I remember that summer was very long at that time-a short memory of Zigui's eating custom.

I had rice porridge for breakfast and finally finished eating the last piece of sesame oil bean curd in the refrigerator jar.

My mother installed this for me when I returned to Beijing from my hometown on May Day. Living in the north for a long time, I have long been arbitrary about the taste of food, and even the term "rice porridge" has never been used in my hometown. Every time I go from my hometown, I don't have to bring a lot of food when I leave home at the beginning of the year-bacon, sausage, bean paste, all kinds of pickles ... When I am in a foreign land, I rely on these foods to comfort my homesickness.

Now my mother asks me if I want to bring anything, and I always answer decisively: no! Only a small jar of bean curd and a small piece of bacon were brought in the Spring Festival, and a small jar of bean curd and a small packet of mustard tuber were brought in May Day.

1

Every summer, my mother will remind my sister who goes shopping every morning: pay attention to wide peppers. Wide pepper is pepper, and it is better for rural farmers to pick local varieties from the ground and sell them directly to the county. Big sister comes back every day to report to her mother the quantity, color and price of wide peppers she saw in the market and judge the situation.

Then, on the day when the summer heat was slightly reduced and the sunshine was still bright and sufficient, our family ushered in the pepper incident of that year.

Sister finally looked at the market early in the morning, and dozens of pounds of bright red peppers were shipped back from the motorcycle camel with big pockets. As soon as we get home, everyone will help clean and dry the peppers. At this time, it is necessary to use the most solemn guy in the family-a big wooden basin, a big dustpan, a big kitchen knife and a long bench, posing as a big fight in the middle of the room or on the balcony. Fresh and full peppers are enclosed in a glittering dustpan.

The most important job is to make chopped peppers. First, the elder sister cut the peppers one by one, seeded them and pushed them into a big wooden basin. The chopping board was placed at the bottom of the wooden basin, the elder sister put on plastic gloves, the knife fell off, and the pepper rolled around under the knife, and the spicy taste was everywhere.

Dajieqie Chili

After a busy morning, most of the chopped peppers were put into the sauce jar that had been dried all summer, some were sealed in the pickle jar to make "squeezed peppers", and some were added to other pickles to enhance color and taste.

Shred other peppers, take out dried peppers and use them to grind Chili noodles later; There are also some very good fresh peppers, all of which have been selected and put into the largest and most important pickled pepper jar at home to make pickled peppers.

2

Here we must talk about Squeezing Wide Pepper separately, which I think is the representative work of Zigui flavor.

Sichuan pepper

The pronunciation of "Tai" in Zigui dialect should be the entering tone in ancient Chinese. Chopped peppers are wrapped in appropriate rice flour or corn flour, sprinkled with salt and mixed well, and pickled in a pickle jar. It is important that the jar mouth be blocked with the whole pickle, and then the jar is upside down with chopsticks, so that the soaked water will automatically flow out and the food will ferment without rotting.

After the pepper is cooked, it has been sealed in the jar. When eating, take out a plate and fry it with rapeseed oil without any seasoning. Spicy Zigui people, such as my elder sister and my third sister, directly take Guang Tai peppers to bibimbap. Cowards like me, who dare not stutter and can't resist the temptation of its taste, will add a little bit to the fried rice with eggs-it has the miraculous effect of "making the finishing point".

Pepper can be cooked as a dish alone or as a versatile side dish. My previous unit had a fellow villager in Yichang, whose hometown was Changyang, a neighboring county with similar living habits to Zigui. A few years ago, she opened a small fresh restaurant with distinctive style in Beijing Wantong Center, focusing on Yichang local dishes, and the killer on the menu was pepper. Pepper fried bacon, pepper fried pork intestines, pepper fried eggs, pepper fried potato chips ... all the office workers nearby had a good time.

