Walking on a foreign road, the warm sun and cool wind are good, but the heart and taste buds are still restless.
1
Eat pancakes on Qingming Day. In Chaoshan hometown, eating pancakes is the same as "crossing paper" (that is, worshipping mountains), which has been passed down from generation to generation. If you can't taste the pancakes with hometown flavor in Qingming Festival, you will feel sorry and incomplete in your heart.
When I was a child, pancakes were still a "special sacrifice" that was only eaten on Qingming Day. Every few days, when the festival approaches, there will be faint shouts in the streets and alleys from time to time: "Sugar onions ... pancakes ..." As long as I hear this long voice, I will eagerly pester my mother to take me to "snap up" this snack that I have been looking forward to for a whole year.
Chaoshan pancakes are divided into salty and sweet, and the difference lies in the different fillings. Salted pancakes are usually filled with shredded pork, shredded eggs, shredded mushrooms, leeks, bean sprouts and shrimp skin. Can be made at home. At that time, the family sat around a table, and everyone chose ingredients according to their own preferences and spread them in the middle of a round cake crust. When they are piled into long strips, they turn the crust three times and roll it three times, and then they can eat it. The filling of salty pancakes is full and suitable. I don't feel tired when I eat three or four rolls at a time, while my brother with a bigger appetite eats six or seven rolls at a time.
However, I can't tell you why. My favorite in my heart is always the sweet pancake that seems bland, but in fact it means Gankun. It is a unique pancake in the world and a traditional craft of Chaoshan people. It's called: sugar onion pancake.
2
Sugar onion is a kind of snow-white Chaoshan dessert, which is generally made of white sugar and sucrose through special processing. This exquisite dessert was once glimpsed in China on the tip of the tongue, but the process of making sugar onions is complicated and exquisite, which may be beyond many people's imagination. Even I, a self-proclaimed "sugar onion control", learned about this magical craft by accident through other people's dictation and some images in my adulthood.
Boiling syrup is the first process of making sugar onions. In order to test the hardness of syrup, in the process of boiling sugar, the master must quickly pinch out a little syrup from the pot with the temperature as high as 145 degrees Celsius by hand, immerse it in cold water and cool it into an irregular transparent shape, which is called "skimming sugar" by the insiders. By kneading the solidified sugar, experienced masters can quickly "hear" whether the syrup has been cooked to the right temperature and whether the final candy will stick to the teeth. The taste of sugar onions often depends on this step.
When the syrup is cooled to a certain temperature, it will reach the most exhausting "sugar pulling" stage. Because the temperature is too high, the golden syrup must be picked up with two wooden sticks at first and "hung" on a wooden post, which stretches unsteadily clockwise. If the temperature of the syrup is low, you can also use your hands instead of wooden sticks, and finally stretch the syrup repeatedly into rectangular white candy bars.
High-quality sugar onions are not only non-sticky, but also sweet and crisp, which melts in the mouth. For example, Guo, the magistrate of Chaozhou in the Ming Dynasty, said: "The onion sugar in the tide is white and loose, and there is no dregs."
Once, I talked to a friend about this sweet food that she longed for. She asked me curiously, "Why is it called sugar onion?" There seems to be no onion in the sugar? "In fact, the" onion "of sugar onion means that it has scattered holes on its side that look like onions, and it has the color of onions. Because a large amount of air enters during the stretching process, the finally formed sugar onion strips are covered with pores. It is said that a perfect and regular sugar onion should have 16 large holes and as many as 256 small holes.
three
The beauty of sugar onion pancakes can only be truly appreciated by those who have tasted it.
A soft and tender pancake skin is used as the base, covered with a crispy layer of white sugar onion, and sprinkled with just a few black and white sesame seeds. Gently bite, the skin is tender and crisp, the sugar onion is crisp and sweet, and the sweetness is mixed with the grain fragrance of sesame. Multi-level taste twists and turns on the tip of the tongue, and finally precipitates into the stomach, and happiness can't help but arise.
A roll of sugar onion pancakes is delicious because of the pancake skin. Pancake skin is generally sold in the street, and its making method is quite unique.
During the Qingming Festival, pancake stalls hiding on street corners are often crowded with diners. The pancake master was in a hurry, only to see his right hand shaking constantly, spinning a mass of batter, smearing it on a hot tripod full of oil, and then quickly collecting it. The thin layer attached to the tripod immediately solidified into a shell with moderate thickness, so his left hand lifted the shell aside and continued to make the next shell.
Until now, I still find it pleasing to watch my uncle and aunt who sell pancakes bake the crust. In my memory, those short days when I bought sugar onions and pancake skins and walked home hand in hand with my mother were so sweet and far away.
four
Listening to relatives and friends in my hometown, even if it is not a node now, I can occasionally see vendors pushing tricycles to sell sugar onion pancakes on the street. However, instead of shouting, they used "megaphones" instead. In my spare time, it is no longer a rare thing to buy a few rolls of ready-made sugar onion pancakes for afternoon tea.
Pancakes don't seem as rare as they used to be. However, in many Chaoshan families, Qingming still retains the custom of eating "pancake dinner" around the table. At that time, at the dinner table, rice was left and pancakes were full.
When young people are not in a hurry, they often secretly look forward to the arrival of Qingming because they are greedy for the taste of pancakes. Later, someone told me that this kind of food is actually from the war years. In order to mourn the dead relatives and friends, people made pancakes wrapped in straw mats to offer sacrifices to the dead and mourn. When I grow up, I gradually understand the heavy significance of Qingming to some people, while sugar onion pancakes have become a touch of sweetness in this world, which has comforted some lonely souls more or less.