Men pull carts in front and women push carts in the back. They may also be followed by a five-or six-year-old preschool child who comes out to help when he has nothing to do.
Most of them sell jiaozi wonton, fried rice noodles with cold noodles, mutton skewers and fried stinky tofu. They are doing small business and earning hard money. "It's not easy to earn twenty or thirty dollars a day," I once heard them pleading with the urban management team members. Maybe they hid some numbers. In short, although people in this line of work are not easy, they also have their cunning. They smiled sadly to gain sympathy from others.
Those people in the city management team, who wear uniforms and big hats, can't care about this. They speak pure Nanjing dialect. Are we on a mission? Don't make it too hard for us. The others took their things to the truck without saying anything.
I saw it once. It was in hankou road, and it was near evening. The city management team suddenly attacked and only heard "the police are coming." All the vendors took their things and ran away. I watched from the side of the road. Although it was an ordinary scene, the hardships of life were thrilling in that moment of panic.
Only at midnight are they safe. The city quieted down and people fell asleep. They set up supper stalls, tables and chairs, simple furniture and steaming white steel pots. The gas burns brightly, and the flame is like a blue chrysanthemum in full bloom.
The street at midnight is so quiet that the shadows of buttonwood trees hit the sidewalk one after another. Several taxis passed by the roadside, and some cyclists left long shadows on the street.
I really like midnight in Nanjing, because there are buttonwood trees, wide streets, several unidentified Nightcrawler, and food stalls. They are a part of my daily life background, which makes me feel warm and supportive. I have come a long way through this period and will look back with cautious joy. Sometimes, when I walk in the middle of the night, I inadvertently see a landscape, and I will slow down. I know I was cautious and serious at that moment. I lit it with my finger and said to my friends, look ...
They said, what do you see?
I said, the food stall at night.
I smiled shyly, because I suspected that I was a little bourgeois and I couldn't stand it. I can't tell them I saw people down there. They are difficult, hurried and turbulent, but they are peaceful and solemn in the light of midnight. They do a good job. At some point, they may feel happy and at a loss, but they are happy after all.
I saw the beauty of life, under the hard shell, quietly blooming in the midnight street.
I often patronize the midnight snack stand myself. A friend of mine once told me: I don't pay attention to eating, but I must be clean and comfortable. I thought I wasn't that fragile. Sitting on the street in the middle of the night, I casually asked for a bowl of fresh meat wonton, and I ate it for a dollar, feeling inexplicably warm and practical.
I looked at the stall owner beside me, a middle-aged couple, wearing a white apron and neatly dressed. The woman put jiaozi on the edge of the box, and the man bent down to get something from the hole, talking to himself. I guess they must also feel warm and practical.
I also saw a middle-aged man who could not tell his identity from his clothes. He sat on the table next door, crossed his legs and told himself: don't add coriander and spicy oil. He said it twice in a row, and I remembered it. I have no idea what he does. Is he poor? Is he bored? Is he happy? Why don't you go home late at night, in the streets of late autumn, just want a bowl of small wonton?
I ate wonton and looked at them and the street view on the roadside. For a moment, I almost buried my head and swallowed. The heat of the soup covered my eyes like fog, which made me feel like I was going to cry, but I didn't. I just eat quietly, calmly knowing that I am just full of feelings for them.
A place has its own special snacks. When it comes to snacks in Nanjing, most people first think of traditional Qinhuai snacks, such as fried stinky tofu, bean curd, duck blood vermicelli, steamed buns, osmanthus wine, Yuanxiao and so on. Among them, the most popular snack for locals and the most jaw-dropping snack for foreigners is the king egg.
People's feelings for the king's egg are extreme. Those who love them love them very much, and evil people are extremely evil. An example that can be compared with them may be durian in Singapore. Its "bad smell" is simply the mouth-watering "fragrance" in the noses of foodies. So is the king's egg. In the eyes of gourmets, the characteristics of king eggs that make people's index fingers move greatly are undoubtedly frightening and even disgusting.
The so-called prosperous egg is an egg that fails to form after hatching. Because of their different incubation periods, they present different states. Among them, there is a "whole chicken". When you break the eggshell, you can see a chicken curled up in a bag full of water, looking very gentle and pitiful. When you eat it, you should carefully pull out the chicken feathers and dip them in fine salt. Some people dare not look carefully. Objectively speaking, if you don't think about the innocent closed eyes of the chicken, the taste of "whole chicken" is still delicious. This is also a fundamental reason why Wang Dandan has many customers. There is also an egg that is not fully hatched into a "whole chicken", called "half chicken and half egg". As the name implies, it is half chicken and half egg. Because it has the delicious taste of chicken and eggs, it is also the popular egg that most diners like. Among them, protein has changed during the incubation process, which is quite different from protein in ordinary eggs. Under the boutique, the delicious taste of meat has been mixed in it, and it is also in the "whole egg", that is, the Wang egg that was interrupted in the early incubation process. Although it is still an ordinary egg on the whole, its color and content have changed qualitatively, and its taste is much better than that of ordinary eggs. In a word, the king egg is a deformed product caused by its own or external interference in the natural process from egg to chicken. The first person who dares to try the king's eggs is as admirable as the first person who eats crabs.
