnut and pepper seed oil harvested by yourself, or new lard. What does the meat taste like when it is cooked?

After killing the pig, start making tofu. At that time, every family would make tofu. The soybeans were harvested from their own fields. Depending on the size of the family, they would make at least one pot of braised tofu. Everyone spends a lot of time making tofu. The smell of soy milk poured over boiling water and the smell of processed tofu slurry fills the village. The marinated tofu is white in color and slightly yellowish in color. It tastes really attractive when boiled, stewed or stir-fried.

Shanxiang people like sticky food. After making tofu, they start frying oilcloth bags and fried rice cakes. The rice cakes and oilcloth bags are made from locally produced yellow sticky rice noodles. The rice cakes are steamed first and then fried, while the oilcloth bags need to be fermented and then directly shaped into the oil pan. The oil used is walnut oil and pepper seed oil. These are the only two self-produced oils used locally for frying food. Walnut oil has a delicate fragrance, and fried peppercorns foam, making it difficult to use. However, according to experienced people, adding a little brown sugar after the pot is boiled will stop foaming. Using pure walnut oil and Sichuan peppercorn oil to fry the fermented sticky yellow rice noodles, another strong aroma of oil smoke floats in the village.

It’s the end of the year when it’s time to steam the buns. The wheat divided by the production team and the fine flour milled in the village are first kneaded into dough and fermented in the big helmets on the fire pits of every household. Then the diligent housewife leads the daughter-in-law and daughters at home, Let's start kneading the dough together. The shaped steamed buns include date steamed buns, dough buns and flower steamed buns. After the formed buns are ready to wake up, put them in a large iron pot on a grate made of sorghum stalks, and burn firewood to steam them in the air. The steam comes out of the kitchen doors and windows, and floats out into the courtyards of every household, sending the fragrance of steamed buns into the cold sky.

Setting off firecrackers and writing couplets are essential items for Chinese New Year in mountain villages. As soon as the twelfth lunar month enters, the sound of firecrackers continues until the end of the first lunar month. The smell of gunpowder after the fireworks are set off is the condiment of the Chinese New Year in mountainous villages. I started posting Spring Festival couplets on New Year's Eve. At that time, there were no Spring Festival couplets for sale. The couplets were all written by local people who could write calligraphy on a voluntary basis. The black writing on the red paper exudes the faint fragrance of ink.

In the first month, people eat, drink, have fun, visit relatives and friends, perform Yangko, turn lanterns, and sing opera on stilts. It is a bustling and bustling place to have fun. That joy is joy that comes from within. Now there are not many people in the mountain village, fireworks and firecrackers are not allowed to be set off, and there is no one to organize entertainment activities. It is impossible to organize activities without money. There were people dancing, but most of them were retirees who had returned from the city. They played pop music, square dances and street dances for fitness. The Spring Festival couplets posted were purchased prints and no longer have the scent of ink. In fact, the twelfth lunar month in mountain villages now has a lot less flavor than in the past, especially since there are no more pigs, and the original alluring meat smell is missing. Nowadays, people in mountainous areas feel that New Year celebrations are the same as those in cities, without the New Year flavor. In fact, if you think about it carefully, is it just the flavor of the New Year that is missing?

In the 1970s, when I was in the Sixth Production Team of the Red Guard Brigade of Huancheng Commune, Ruichang County, Jiangxi Province, we were 11 male and female educated youths who came from Shanghai to join the team and settled here. The production team was freed up We built a warehouse building, which was a tile-roofed house with mud brick walls and divided into 6 rooms for us to live in. We lived together and worked together in the production team.

The production team set aside a piece of land on the hillside behind the house as our vegetable plot, and arranged for an old farmer to guide us in planting various varieties of vegetables throughout the year to supply Solve the food problem of our educated youth.

One day, a female educated youth went to pick vegetables in the vegetable field. Suddenly she saw a black shadow passing through the vegetable garden. She was so frightened that she ran away, her face turned pale, and she shouted all the way that she was in the vegetable field. I met a big snake there. The production team hired an experienced snake catcher to help us catch and eliminate the snake. It didn't take long before he found the snake hole by following the snake's crawling tracks. He dug the entrance of the hole and used a frog as bait to lure the snake out of the hole and caught the snake. , this snake is 2 and a half meters long and as thick as an arm.

He killed the snake, peeled off the skin and removed the internal organs, and let us cook the snake meat to taste the wild game in the mountains.

To be honest, it was the first time for me and most of the other educated youths in Shanghai to eat snake meat at that time. When cooking, we only added a little oil, salt and a few slices of ginger. The cooked snake meat was delicious. Incomparably, together with the thick white milk-like soup, everyone had a bowl. Later, I also ate farmed snake meat again, but I never tasted the delicious taste of wild snake meat that I remembered.

