I don't know when baked cold noodles have become the "standard" food of small stalls across the country, just like the pancake fruit in Tianjin and the hot dry noodles in Wuhan, which warmed the hungry people on countless cold nights.
Originally thought that this was a "strange dish" invented by a stall owner on a whim, it will not be long before it will be buried in many stalls of food, and it will be gradually forgotten.
(Image from the Internet)
But unexpectedly, the baked cold noodles have been "on fire" all the way to 2021.
Why is baked cold noodles, a food that sounds so "side-door" at first glance, so popular?
Under a coincidence, I learned that this humble local stall snack was condensed into the helplessness and hope of an era.
Today, I will tell you the story behind the grilled cold noodles.
1
Baked and cold, what noodles?
You may not believe it, as a northeasterner, I have not actually eaten much grilled cold noodles, and when I first heard that there was grilled cold noodles, I refused to try it.
Although the Great Northeast is famous for its barbecue, but the cold noodles soaked in cold soup are grilled on the shelf and eaten, I really can't think of that scene, can I eat it? Is it tasty?
After all, in my impression, cold noodles are cold noodles, and it should be like this.
Later, after tasting the baked cold noodles once, I learned that it was noodles, but in fact, the baked noodles were more like a cake.
However, when baked cold noodles were first invented, they were really noodles.
The earliest roasted cold noodles are made of Korean cold noodles as raw materials, after the noodles are fried, and then the cold noodles are strung up one by one with bamboo skewers and grilled on a charcoal fire, and then brushed with the dipping sauce used for barbecue.
Later, after improvement, there was a specially made cold noodle cake that we see now.
The method of baking cold noodles is very simple, just a small cart and a hot iron plate. Fry the cold noodles on an iron plate, beat an egg and add a grilled sausage.
Under the skillful technique of the stall owner, the dough cakes are wrapped in egg liquid and baked on an oiled iron plate.
Grilled sausage is the last dignity of a baked cold noodle, the crispy sausage, the powdered meat, the moment it bursts out of the entire casing, the soul of the grilled cold noodles is sublimated.
Brushing with a special sauce and sprinkling with some shallots and coriander only takes two or three minutes to make a slice of grilled cold noodles.
From the birth of Tohoku to the conquest of the whole country, it took 20 years to bake cold noodles.
But it is this short 20 years, condensed the back of an era.
2
It was an era of helplessness and hope
Time back to The day of September 17, 1988 in South Korea, when the capital was still called Seoul. The XXIV Summer Olympic Games opened here.
The opening of the Olympic Games means that South Korea's economy is taking off, and they are about to become an emerging force in the world that cannot be ignored.
With the rapid development of the economy, South Korea's demand for foreign labor is also increasingly strong.
In particular, in the early 1990s, the remuneration for manual labor in South Korea increased rapidly, which not only gave Koreans a taste of sweetness, but also had a strong attraction for Chinese who were in the early stage of reform and opening up.
As a result, many Korean compatriots in northeast China saw new opportunities, and they also began to go to South Korea one after another to engage in manual labor.
With the advantage of language, they quickly adapted to life in Korea, although physical work was hard and tiring, but the relatively high remuneration did bring great economic improvement to the ordinary family at that time.
At that time, the father of a classmate of the editor took this road, quit his original job and went to South Korea, and the imported snacks he brought back every time made several of our friends hungry.
However, the economic crisis that broke out in the late 1990s gave the South Korean economy a blow, and some companies have reduced wages and cut off workers.
As a result, many people who went to Work in South Korea had to return to China and face the problem of re-finding jobs and re-employment, and they who have been engaged in manual labor for a long time are not so easy to return to the northeast to find a decent job.
The friend's father was also a member of the tide of returning home, but fortunately his father soon returned to his original unit, and he was lucky.
Those who were not as lucky as he could not find a job, began to seek their own employment, taking advantage of their own Korean advantages, and opened large and small Korean-style snack bars throughout the northeast, and cold noodle restaurants and dog meat restaurants blossomed everywhere.
Cold noodles are traditional Korean food, refreshing taste, loved by the people of the country, but it has a very embarrassing birth defect, that is, it is only suitable for summer eating.
The northeast is just another area that is in a cold climate for most of the year, except for the middle of summer, few people go to the cold noodle restaurant to order a bowl of cold noodles, and the sales are not optimistic.
Some stores have also tried the way of making cold noodles hot in order to attract customers, but this way not only makes cold noodles lose their refreshing taste, but also makes diners feel different when they eat, and the effect is not very ideal.
It is in this context that the opportunity to bake cold noodles, which is not restricted by the climate environment, is given the opportunity to be born.
Now it is more accepted that grilled cold noodles originated in Heilongjiang, and more specifically, it is a stall in front of a school in a town in Jixi City, Heilongjiang.
It is said that one day the stall owner blew up the cold noodles he had left for supper and brushed some sauce to sell to the students, and accidentally found that the cold noodles in this practice were surprisingly delicious and very popular.
Other stall owners saw that this kind of food was so good to sell, and they also followed suit, and soon the grilled cold noodles became popular in the three eastern provinces.
3
The East is not bright, the West is bright
However, the rapid development of grilled cold noodles and the occupation of the whole country were also inseparable from another major event that occurred at that time.
At the end of the 1990s, China's first wave of layoffs was quietly occurring, changing the fate of countless families before people had returned to God.
A group of middle-aged people with old and young have lost the iron rice bowl of the previous drought and flood protection, and have to face the dilemma of finding a way out of life again.
At that time, middle-aged people who lost their souls on the street abounded, and there was not much time left for them in desperation, so some people chose to set up stalls and subsidize their families.
It was at this time that the easy-to-make and very delicious specialty snack of grilled cold noodles came into their eyes.
You only need a small car to open a business, the cost is extremely low, selling on the crowded street, and you can also have a very considerable income at the end of the day.
Ten pass a hundred, a hundred pass a thousand, baked cold noodles are imitated and spread in the process of continuous improvement and improvement.
In this process, baked cold noodles are also divided into several genres, the initial baking cold noodles are fried pie, the noodles used in the fried pie are called steel wire noodles, and later because of the process, cost and other reasons gradually declined.
Later, the charcoal grilled pie was derived, and now the most common teppanyaki pie.
With the rapid increase in the sales of grilled cold noodles, cold noodle making factories and baked cold noodle sauce factories have also emerged.
Nowadays, baked cold noodles have formed a complete industrial chain from cold noodle production to terminal sales, and its sales scale has long exceeded that of traditional cold noodles.
I have to say that grilled cold noodles are a gastronomic miracle created by an era.
Today, grilled cold noodles have broken the traditional production method and developed countless amazing new products.
For example, cheese grilled cold noodles, durian grilled cold noodles, and more brain-opening merchants combine stinky tofu grilled cold noodles to create a must-eat Internet celebrity food.
4
Write at the end
In fact, not only grilled cold noodles, many "dirty stalls" cuisine are constantly developing and changing.
They appear in roadside stalls in every city, adding a thick pyrotechnic atmosphere to the world.
In the blink of an eye, the winter of 2021 has also quietly arrived, and the recurrence of the epidemic and frequent natural disasters have made this winter seem even colder.
In such a cold winter, on the way home from work, buy a steaming baked cold noodle in front of a stall.
While tasting the delicious food, it can also soothe the fatigue of the day.
After all, food still has to be accompanied by life!