When you come to Tongli, a thousand-year-old town known as "Chunzheng Water Town, Old Jiangnan", you have visited the old streets and alleys in Ming and Qing Dynasties and visited the private gardens of world cultural heritage. The next step is to pay attention to the dazzling array of local products in Tongli. Tongli is a big market town, and it has been said since ancient times that people eat in Tongli. Let's take the tea and cakes in Tongli as an example. Guxiang Village, which opened in Zhuxing Street in the old days, is the most famous. It was founded in the Xuantong period of Qing Dynasty. The founder of Guxiang Village is Lv Jianqing. When he was young, he apprenticed in Suzhou Daoxiang Village candy store. After starting his career, a small-scale tea and candy stall was set up on Dongdai in Tongli. Later, when the business expanded, in the middle of Zhuxing Street, a facade room was rented in the south street of Daqing Yaowan Post Office, which was named Guxiang Village, in order to inherit the traditional meaning of Daoxiang Village. Tea candy made by Guxiang Village has Suzhou flavor; Business management is famous for its diligence and strictness, and product quality is famous for its precision and constancy. Tea snacks produced in Guxiang Village pay attention to workmanship and quality, especially lard rice cakes. Guxiang Village after the founding of New China was renamed several times. In the late 1980s, it resumed its original name; Today, the name of Guxiang Village has been entered in Suzhou Dictionary. In the memory of Laotongli, near the Yejiaqiangmen, east of Ming and Qing Street, there used to be a Yicong Hefeng firm, which was also engaged in the tea and candy business, and its reputation was even louder than that of Guxiang Village. Unfortunately, it closed down due to the war. It happened at the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War. Hefeng Business Firm, located next to the wall door of Yejia, still opens a shop to do business; One day, a row of patrolling Japanese soldiers passed by Hefeng Commercial Bank. The devils smelled a wisp of wine aroma floating from the store and surrounded them one by one. When I saw the steaming wine cakes in the tray, I was really salivating, and immediately you grabbed them one by one and ate them; They are not satisfied after eating, but also the owner Chen Wenxi to help them cook another pot; The proprietress, who was busy kneading dough in the back room, suddenly panicked. In her panic, she actually rubbed a gold ring on the table into the dough. The Japanese have always been suspicious. When a ghost soldier ate the gold ring, he suddenly flew into a rage. He put a gold ring on his hand, without asking indiscriminately, and stabbed with a bayonet; Only three times and two times, the owner Chen Wenxi was stabbed to death; That's not to mention, even the guy who served the plate was heavily hit by him; Everyone else was scared and motionless on the ground; When the devils are gone, they will return to god; After the funeral and the inventory of the property, the family fled everywhere, and Hefeng Firm was lost from then on. Now there are more than ten pastry shops listed on the market. Guxiang Village and Lin Jiapu in Zhuxing Street are actually descendants of the same clan; They used to be pastry chefs in Guxiang Village, and the cakes they made were similar. The sock bottom pastry produced in these shops is one of the traditional teas in Tongli. According to legend, sock bottom pastry was made by a royal chef in the Southern Song Dynasty following the example of court refreshments, and it has a history of hundreds of years. Flour and lard are the main materials for sock bottom crisp, with sugar, salt, sesame and chives. The preparation method comprises the following steps: mixing flour, boiling water and oil to make oil noodles; Then mix oil and flour to make pastry; The oil noodles are wrapped with pastry, rolled into long strips, rolled with sesame seeds, wrapped with stuffing, divided into small pieces with uniform thickness, and finally rolled into the shape of sock soles with a rolling cylinder, and the green body can be formed; Take the green body to the pot for baking. A few minutes later, a delicious, golden, crisp and delicious sock bottom crisp was baked. Sock bottom crisp has become a special food that people are scrambling to buy because of its fresh, crisp, sweet and salty taste. Jujube paste hemp cake, cloud cake, peach cake, rose lard cake, Euryale ferox cake, ear cake, snow dumplings, etc., are traditional and exquisite in workmanship. Before and after the Qingming Festival, the wild herbs and grass heads picked from the countryside were the coloring materials for cakes, and the green dumplings "occupied" all the cake shops in the streets. Glutinous rice flour is mixed with green grass heads and bean paste is used as stuffing; Put it in a steamer for ten minutes. After opening the steamer, the green dumplings are made. Take a taste, the bean paste is slightly sweet, soft and non-sticky, with a hint of grass flavor; Green dumplings are also sacrifices used by Tongli people to sweep graves in Tomb-Sweeping Day, which means "green (clear) and white". Jiuniang cake is one of the seasonal foods in Tongli in spring. According to Lin Debiao of Lin Jiapu, it is a special cake made of fermented wine and flour, baked and wrapped with sweet stuffing. Add fermented grains, bean paste and lard into the fabric. In the season when Jiuniang cakes are on the market, the Lin shop in