This feeling and scene are deeply engraved in my mind. What I will never forget in my life is the extremely delicious and unique game flavor of the snake meat. I can’t help but think of the time when I went to the countryside to work in the countryside. What I will never forget is the atmosphere of rural life; what I will never forget are the respectable and amiable villagers; what I will never forget are the fellow educated youths who lived together; What will be unforgettable is the ten years of life experience of jumping in and settling down!

My uncle smokes dry cigarettes. Several elderly people of his own age who smoked dry tobacco praised the quality of the tobacco leaves he made. Seeing that he could smoke the fragrance, I took it. I came over and took a strong puff...went down...it didn't go down, and it didn't come out. It was like a ball of chili noodles, or a ball of mustard, stuck in There in the throat. When I took that breath back, my tears had already reached my nose. Look at the tobacco pipe pole thrown to the ground and the tree sliver in the uncle's hand, run...

The impact and memory of food on the taste buds, some are lifelong memories, not necessarily delicacies, but also simple meals. Huizhou, my hometown, is fragrant with flowers all year round. It can be said that firewood is close to water, both sides of pines and mountains, rivers and lakes, and there are all kinds of natural ingredients. It makes Huizhou Hakka famous in the world, but what I will never forget the most in my life is The most common and ordinary home-cooked dish, the Caipu steamed egg made by my mother, made Mr. Kanguan laugh after hearing it. Although it is a simple Caipu steamed egg, it is something that I, a cooking expert, cannot copy, maybe in the whole world. No one can ever do it again a second time. When I was young, I lived in a rural mountainous area. My father was an erhu player in a county troupe. He often went to the mountains and countryside, traveling from village to village to work as a literary and art worker. He could not return home for more than a few days a year. My mother, my two younger sisters, and I were all taken home. We were indeed poor at that time, remember the system had just been decentralized! I eat clean rice once every three days, with potatoes and potatoes as the main meal. I don’t dare to think about meat. Even eating lard once is delicious. I am so poor that I am not kidding. The fact is that even mice shed tears when they don’t have enough food. That year, my father At the beginning of the new year, there are many instructions and instructions, plant several acres of tobacco, raise a cow and two pigs, and then ride a bicycle and carry a bag and go out. The tobacco harvest can be exchanged for food, raise the cows to plow the fields, and raise the pigs to make money. For me and my little sister to study, it was the guarantee of my family's happy life, but it was not a good thing to lose someone. That year, Huizhou suffered a once-in-a-hundred-year flood. The smoke washed away the cattle, and the pigs were destroyed once the pig house was destroyed. One pig was crushed to death. The life of this pig was the life of my family. The green mountains and green waters turned into barren mountains and rivers in an instant. There were dead roads and broken bridges in front, and there were mountains behind. The protection turned into cataracts. I couldn’t even cry without tears. It was a natural disaster. Water As soon as we retreated, my mother and I carried large firewood, dug it in the mud, and then carried it home to make fuel. We kept doing this for several days. My sister cooked wild vegetables and pig rice at home. Once, my mother carried a big pine tree. I raised my tail and tried my best. When I lowered my shoulders, I let it go one, two, three times. My mother let go, but I was still unable to lift the tree and put it down. The impact was so great that I fainted on the spot. My mother hugged me and cried, "Don't act rude again." I hurriedly went to the barefoot doctor, and everything was cured. My mother was originally going to make Caipu omelette, so she also prepared the Caipu egg liquid and put it next to the stove without steaming, but the result was the same as above. When I When I woke up, I found a vegetable steamed egg. After eating it, I ate four bowls of porridge and water. It was delicious. It quenched my thirst and quenched my hunger. I was sleepy and tired and fell asleep. When I woke up, I heard my mother again. Cry, child! Why eat raw eggs if they haven't been steamed yet? Are you still telling this story after decades? I also thought about how it could be so delicious and what the reason was. It wasn’t until I worked as a chef for more than ten years that I realized the reason. Because the egg liquid is next to the stove, and the pig is cooked in the stove, and the residual heat makes the egg liquid cook slowly and become tender. It's so cool that it's hard to put it into words.

The most unforgettable thing is the braised pork with rice that I ate in college. It is fat but not greasy, melts in your mouth, is ruddy in color, full of fragrance in your mouth, and has endless aftertaste. Just thinking about it makes you happy

When I was a kid, my mother fried dried Filipino taro noodles! ! Put some shrimp skin! ! ! Egg skin丨! ! ! You definitely haven’t eaten it! !