Ten miles of different winds, a hundred miles of different customs. During the New Year, the north of China generally has the custom of making rice cakes and eating dumplings; and the south also has the characteristics of the south, Cantonese pastries are generally sweeter, and in the Chaoshan area, the traditional New Year's day is to make rat koji and traps made of rat grass.
Sage grass (This picture is from the Chinese Plant Gallery)
Aliases: Soft buckwheat, cotton cabbage, autumn chrysanthemum, pineapple, buddha ear grass, soft finch grass, yellow flower white wormwood, soft mustard, artemisia, artemisia, artemisia, Qingming, water hagi, heartless, heartless, tian ai, green, pengcao, glutinous rice green, water flesh flower, Latin name: Gnaphalium affine D. Don is a plant of the Asteraceae family, sage koji grass, an annual herb.
The lower branches of the stem are erect or emitted at the base, rising obliquely, 10–40 cm or more in height, about 3 mm in diameter at the base, unbranched in the upper part, grooved, covered with thick white cotton hairs, 8–20 mm long between nodes, and rarely up to 5 cm in the upper internodes. Leaves without sessile, spoon-shaped inverted lanceolate or inverted ovate spoon-shaped, stems and leaves into the medicine, for cough, expectorant, treatment of asthma and bronchitis and non-infectious ulcers, trauma of the common medicine, internal administration also has hypotension, uric acid lowering effect.
In the past, there were more rice and sweet potatoes planted in the Chaoshan Plain, and the fields were often covered with sage grass, and the Chaoshan people pulled out the sage grass and made it into various kueh products. Rat Koji is one of the traditional delicacies.
The Chaoshan ancestors dried the sage grass, then mashed it and made it into a trap; the glutinous rice was crushed into rice flour, added water to make a paste, steamed and made into a crust. It was made into a rat koji. It is said to be delicious, with a strong aroma of wild artemisia, and it is beneficial to the lungs and soothes the spleen and stomach.
Although rat koji is delicious, but it is rare, there are not so many in the field, it is also labor-intensive to do, and later there are fewer and fewer places to grow rice and sweet potatoes in the Chaoshan region, and rat koji grass has gradually become a rare herb, and modern people do not like things that are too labor-intensive. So gradually, rat curl became a kind of history, and only a few places still insisted on doing it.
Rat koji is also replaced by another type of kon product , ping-pong.
Ping-pong
The skin of ping-pong koway is similar to that of rat koji, and the filling is different. Ping-pong is made of popcorn ground powder, crushed peanuts, sautéed sesame seeds, and white sugar.
Traditional popcorn is also very interesting and dangerous:
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When it's done, it looks like this:
Pack it up
It's delicious, but it also needs to be noted: glutinous rice is an extremely difficult to digest food, the elderly and children have poor digestive function, can not eat too much, and the outer skin is sometimes too thick if it is difficult to bite; pancreatitis and gastritis patients are contraindicated, because glutinous rice will cause the recurrence of these inflammations or worsening of the disease; diabetics are forbidden to eat, ping-pong koong has a lot of sugar.
Some people have improved this traditional product, such as the skin is as thin as a cicada wing, less sugar, and so on