Those of us who were born before the 196s have all tasted the taste of hard life. Compared with childhood, today's life is simply paradise. People, maybe they just don't know when they are blessed. Like me, every day, big fish and big meat satisfy their appetite, but they always miss the "delicious food" when they were children.
(a), kill the pig braised dishes
The kitchen is steaming, killing the pig.
In the big iron pot on the stove, chunks of pork belly and chopped pigs are boiled (heart, liver, intestines, etc.), and the meat and water are red and white in the soup, and the thick white oil flower on the noodle soup is also rolling and jumping, and the air is filled with the smell of meat. The master butcher, the uncle next door, pokes the meat with chopsticks from time to time to see how the meat is rotten. Mom and my aunt next door stood on the edge of the stove where the steam was blowing, cha, cha, cha, and the knife fell. In an instant, the thin shredded sauerkraut piled up on the cutting board, then pushed it into the pot, covered it and cooked it again.
I don't know how long it took to cook, but when I opened the lid, the meat and vegetables in the pot were not their original colors, and the sauerkraut changed from dark green to oily yellow. As soon as the meat is cooked in vegetable soup, the color becomes darker, and it is not so clear between red and white. The translucent soup is just flush with the vegetables in the pot. Uncle Kill Pig then brought the filled blood sausage, opened the meat and vegetables with a spoon to reveal a piece of noodle soup, carefully put the blood sausage into the meat and vegetables, and slowly boiled it with a small fire. After a while, the blood sausage bulged and coiled into a circle, like the red inner tube in the wheel of Dad's bicycle. Uncle butcher holds a needle in his hand and sticks it on the bulging intestine from time to time, saying it's deflation.
it's time for dinner, and four big dishes are served on the special plate: a plate with five flowers and three layers of big meat slices on the top, hot and trembling. Sliced blood sausage is smooth, tender and shiny, and each slice is like a small moon, which is pressed round and round to form a big purple flower on the plate. The third course is a big platter made up of heart, liver and small intestine, and there are also a few pieces of lean meat kernels in it. The lean meat kernels are for people who don't eat fat. The last course is fresh, soft and refreshing sauerkraut from the cauldron. In the middle of the four courses is a small bowl of mashed garlic.
two big tables, one for adults and one for children. Uncles and grandfathers "made" big pieces of meat by dipping them in garlic paste, and the children's cheeks were full of meat. From time to time, they wiped the oil from their mouths with their coat sleeves.
The meat stewed with sauerkraut is fragrant but not greasy.
Sauerkraut stewed with meat is sour and soft, and every shredded vegetable smells of meat.
blood sausage is my favorite. The hot, tender tofu is generally soft and smooth, with a "little moon" dotted with green flowers and white garlic. The tip of my tongue rolls one piece at a time, and I don't have to chew it. I can "roll" it into most of the plate by myself in a short time.
My stomach is "stuffed" with meat and vegetables, then I pull two mouthfuls of rice soaked in stewed vegetable soup and burp twice. After this meal, I don't have to eat several meals.
(2) The smell of bacon
After killing pigs in the twelfth lunar month and inviting relatives and friends to have a big meal, the rest of the meat is poured with water by my father and frozen in the outside jar, and kept for the New Year and the first month. Before the meat was frozen, Mom chose two sides of fat and suitable meat, thickly smeared it with homemade sauce, and then hung it on the roof of the stove house with fine wire, and let it dry slowly for half a year, which became bacon. These two pieces of bacon are rare meat in bitter summer.
when the beans and pumpkins come down, mom takes the bacon off the roof and stews them, cutting only a small piece at a time and cutting it into thin pieces. At that time, there was little oil in the house, and the dishes were not oiled when bacon was put. Strangely, a pot of dishes stewed with a few pieces of bacon was fragrant and rotten, and it looked oily. The cooked bacon slices were bright red in the thin place, hard and clanking like the dried sausage we ate today, and the fat place was crystal clear and transparent, like ground glass. First, they were put into your mouth like peppermint and hemp like pepper. Sometimes, in a big pot, mom stews vegetables at the bottom of the pot, puts a circle of cornmeal cakes on the top of the pot, covers the pot, and the soup boils on the cake. When the pot is opened, the cake is oily, and it is also salty and crispy with bacon.
(3) Roasting small fish on the stove cover
For a few years when I was a child, we were able to roast small fish by the stove soon after freezing, which was our own invention. When I was a child, my brother and sister were greedy cats like me. In the winter of those years, my father's unit went to Xijiang River (where Xijiang River is, we still don't know, and we haven't made any textual research) to pull fish, and when we pulled it back, we used a dustpan to divide it. Most of those fish were small miscellaneous fish, gourd seeds, seven-star fish, loach, and wheat ears (also called' piercing nails'), and everything. Although small, it is fresh, wrapped in an ice shell. Our favorite is the ear of wheat, which is full of meat and a thorn, and the meat is the most delicious. We knocked the ice off the ears of wheat, sprinkled salt flowers on them, wrapped the leaves of corn steamed with mom one by one, tied the two ends with thread, and then placed them flat on the stove cover, buckled the washbasin on them, and the corn pulp burned fiercely below. Soon, the stove cover made a crackling sound, and the white smoke son rushed out of the washbasin wrapped in a fragrant smell. Until now, I think it is the most delicious barbecue in the world.
My childhood years are gone, but the delicious food that wafted in my childhood always lingers in my memory, and it often makes my mouth water. I have been to many stew restaurants and want to relive the taste there, but the so-called "kill pig stew", whether in color, fragrance, taste or shape, makes me feel wrong. I also thought about cooking it myself once, but where did I get such a big pot?
wherever I see bacon these years, I can't help buying a piece, but none of it tastes like bacon cooked by my mother when I was a child. I also thought about making a piece according to my mother's method. I can look around the room. Where is it suitable to hang a piece of bacon? Helpless and dispel the idea.
whenever I take my daughter to a barbecue restaurant to eat "baked plates" and "teppanyaki", I can't help but recall the smell of roasting small fish as a child, and I wish I had a stove that only burns corn pulp now.
While life gives us new and beautiful things, it also quietly takes away some old and beautiful things, so we have one more enjoyment, that is "aftertaste".