There is also a magical pepper-Taifeichang, my third sister's favorite. Wash the domestic pork intestines, cut them into small pieces, and mix in pepper and "Tai". The fat sausage smells strange after being fried, but it has not been eaten for many years.

three

Hanging soy sauce used to be the most important thing for my mother to do in summer, and it was also the test that every housewife in my hometown had to face in summer.

Zigui sauce, similar to Sichuan bean paste, is also made of beans (broad beans). The practice is quite complicated. I vaguely remember that beans should be fried first, then soaked and peeled and steamed in a pot. In early summer, when the summer heat is not too strong, spread the steamed cowpea on the sun mat in the dark, cover it with branches of Vitex negundo (a shrub with purple flowers) collected in the field, and let it ferment quietly in the dark.

After about seven days, all the beans turn fluffy yellow-green, and it will be fine. Take out the beans, dry them in the sun, and remove impurities with a sieve to obtain watercress. -This is just the first step.

During the fermentation process, slight changes in temperature and humidity will affect the color of watercress, and sometimes even completely fail: beans are not moldy or rotten. But my mother almost never misses.

Next is a very important day. My mother and elder sister have prepared all kinds of sauces: enough salt packets, a safe sauce jar, a handful of washed and drained old Toona sinensis leaves and green peppers, and several pots of boiling water to cool. At noon, everything is ready, douban and all accessories are put into the sauce jar, poured with cold boiled water and stirred. The whole process and all utensils must not be contaminated with grease and raw water, otherwise the sauce will go bad.

Everything that follows is left to the sun and time. This sauce jar has to be guarded by the whole family all summer. My mother will monitor the whole drying process, stir and observe the sauce when it is cold in the morning, judge whether it is necessary to add more salt at any time according to the salinity, and then choose the right time to gradually add garlic and chopped pepper to taste.

In fact, the sauce in the sun is edible. You can insert a summer seasonal dish: eggplant mixed with new sauce. Steamed eggplant, torn into long strips, packed with chopped pepper and minced garlic, and poured in the newly scooped sauce. -mellow and refreshing, of course, the eggplant in your home is not delicious and difficult to cook.

The sauce will dry almost all summer. There is a lot of rain in summer, so the sauce jar needs to be placed in the open air to be completely exposed. Just covered with a layer of yarn to prevent mosquitoes and flies. Therefore, before the rainstorm comes, covering the sauce is the first major event for every household. The general craft is not bad, but the sauce tastes very different from family to family, depending on the luck and feel of the housewife.

The sauce made in summer is used for cooking and seasoning in the second year, which is the unique taste of every family. My sisters lived on campus when they were in middle school. Every week, they bring home a small jar of sauce. There is little food in school, and they all live on this sauce.

four

Summer is the most concentrated season of handmade food in our family: drying sauce, making all kinds of pickles and pickles, and making potatoes into dried potatoes, potato chips, shredded potatoes and other dried vegetables. The summer memories of my childhood are all kinds of ingredients spread out in the sun. Sunlight quickly takes away their moisture, and time gives them some mysterious transformation, which eventually becomes other ingredients with different flavors.

In our hometown, potatoes are called "potatoes", and Xiao Shunxiao knew three names of potatoes (grandma called potatoes and grandma called potatoes). In that era of lack of life, potatoes were the home cooking of my hometown people in the mountains, and my mother can't live without them until now. Without potatoes, she can't eat enough. In order to make the taste of potatoes less monotonous, my hometown people have thought of many ways, and now they are optimistic about magic rather than food.

One of the magic: potato chips-Zigui version of potato chips, but better than Pepsi chips 100 times.

Peel the potato, clean it, cut it into large pieces about 2 mm thick, and remove the starch with clear water. Boil the water in a large iron pot, soak the potato chips in boiling water for a while, take them out, then spread them on the drying table and expose them to the sun. It must be hot in summer, and it will dry in one day, otherwise it will rot.

