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The coolness of mint mixed with the sweetness of sugar osmanthus flowers comes to the nose, suddenly giving rise to a kind of "calm and natural coolness".
Take a spoonful into your mouth, a little sticky, a little tough, a seemingly innocent coolness flowing between the lips and teeth.
In the summer of "Ruo Boiling Wok", how can you get one of the two major "killing weapons" of Ningbo people to spend the summer - ground chestnut cake.
The "ground chestnut cake" sold by the sugar water shop in Nantang Old Street is cool on the sale.
Hot summer, "dirty heat"
The weather is being "called" for the heat.
On July 18, waving goodbye to the rainy season with the heaviest rain in nearly 60 years, we were "hit" by the high temperature above 35 °C.
Judging from the ten-day forecast released by the Municipal Meteorological Observatory on July 20, before the end of July, except for July 24 to July 25, the city will have a short rain process, and other days will be dominated by sunny and hot weather, with local afternoon thunderstorms.
Therefore, until the end of July, the maximum temperature will remain at 34 °C -37 °C on most days.
It is not that this year's summer is particularly suitable.
In the "Explanation of the Seventy-two Waiting For the Moon Order", it is said that "summer, heat is also divided into large and small in terms of heat, the beginning of the month is small, the middle of the month is large, and now the heat is judas"; in the "Interpretation of the Name", the climatic characteristics of the summer have been vividly and vividly expressed: "Summer, simmering (same as 'boiling') is also, such as water simmering also.".
It should be reminded that the heat of the summer is not just hot.
As mentioned in the "Explanation of the Seventy-two Waiting Seasons of the Moon Order", "one waits for the rotten grass to be a firefly; the second waits for the soil to moisten the heat; and the third waits for heavy rain." It can be seen that the heat of the summer is often accompanied by heavy rain, hot and wet, and it is more and more unbearable.
Folk also refer to this kind of "people in a steamer" heat as "dirty heat".
Mint, gouache, sugar, brown sugar, and sugar osmanthus are the ingredients used to make chestnut cakes.
Love hidden in chestnut cakes
At 4 a.m., Fu Xiuling, who lives in the Shijia Community in Dongsheng Street, Yinzhou, got up and busied herself in the kitchen. She plans to make a plate of chestnut cake before going downstairs to work out.
By the time the boiling water in the milk pot "grunts" bubbles, the beaguel in the bowl has been turned into a paste with cool water.
Mountain flour is a Ningbo dialect. It has a more understandable name, sweet potato flour. Simply put, sweet potatoes become powder after being planed, washed, dried, and ground. In cooking, it is often used to "turn pulp to make soup", that is, to make a soup.
Compared with the usual goji, the mountain flour paste used to make chestnut cakes is thicker.
Slowly pour the mountain flour paste into boiling water and stir clockwise with chopsticks until there are no particles.
Fu Xiuling, 80 years old this year, watched her grandmother make chestnut cakes with mountain flour when she was a child. When her grandson was a child, she would also make chestnut cakes every summer for her grandson to eat as a cold drink. For decades, she had long since stopped remembering "how much mountain flour with how much water", completely by the feel.
Pour the cooked gouache paste into a porcelain dish and sprinkle a small packet of sugar osmanthus flowers. The small golden flowers, with a slightly burnt brown mountain flour paste, have an amber-like feeling.
Seeing that the sky was getting darker, the time for early exercise arrived, put the porcelain plate into the refrigerator, and Fu Xiuling went out.
Until 10:00 a.m., the temperature gradually rose, Fu Xiuling lifted the porcelain plate out of the refrigerator, at this time the chestnut cake has condensed into a freeze, with chopsticks gently poked, there is a kind of Q bomb texture.
Take a bowl and use a knife to cut off a few pieces of chestnut cake. As if remembering something, she turned and plucked a few mint leaves from the windowsill and rinsed them with water and slapped them on the chestnut cake she had ripped off.
After decades of making chestnut cakes, Fu Xiuling prefers to "eat dry". Of course, if you want to "eat wet", you can also burn a juice with mint and honey and pour it on the chestnut cake.
Leave it in the refrigerator for two hours, and the cool chestnut cake is "done".
The different fates of the "artifact" of the summer
On a whim, Fu Xiuling made another plate of Wood Lotus Jelly.
In the memory of many people in Ningbo who are a little older, the chestnut cake and the wood lotus jelly can be regarded as the two major "artifacts" for cooling off the heat. The former is amber-like in color, while the latter is crystal clear.
However, the fate of the two "artifacts" is not the same.
Whether it is in the streets, vegetable markets, supermarkets, or attractions, mullein jelly is still relatively easy to buy, and chestnut cake is not so common.
At a sugar water shop in Nantang Old Street, the reporter finally found the chestnut cake.
Compared with the "home-cooked version" made by Fu Xiuling, the chestnut cake sold by the sugar water shop is indeed much better-looking, and it is more transparent than the mulian jelly; and in terms of taste, the chestnut cake of this house is more like the jelly with konjac, which is a bit chewy.
In Fu Xiuling's view, the different "encounters" of ground chestnut cake and mulian jelly may be related to the ingredients.
She said that when making chestnut cakes, it is usually used the most is mountain flour, and sometimes it also uses lotus flour and yam powder, which are "enough to fill the stomach", and as for wood lotus jelly, "it is more like a cold drink".
As a common condiment, mountain flour is almost a must-have for every household. Even if it is a "hungry" chestnut cake on a whim, it can be made at any time at home; if you want to make wood lotus jelly, even if it is brewed with ready-made wood lotus powder, wood lotus powder is not "easy to take".
The two major summer "artifacts", the left is the wood lotus jelly, and the right side is the chestnut cake.
Chestnut cake, or "ground cake"
As the two major "artifacts" to cool off the heat, although the ground chestnut cake is slightly inferior to the wood lotus jelly in the "market", it can compete with the wood lotus jelly in the "background".
According to legend, the ground chestnut cake was once on a par with the dragon and phoenix golden dough and crystal oil bag, and was included in the traditional snacks of Ningbo.
However, in the sugar water shop located in Nantang Old Street, the reporter saw that whether it was on the wall or on the product signs, the words "Dili Cake" were clearly written.
The reporter consulted Xu Chunwei, a member of the Ningbo Fangzhi Society and a ningbo dialect enthusiast, who only found "ground chestnut cake" in different versions of the Ningbo dialect dictionary.
One says it is "a cold drink made from water chestnut juice frozen." The Shanghainese pipe water chestnut is called ground chestnut, hence the name"; another saying is "a frozen snack made of water chestnut powder, often eaten in the summer".
To some extent, this can also be regarded as justifying the name of "ground chestnut cake", and also explains the origin of "ground chestnut".
In Xu Chunwei's view, the folk legend of the name "Dili Cake" may be because in the generations of word of mouth, people did not remember the "original character" of the word, and as a result, they wrote "white character".
"For example, many people will write 'big' as 'big eyes', and even some people write 'son' as 'roe'."
However, it is not difficult to find that the chestnut cake made by Fu Xiuling should be "revised", because the ingredients it uses have nothing to do with the chestnut, that is, the water chestnut, and in Ningbo, the real estate water chestnut will not mature until late autumn. Reporter Shi Chengcheng Photography Cui Yin Video Clip Zhu Jiakai Correspondent Lou Xinrong