Tailai Bridge is full of customers; Shops bake and sell, and customers buy and eat now; Take a newly-released Jiuniang cake and take a bite. A sweet bean paste with a bouquet of wine flows down from your mouth. Take a sip with your mouth, and a piece of fat lard in the cake will make the oil and water run straight; Jiuniang cake, because of its excellent product quality, has attracted people from far and near places to buy it. Malt cake is also a seasonal tea in Tongli town. This tea with a strong local flavor can be cooked by almost all the skillful daughters-in-law in the countryside; In spring. As soon as they are free, they will go to the fields to pick Malantou, dig wild vegetables, and occasionally pick grass heads home; Grass head, one of the raw materials for making malt cake, is crushed and mixed with malt and flour; People who pay attention to it will also put walnuts in the malt cake and sprinkle sesame seeds on the outer layer of the cake; When the blank is ready, put the cake in the oil pan and fry it slowly; Just ten minutes, when you see the cakes "bright and fragrant", you can start the pot; Taste one with chopsticks, sweet, fragrant and oily; It's just that malt cakes are only sold in spring. From long summer to autumn, Tongli's winemaking is also very famous, and most local people can make it. Fermented wine is made by mixing glutinous rice with medicinal liquor and fermenting it. "Glasses", who lives in Hougang, can not only make all kinds of cakes, but also fry fish to make wine. Every day, he pushes a scooter carrying dozens of pots of wine from his home and sells it all the way in the old street; Nakagawa Bridge often stops. Three yuan a box of wine, let you taste it and want it; Just buy and eat now, not easy to keep. Minjiawan, to the west of Zhuxingdai, originally produced Bentang Zhai Min Cake, which is a well-known traditional cake, has a history of more than 400 years according to historical data. In Qing dynasty, Min cake was once listed as a tribute of the imperial court. Minbing, a kind of green dumplings, is made by kneading white ramie with rice flour as skin, adding bean paste, walnut meat, sugar-preserved lard and so on, and steaming. It has the unique flavor of bright indigo, smooth waxy fragrance, oily but not greasy, and fragrant after eating. In the early years of the Republic of China, there were people from Tongli who founded Dafugui Minbing Company in Shanghai, and their products were exported to overseas. Tongli Min Cake is called Min Cake because it is only made by the Min family and has been handed down from generation to generation. It is sold in Bentangzhai of Ming and Qing Street in spring. There is an old saying in Tongli that "greedy daughters-in-law frequently offer stoves". As long as clever women have a handful of noodles in their hands, they will rub them and knead them, and a very delicious snack will be made. Traditional cakes, such as "supporting cakes", cake dumplings, pimples, zongzi, rose cakes, Osmanthus Jelly, begonia cakes, steamed dumplings, square cakes, sugar cakes and muffins, are mostly sold in the market. In addition to these teas and cakes, the hoof is the main course of the people in Tongli for holidays and wedding banquets. As the saying goes, "No banquet without hoof" means "reunion and self-improvement". There are several shops selling hooves and shoes on the street in Tongli. In the newly filled street opposite the ginkgo tree, there are several houses, such as Jinbang Zhuangyuanfang, Tongshi and Haozailai. Speaking of the hoof of Tongli town, there is really a history: it is said that Song Chunyou was the top student of Wei Ruxian High School in Tongli for four years. Wei Zhuangyuan especially likes to eat braised hoofs. During the Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty, Ren Lansheng, the owner of Tuisi Garden, admired Wei Zhuangyuan and specially hired a famous chef to cook braised hoofs as the main course of family banquet, which was nicknamed the champion hoof. At that time, the champion Hong Jun and his concubine Sai Jinhua often came to taste it; Although today's champion hoof is slightly different from the past in practice, it is better in taste. According to the proprietress of Zhuangyuan Square in Jinbang, all the top-ranked hooves they produce are selected from the hooves of regular manufacturers, and the specifications are above one kilogram; "First, boil the hoof in water, remove the hair, add 18 Chinese herbal medicines to boil, and then simmer with slow fire; A large pot can cook 80 hoofs at a time, which takes about four hours "; When cooking the champion's hoof, you must use an iron pot. The iron pot can absorb the water generated in the cooking process, and in addition, it can steam out the fat in the hoof, so that the cooked hoof is fat but not greasy, crisp and not rotten. It is said that those eighteen Chinese herbal medicines can also play an antiseptic role! How to eat the vacuum-packed champion's hoof? The enthusiastic proprietress said that the vacuum-packed champion's hoof can be boiled in water, so that the soup is not easy to dry and more tasty. The champion's hoof, soaked in Chinese herbal medicine and baked in thick oil red sauce, is a specialty of Tongli Town, and its quality is equivalent to that of Zhouzhuang's Wansanhoof. In addition to these local products, Tongli also has cooked lotus roots, yellow pickles, Euryale ferox, Wuling and goose eggs to buy; As long as you like, you can take some back and share it with your family. Text/Yao Hongxi