After drying, put it away. When you have a big or small banquet at home, fry it in an oil pan, and it will foam instantly and become flat and flaky. Sprinkle salt or sugar after fishing, it will be very brittle and have a slight toughness after cooling. Drinking wine is excellent, but a snack is not much better.

Potato chips are Xiaoshun's snacks.

Magic 2: potato fruit-the best companion of boiling hoof.

Select the smallest potato, wash it, boil it in an enlarged pot with skin and soak it in cold water. Then we all work together and peel it by hand. God knows how many potatoes and fruits our family used to make. I always remember peeling potatoes to make my hands sticky, and then reaching out to pat a small mosquito on my leg as inconspicuous as a needle tip but itchy.

We will take a ladle as a container, peel it out in time, and pour it on the "basket stockade" in the yard (a bamboo woven appliance, such as a door panel, which is convenient for ventilation and is used to dry things). My sisters only do these things at home during the summer vacation. They always send me to pour potatoes and fruits. I angrily walked out into the sun and dumped a gourd fruit on the stockade, feeling dizzy.

The dried potato fruit in summer is delicious in winter, and it is their best and only destination to cook it in the soup of bacon ribs and hoof flowers. The sun-dried potatoes are waxy but not rotten, and have a little bones and muscles. I can stutter three empty bowls.

Magic 3: shredded potatoes-an intriguing essay in Zigui kimchi.

The same method is to peel a big potato, plane it into filaments with a plane, remove starch with water, blanch it in boiling water until it is half cooked, and dry it in the sun for seven or eight minutes. Sprinkle with salt, wrap with chopped pepper, and seal it in the pickle jar like "squeezing wide pepper" for a while.

Squeeze the shredded potatoes out and fry them in plain oil, which becomes a side dish. Best of all, it is used to fry bacon. The fat fried from the fat pork belly in the pot was deeply embraced by the potatoes, and was soon sent down by the rice.

A potato can change these wonders because of one word-poverty.

Poor and closed, I hope to store food for a long time and inadvertently create delicious food. Bacon is probably produced in this way.

five

Fried bacon with black bean sauce is a classic of Zigui home cooking.

Bacon is almost everyone's homesickness in Zigui, and a fellow villager who is a university professor in Beijing also writes articles praising it. Nowadays, transportation and logistics are developed. Which Zigui person in other places doesn't have a few frozen bacon in the refrigerator? When they return to the city on holidays, people ask among their classmates whether they can bring bacon on the train.

I don't like bacon gradually, because with the rapid development of urbanization in recent years, the rural labor force is getting less and less, and the real rural local pork is almost extinct. A few years ago, at the end of each year, I could ask my relatives to buy domestic pork from the countryside or ask someone to help me smoke it. In the end, you will always get some real bacon and hang it on the balcony with satisfaction.

This kind of bacon oil is tender and tender. After cooking, slice it and mix it with any kind of pepper, green garlic, onion and lobster sauce to make a bright and wonderful dish. The fat is crystal clear, the lean meat is ruddy, and the overbearing fragrance is floating around the house, which is fascinating.

As for the best bacon-preserved hoof, we use the most traditional method: stew with orange peel and potato fruit. If I have literary talent, I would like to write a lingering long poem for it.

There are only two steps to make bacon: curing and smoking. It was originally invented by residents in mountainous and remote areas. They killed a pig before the end of the year in order to preserve pork for a long time as meat for the next year. It's time to cook well: I feed the pigs in anticipation for a year, kill the pigs in the cold winter, put the meat in a big barrel with salt for a few days, and take it out to hang on the beams of the woodshed for the winter.

On a cold night, people gathered around the fire to keep warm, looked up at the long pieces of meat leisurely, and almost dripped oil from the high flame. Day after day, the surface of meat is covered with a layer of black soot, but the inside has completed a secret and great evolution.