In fact, the king's egg is not unique to Nanjing. In the north, similar eggs are called hairy eggs, probably because the chicks in the eggs have already given birth to chicken feathers. However, the custom of eating raw eggs is far from being formed in the north. In Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, Nanjing, Changzhou and Liuhe in Jiangsu province, Jinhua and Lanxi in Zhejiang province, people have been eating customs for hundreds of years. However, the eggs that have never been hatched are extended to all eggs that have not been completely hatched, such as king goose eggs and king duck eggs, which are all similar. The energy and patience spent by human beings on the road of exploring delicious food are considerable.
It is worth mentioning that Wang Egg is called "Phoenix Egg" in Jinhua and Lanxi, Zhejiang Province, and this name also has allusions. It is said that the prevalence of the edible custom of king's eggs is also closely related to Emperor Qianlong's visit to the south of the Yangtze River.
That year, Emperor Qianlong was inspecting in Jinhua, Zhejiang. He was robbed in the northern suburb of Jinhua and separated from his entourage. After walking in the mountains for a long time, he was hungry and thirsty. He came to a farmhouse, and Qianlong asked the peasant woman at home for a favor to take shelter from the rain for the time being. As soon as the peasant woman saw the distinguished guests coming to the hut, she arranged tea and snacks to entertain them. But the family is poor, and tea is made of octagonal thorns. The peasant woman is thinking about snacks, and there is really nothing to eat at home. She had to take out eight hatched eggs from the henhouse and cook them for the guests. At this time, Qianlong was hungry. He was very happy to see steaming boiled eggs served. When he peeled off the eggshell, he found a furry chicken inside. At present, he can't care so much. There are even three or two people eating with bones, and they eat one after another. The more they eat, the more delicious they feel and the more they want to eat. To my surprise, this egg has not only hair but also bones. Its taste is so unique that it is unheard of in the palace. So I carefully asked the peasant woman the origin of the egg name, and the peasant woman told me the truth. After hearing this, Gan Long clapped his hands and said with a smile, "Sister-in-law, this is it. This egg was born from the mother and got the essence of the mother, so it is no small matter. What a rare treasure! In my opinion, it should be called "Phoenix Egg"! " As soon as Emperor Qianlong's golden mouth opened, he called the name "Phoenix Egg". Because this kind of egg is really fresh and delicious, there has been a custom of eating "hatching eggs" among Jinhua people since then.
It doesn't matter whether this legend is true or not, but it adds magical color to the cage of folk snack Wang Dan, and people like it better.
Most people who love to eat boiled eggs think that it is a tonic with rich nutritional value, in which the contents of amino acids and globulin are extremely high and easy to digest and absorb. Especially the top grade of Wang's eggs-"live beads". This is a living embryo that has been hatched for 12 days without long hair, and its nutrition is better. But there is another saying that this kind of egg is actually rich in nutrition and even harmful to the body. Because the original nutrients such as protein and fat in eggs have changed, most of them are used and consumed by embryos, and the remaining nutrients are very few. Especially stillborn eggs, which contain a lot of germs, are easy to cause food poisoning, dysentery, hepatitis and other diseases after eating. There seems to be no conclusion as to who is right and who is wrong in these two widely different statements.
Speaking of "living beads", I have to say a few more words. Speaking of it, the principle of the king's egg is similar, except that the king's egg is interrupted during the incubation process due to insurmountable internal or external reasons. "Living beads" is a kind of artificial intentional interference in the incubation process. It is a special product that grass eggs are hatched into living embryos by special technology. It has a history of hundreds of years in Liuhe, Jiangsu Province, and is a folk tonic. However, its edible range is not extensive. In the past two years, Liuhe County has industrialized the special food "live beads", registered trademarks, unified quality standards, and shipped them to the corners of large and small cities after packaging, so that urbanites can re-understand "live beads". The "live beads" produced on the assembly line are undoubtedly more scientific and nutritious than the red eggs sold on the street. They are the same size and arranged neatly. Even the proportion of half chicken and half egg inside is quite different, and they are all full of body fluid. Two thirds of the whole egg is hatched chicken, and the other third is equivalent to the basic protein. Chicken is hairless and clean, delicious and rich in protein. It adds a lot of sense of the times to the traditional snack king egg. People don't have to eat in the street to satisfy their appetite, but they can find "living beads" in high-end hotels at home.