Lettuce is loved by everyone
Author: Zhou Renchen
Lettuce, a kind of mountain wild vegetable, tastes bitter, and is also known as bitter vegetable. The novel "Bitter Cauliflower" and the movie are about it. For many years, the people of the mountain village have loved it, loved it, and formed an indissoluble relationship with it.
After the Qingming Festival every year, with the rise of temperature, the lettuce in the mountains of my hometown could not stand it, and together with the grass seedlings, I arched upwards with all my strength. A few days passed, and when people climbed the hill and looked into the ground, oh! So tempting, corn seedlings, millet seedlings, soybean seedlings, etc., neatly arranged, although the lettuce is not artificially sown, but people do not show weakness, brush together, green and bright piece.
At this moment, if the grass seedlings are pleasing and the fire is good-looking, then the lettuce can be called emerald green and tender, not to mention the eye-catching, it is all mouth-watering. According to the old Chinese medicine, this dish is cold, has a strong Chinese herbal ingredient, although the taste is bitter, but has anti-inflammatory, cough and lipid lowering blood pressure, healthy spleen appetizer and refreshing effect. Eating some raw in the spring has a health effect on the body and mind.
In accordance with the doctor's advice, coupled with the old customs passed down from generation to generation in the mountain village, the adults and children in the mountain village, when spring comes, will always carry baskets to the hillside to dig up this wild vegetable for a full meal, praying for health.
Grandpa told me, "Lettuce looks no different from other wild mountain vegetables, but the character of others is completely different." This wild vegetable has been associated with people for generations, mingled with crops, never mixed with mountains, shrubs and weeds, showing extreme holiness and elegance, and is a wild vegetable with personality and backbone." I still can't understand why they always have to accompany human production and life, there can only be one explanation, which is probably the love of people often saying that "good birds choose trees to roost, and virtuous subjects choose to stand on the Lord".
Much more admirable and appreciative than that, I was also surprised to find that the people of the mountain village not only took health care for lettuce internally, but also often took external healing. When collecting firewood, grazing or collecting mushrooms in the mountain forest, it is inevitable that people will not be stung by poisonous insects such as horse bees, sheep pullers and cattle (commonly known as blind midges), and when the pain and itching are uncomfortable, people will always take the ancient folk remedies. Go to the cornfield and pull out a lettuce, put it in your mouth and chew it up, and then apply it to the wound. scold! The home remedy cures serious diseases, and within three or five minutes it begins to work.
According to the small folk remedies to cure serious diseases, some people also use this method as a god plaster to remove skin diseases such as abscesses and scabies, and they have received unexpected curative effects, and there are many people who are cured. It is not difficult to see that in the remote mountain villages, in the early years, there was a lack of medical treatment and few medicines, and people did find a lot of good ways to heal their health care, and the medicinal value of this dish has also been played to the extreme.
Unforgettable, the dish also saved the lives of people in mountain villages, in the early 1960s, known as the "Great Famine". Natural disasters and man-made disasters struck together, people lived a bitter life of "three or two grains, hanging vegetables", in order to fill the belly, to survive, had to start eating grain and throat vegetables, peeling the bark of elm trees to fill the hunger. At this time, this wild vegetable has been upgraded from a health product to a staple food.
In those years and months, I don't know whether the sky had eyes or the earth had feelings, and the lettuce on the mountain was surprisingly large, and the growth was particularly luxuriant. Just a few days after digging, the field will emit a thick piece, from spring to autumn, inexhaustible, digging, how to eat without getting sick. Other wild vegetables were not so lucky. Growing gray vegetables, amaranth, bitter hemp seeds, etc., no matter how tender they are, will have a poisoning reaction after eating. Among the partners and classmates, there are many faces swollen like "puffer fish" and "big heads" in the stilt team.
Heart-wrenching events have taken place. In the "Red Age" during the Cultural Revolution, it seemed to mysteriously disappear overnight. The mountain villagers chased after it and quickly found the "culprit" who destroyed the dish. It turned out that it was fertilizer that caused the trouble.
In that year, the mountain village launched the "Agricultural Dazhai" to fight a big grain turnaround war, and began to use a large number of chemical fertilizers, especially the "bicarbonate" that was as white as snow and smelled of the sky, and the people called it "gas amine", which was fatal manslaughter for lettuce. Within three or five years, the lettuce vegetables in the nearby mountains had disappeared without a trace.
Fortunately, the terraced fields, far from the mountain villages, with steep slopes and thin soil, were inadvertently protected by the reluctance to use fertilizers on less promising crops. This is called crooked, and finally retains a little blood for the lettuce family. When the wind blows and the snowflakes fly, the bunches of mature seeds will boil and fall from the sky, plunge into the farmland of the mountain village, and bravely take on the responsibility of breeding offspring. Now that the hillsides are full of farmland and can be seen again, the restoration of the race is no longer a problem.
It is gratifying that in recent years, the much-loved lettuce has also been invited into the farm yard and has become a "guest of honor". When many villagers harvest their crops in the autumn, they collect a few bunches of ripe seeds and sprinkle them in the vegetable garden behind the house in the spring. I never thought that the lettuce that had been growing in the field crops for generations would live up to the expectations of the owners and thrive in the new home. Since then, people have become within reach and convenient like eating leeks.
In the past, the mountain village people ate lettuce vegetables in a single way, in addition to dipping sauce raw, that is, rolling vegetable dumplings, cabbage cakes. Nowadays, the eating method is constantly updated, after blanching with boiling water, it is soaked in water for three or two hours, which is used to stir-fry meat, boil soup, wrap dumplings, pinch buns, and eat as much as you want. If the early days were used to support the belly, now it is completely used to taste taste and maintain health.
According to industry insiders, the figure of lettuce has long gone out of the mountain and is honored to climb the Hall of Daya. On the table of the star-rated hotel restaurant in the bustling city. The value is also soaring, just unearthed, and the price of each kilogram growing into two young leaves has exceeded the thousand yuan mark. With the development of the economy, there is no doubt that their appreciation space will rise upwards.
It can be seen that this wild vegetable cannot be underestimated, and its role and value cannot be underestimated. People seem to read out that it is a rare green food from the rejection and antipathy of fertilizers and pesticides. When spring came, the people of the mountain villages went as they went, and groups of people in the mountains went into the mountains to collect, and many people in the city also came by car and walked in the crowd of people digging lettuce. People never forget the classic line said by the protagonist of the movie "Bitter Cauliflower", mother Feng Daniang: "Don't look at its bitter roots, bitter leaves, but the flowers it blooms are fragrant." It seems to suggest to people that if you eat bitterly, you know that sweetness is sweet, bitterness is sweet, and good days will always be with you.
About author:Zhou Renchen, a native of Wafangdian City, Liaoning Province. Born in 1952 in a Manchu peasant family in Dachuan Village, Laohutun Town, he returned to his hometown after graduating from high school to work as a farmer. He has loved literature all his life, and although he has achieved nothing, he has not changed his mind. He is passionate about writing poems and words, and likes to write literary works in many aspects such as realistic prose and childhood memories. He has edited and published four books at his own expense: "Rural Style", "Tintin Roaming Animal City", "Cute Elf" and "Paradise of The Child's Heart". After its release, it was widely praised in urban and rural areas.
EDIT: True, true
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First public number: Jiangnan Poetry and Painting Art Institute 2021-07-28