Rapid breeding and workshop-style smoking make bacon lose its original intention and taste like chewing wax. Don't eat.

six

Cooking food at home is, in the final analysis, a way of life in the pastoral farming era. As our family moved from rural areas to cities and towns, those timely dietary customs gradually declined at home and eventually became unsustainable "intangible cultural heritage"

Sun-dried sauce is something that my mother insisted on for many years after moving to the county seat. Douban can't be made by itself, so you can only buy some from the street. Farmers nearby will take homemade watercress to the market for sale. It is quite difficult to distinguish the quality of watercress only from the appearance, so the quality of the sauce is not as good as before, and it is not fragrant. In recent years, our family cooked with Sichuan bean paste bought in the supermarket.

Besides, my mother always insists on making fermented bean curd every winter. These years, to be exact, are the efforts of my mother's technical supervision and elder sister's brother-in-law.

Douchi is a dark work in Zigui cuisine. Whenever Xiaoshun finds lobster sauce at the dinner table, he will cover his nose and push the plate far away, but he likes durian very much. Douchi is like durian, and the person you like smells delicious. Is fried bacon with Douchi the best in the world? People who are unfamiliar and unaccustomed will be nervous.

The production process of douchi is relatively simple: wash and swell soybeans, cook them in a pressure cooker, cover them with a quilt and ferment for three days, and then release the sticky silk between beans when the remaining temperature is exhausted. The degree of cooking and the degree of covering should be very accurate, and the results are very different if you cook the pot in an instant earlier or two hours later. When I came home during the Spring Festival, my mother regretted that she was bedridden because of a heart attack and her supervisor was not in place on the day when Douchi was cooked years ago. The temperature of soybeans cooked by elder sister and brother-in-law is a little poor, so this year's lobster sauce is not delicious.

Douchi that just came out of the nest is very similar to Japanese natto. Next, my mother seasoned it herself, adding seasonings such as white wine, salt and pepper powder, then wrapped the Chili noodles and took them out to dry until the granules became clear and dry. Douchi is delicious, but it is too salty. If you eat two, you should drink a lot of water.

Bean curd, home-cooked food, is easier to cook. Every day, my mother orders a cage of dried old tofu from the tofu vendor in front of the door, cuts it inch by inch, spreads it on dried straw and puts it in a warm and dark corner. Every 10 day, it is good for tofu to grow thick white hairs, and my mother has to season it herself.

Pick out the tofu from the white hair, sprinkle it with salt, white wine and pepper powder to taste, then roll the tofu in the Chili noodles one by one and put it in the jar conveniently, with one layer of tofu, one layer of shredded ginger and one layer of shredded tangerine peel. Thanks to the temperature and humidity in my hometown in winter, the jar can be sealed for a week or two, and the tofu brain can be eaten.

During the Chinese New Year, big fish and big meat eat a lot, and tofu milk just solves the boredom of the Chinese New Year. My fermented bean curd probably belongs to the so-called "white square", with heavy taste and salty taste. Breakfast with rice porridge is still very suitable, which makes people exclaim that "the best taste in the world is Qinghuan".

After being away from home for many years, it is no longer "Zigui stomach". Instead, every time I go home, I advise my mother to eat less pickles and talk about the dangers of high-salt diet and nitrite health.

But/kloc-the delicious food and taste that I experienced when I left home at the age of 0/8 has become a part of my body like a brand.

Like water, time cannot be caught, but food and taste are like glass bottles that seal time. Just as Liang Shiqiu wrote prose in Taiwan Province Province praising the bean juice, enema and sour plum soup of Beijing snacks, he pinned his deep affection for his hometown. In her later years, Zhang Ailing read sausage rolls in Shanghai Feida Cafe in a foreign country, not only because Zhang Fu often took her there when she was a child, but also because she never stopped loving her.

Speaking of these foods with family marks, the long summer in my hometown is back: my mother is still young and chic, my sisters are young, and I am still a wayward child sitting on the peach tree in front of the door.