Nostalgic prose: fried rice noodles that remain in the depths of memory

Nostalgic prose: fried rice noodles that remain in the depths of memory

Text: Wu Jianchang

People say that once people are old, they will remember the past, or the trivial things of childhood, or the little friends of childhood, or the "food" they ate as children...

I'm old and retired. So I always think of those tastes that remain in my memory, those "delicacies". What breaks into my memory today is the smell of "fried rice noodles in lard", which used to accompany me through that high school years.

For this former "taste", my wife went to the supermarket to buy a package of water-ground glutinous rice noodles. This afternoon at home, I began to stir-fry glutinous rice flour, fried glutinous rice flour, poured it into a glass bowl, added an appropriate amount of brown sugar, mixed with the lard that had been boiled long ago, and then mixed it back and forth with a spoon until the lard was all melted and then put into the glutinous rice flour. When it was finished, he eagerly scooped up a tablespoon of glutinous rice flour and put it in his mouth, and his tongue turned back and forth, and the lard glutinous rice flour went down his throat. The aroma is there, but I always feel that it is not as delicious as the fried rice noodles that my mother personally grinded on the stone grinder at that time, and I always feel that something is missing. So I can't help but think of the lard fried rice noodles made by my mother at that time.

I was in high school in the early 1970s, because the school was in the town, and my family was in the most remote part of the commune, far from the town, and it was surrounded by water on all sides, there was no bridge, only by ferry, so I lived in the school from Monday to Friday, and when I came home on Saturday morning, I was the so-called residential student.

At that time, the material life in the countryside was not very rich, and the economic conditions were limited, and it was not easy for my family to provide me with high school, because living in school and eating in school always cost a certain amount of money, although the meals in the school canteen were still relatively cheap at that time. My parents were able to guarantee that I had done my best to pay for food every week, and it was really difficult to ask my parents for snacks and the like at that time. Among the students who live in the school and dormitory, there are always some who are better and some who are worse, just like me. Better students would bring snacks such as biscuits and cakes every week to prepare for the unexpected needs of the evening; the poor students had to eat more rice in the evening.

Remember when the farm break in the first semester of high school is coming to an end. One day, after my father went to the commune for a meeting, he bought about a pound of pork plate oil in the town. After returning home, the mother carefully cleaned the pork plate oil, and then cut off the fattest part and chopped it into diced plate oil grains. Then put the diced plate oil into the blue-edged bowl, put some sugar in the bowl, mix the diced lard with the sugar, and then put in an enamel cup, cover it, and say that it is pickled. The next day, after eating lunch, my mother brought in the glutinous rice that had been washed in the morning and told me to sit under the stove and burn it, and she put the glutinous rice in the iron tile and repeatedly fried it back and forth until the glutinous rice was fried to a brown brown, and the whole house was filled with the scorched aroma of rice. Then the mother put the sautéed glutinous rice into an enamel pot and let it cool. After cooling off, he took the sticky rice to the "old house" (this is Hamari's nickname for the family) to grind the glutinous rice flour. Because at that time, his family also had a small grinding disc made of stone that only needed to be pushed by a person.] Originally, his family also had a large plate of large stone grinding that needed to be pushed by three people, which I had seen when I was a child, and then somehow disappeared. It is said that the millstone in the "old house" is actually similar to everyone in the Hama, and the little father-in-law, the big mother and the old couple in the "old house" are very polite, if you don't use his stone mill, they will be unhappy. Another reason is that the hamawa where we live is far from the brigade's port, although there are electric mills in the port, and it is not convenient to go back and forth.

The mother's right hand pushed the handle of the mill, and the left hand duly put a small handful of sticky rice into the small hole in the millstone. The grinding disc creaked and turned, and the scorched yellow scented rice noodles kept falling from between the teeth of the grinding disc into the grinding groove. It took about half an hour to grind, and my mother finished grinding all the glutinous rice. Then I carefully brushed the glutinous rice flour into the washbasin with a brownboard brush, thanked the little father-in-law, and returned home with me.

When she got home, my mother took out the diced pork plate oil that had been pickled in sugar yesterday and put them in the middle of the ground rice noodles. Then the mother rubbed the rice noodles and lard with her hands repeatedly, and after a while the diced lard in the rice noodles gradually disappeared, and the original dry glutinous rice flour gradually became wet, and then a smell with rice and lard slowly thickened. After about half an hour of rubbing, the original diced lard completely melted in the glutinous rice flour, and the original glutinous rice flour became "lard fried rice noodles". My mother scooped me a spoon and told me to try it. As soon as the fried rice noodles entered the mouth, the mouth was full of fragrance, and the taste was really indescribable, and the mouth even said that it was delicious and delicious.

When the rice noodles were fried in lard, my mother brought a large glass bottle prepared in advance and poured the rice noodles into it. After filling the seal, he shoved it into my hand and told me to bring it with me when I went to school in the evening, and not to forget. And said that such fried rice noodles do not need to boil water, with a spoon to scoop to eat, save effort and convenient. Only then did I understand my father's intention to buy lard yesterday and my mother's intention to pickle lard. It turned out that my parents were afraid that I would not have snacks at night at school, so they took this as a snack for me.

After eating early and late, I walked nearly six miles back to school with a glass bottle full of scents. Returning to the dormitory at the end of the evening self-study, I took out the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and in an instant, the aroma of lard and fried rice flour filled every corner of the dormitory, and it overshadowed the cookie aroma of other students. The students all gathered around to see what was going on. After seeing it, I couldn't help but say, just you a spoon, I a spoon, scramble to "grab" to eat, but also said vigorously "delicious, delicious!" "After a while, most of the bottle of fried rice noodles disappeared." However, my classmates still very politely left me half a vial, saying that they would eat it tomorrow. Classmates are so real, so rude.

A week passed quickly, and when I got home on Saturday, I told my mother how my classmates "grabbed" my lard fried rice noodles, and my mother was very happy to hear it. He also said that the last time I made lard fried rice noodles, I still have some, because at that time I guessed that your classmates in your dormitory might also like to eat it, and I would bring another bottle when I returned to school tomorrow.

In this way, my mother's lard fried rice noodles accompanied me through the high school years, and the lard fried rice noodles left a lingering memory in my mind.

Now that I am eating my own fried rice noodles and thinking about the fried rice noodles made by my mother in lard, I suddenly understand why what I made was not as delicious as my mother made back then. I think that back then, the lack of materials, life is difficult, rural children can eat very few snacks, only during the New Year's Festival can eat biscuits and other "fine" snacks, so the mother's fragrant lard fried rice noodles, of course, is very happy, impressed. Nowadays, large and small supermarkets, all kinds of snacks, a variety of dazzling, they are constantly challenging people's taste buds, so I feel that the taste of fried rice noodles I made is not as good as what my mother made.

Thinking about it carefully, I am very relieved: this is not comparable, does not it prove that our living standards are as high as sesame blossoms!

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