The eel sold in the vegetable market were all alive, so they asked for a counter-offer, and asked the fish seller to fish a few pieces in the pool to help slaughter them. The fishmonger was very quick. He took out a narrow board with nails from the side, grabbed a eel and nailed it to the board with a bang, cut open the belly, carried the back, took the meat and washed it again, and it was ready in a moment.
Cooking Monopterus albus is also simple, not a technical job. Go home and slice the eel, thicken the starch, scoop a tablespoon of lard in the hot pot, add onion, ginger and pepper to fry until fragrant, then pour the thickened eel into the wok, add soy sauce, sugar, yellow wine, balsamic vinegar, monosodium glutamate and garlic, add a spoonful of oil, fire in the wok, stir the wok a few times, dish it up, and sprinkle with pepper.
Monopterus albus has only one triangular thorn, which is less and thicker, fresh and tender, full of meat and lingering aftertaste.
The taste of eel varies according to different cooking methods. It is soft and firm when fried raw, moist and full when braised in brown sauce, soft and tender when stewed, and crisp when fried. Eel can also make soup, pour oil into the pot and stir-fry the fins until the milky soup is collected, and the fins turn over, then add a bowl of water, add sauce, pepper, garlic and ginger, cover the pot and simmer, and sprinkle some chopped green onion. Although it is a common practice, it is as fragrant and fresh.
There is also a dish in Suizhou restaurant called Pan Eel, which is said to have been learned from Yicheng, a neighboring county. The ingredients are young eels with a brush with a thickness of 1 cm. It is said that the small live eel is directly put into the hot pot. When it is stir-fried, it can be seen that the eel is coiled up one by one, and when it is eaten, the internal organs are torn down from the eel head with its mouth, which is quite bloody.
Maybe nowadays, eel is mostly farmed artificially, and there are many kinds of eel, and the source of ingredients is easy, so some people are ingenious and eat eel seeds and grandchildren.
I remember when I was a child, it was not easy to catch eels, but it was something for our children to explore.
in the 197s, when I was a teenager, my family was moved to Huoshichong, Shangdian, Sanligang, Sui County.
In spring and early summer, when the paddy field is ready for transplanting, it is necessary to ditch around the paddy field with a spade. A ditch digger will catch a lot of Monopterus albus in half a day, and Huang Cancan is big and fat. Monopterus albus often makes holes in the ridge of the field and leaks water from the rice fields, so Monopterus albus is harmful to some extent.
At that time, there were not many people eating Monopterus albus in Huoshichong rural area. I don't know if it was fried eel's waste of oil or other reasons. My family is a decentralized household, and the villagers who dug ditches knew that our family ate Monopterus albus and sent it to my family. In fact, you can sell it on Shangdian Street, but the rural people at that time could not wipe their faces.
But there are always people with lively minds who want to get some spare money and go to catch eel. In the evening of summer, there is a cool breeze everywhere, and the grass insects chirp and sing. I wear an eel cage basket on my shoulder with a hoe handle, find a rice field ditch where I feel eel infested, bury a piece of eel cage, and put some animal offal in the cage. Only when I get up early the next day, I can get a few eels.
The simplest way to catch eels is to use a torch to catch eels in the shallow water of rice fields when they come out for food at night, and you can catch them accurately, but you are afraid of stepping on the rice seedlings.
The easiest thing to do is to dig out the eel. Soon after the seedlings were planted, the ridge of the field with fresh water was carefully searched for the eel hole. Monopterus albus likes to burrow at the edge of the ridge, find a fresh mud hole, reach into a finger, and carefully dig along the hole by feeling. When the hard mud can't be dug any more, you can put one foot in, twitch back and forth, and "splash" mud water in it. Monopterus albus can't stand this, so it will "grab" the hole and flee, take a look and suddenly stretch out its hook and bend.
in the 198s, my family returned to the city, and I grew up to be a young man. I took part in the work and worked in Suizhou Light Industry Machinery Factory. On Sunday, I had a rest, so I was bored. I went fishing for Monopterus albus in the suburbs with several colleagues, such as Wang Bing, Chen Xuejun and Zhang Xiaozhou.
A few young people usually catch a fish in a basket, and run around Xihao or the pond and seedling fields in the suburbs like solitary herons and wild cranes. The hook for fishing Monopterus albus is made by sharpening and bending the spokes of a bicycle. Put on thick black earthworms, touch the hole of Monopterus albus at the edge of a pond full of weeds and roots, insert the bait, carefully lift and insert it, rotate it, and use your fingers to bounce water to make a noise, so as to induce the yellow fin to bite the bait. The yellow fin fiercely protects the hole. As long as the mouth bites, it won't let go and drag it into the hole. At this time, hook the fishing ring and twist it hard in the opposite direction, then pull it obliquely outward and crash, and a thick eel will be pulled out. Fishing for Monopterus albus is a technical job, which requires patience, and most of us young people always catch very little fish.
Monopterus albus is degenerated, and the medium-sized and small-sized eels are female, and the stout eels over three to five years old are male, without exception. In midsummer, when female eels lay eggs, they all make big holes, and spray a small pile of sticky white foam on the water surface of the hole to attract male eels to fertilize the eggs. The female eels who protect the eggs are particularly fierce. When fishing eels, they may bite their fingers and never let go. Fortunately, Monopterus albus is not poisonous, and it doesn't matter if it is bitten, it's just a shock.
in a blink of an eye, decades passed quietly. We are no longer young, and we are no longer catching eels. In the past, Shangdian Flint, who used to catch eels, rushed to friends who lived far apart, and had long since heard from them. Even when I was young, my colleagues rarely contacted me. Wang Bing set up a factory. I heard that he has now given the factory to his son and played orchids by himself, which is often only seen in Tik Tok. Chen Xuejun is selling cars. I don't know how the business is going. It's unknown that he still can't live in Suizhou from his hometown. Zhang Xiaozhou became famous in the southern suburbs. His eldest sister-in-law is my classmate. I heard that he got cancer the year before last and drove the crane west.
Time flies, like flowers, like grass. Every time I buy eel in the market, I will think of catching eel in the past. Just sigh, sigh that time has precipitated the past, sigh that youth has picked up the beauty, sigh that memories are unforgettable, and make people feel melancholy.