The Great Plains (two hundred and twenty-five) | pickle urns

Pickle urn

Lu Zechun

On the vast Lubei Plain, the pickle urn was a household name for its "vegetable basket" in the 1970s and 1980s. In my childhood memory, every house had a large urn of pickled pickles standing on the side of the door of the Big North House.

In that era of material scarcity, pickles were the main side dish of the next meal. According to the number of workers and the number of people, the production team only divides cottonseed oil once at the end of the year, and the general family is only divided into twenty or thirty pounds, and the family labor force can be more than one point. Faced with a very short supply of cottonseed oil, the family must carefully calculate how to eat it. At the end of the year, the family can't fry the dishes several times, unless guests come to make dumplings, fried vegetables during the New Year's Festival, or can you see some oil during the busy season. Pickles are naturally indispensable dishes for connecting the upper and lower meals.

Every autumn, when a large number of crops are harvested, it is also the time when the pickle urn needs to be filled with pickled ingredients. As the year passed, there were few pickles left in the urn, and only a few turnips floated alone on the muddy salt water. Most homes pickles are the same. It is nothing more than spicy knots, water radishes, carrots, sweet potatoes, cabbage gangs, peppers, radish tassels and so on. The grown-ups take home various ingredients that need to be pickled, cut off the roots with dirt such as turnip spicy knots, and wash them to dry in the sun. Everything in the pickle urn is cleaned up and washed and dried in the sun. Dump the sediment in the brine and filter out the remaining brine. Start placing the ingredients to be pickled in the pickle urn in turn. It is common to place large spicy lumps at the bottom, followed by water radishes, carrots, sweet potatoes, etc. Each layer will be sprinkled with some granular coarse salt, after the top must also be sprinkled with a layer of salt, the specially pressed pickles of large stones on the top, and finally the filtered brine poured in, with an urn lid or with an iron pot cover, slowly marinated.

I remember cutting spicy knots or radish pickles into strips, cutting some shredded green onions and pouring them with vinegar. Finally, use chopsticks to reach into the sesame oil bottle, dip a few drops of extravagant sesame oil into it and mix well, and the next meal is ready. Put a few sticks in your mouth, and the refreshing aroma of the faint sour wrapped salt is also a delicious taste. When steaming dry food, the washed sweet potato pickles are steamed together in the dry grain bushes. Accompanied by steamed dry food, take a bite of the soft and gentle dishes that have both the taste of sweet potatoes and the dishes of the rice. Occasionally, spicy knots or radish pickles are shredded and dried chili peppers are simmered in a pot and stir-fried to make them spicy and fragrant. In the hot summer, eating cold noodles is also a way to cool off. Chop the carrots and pickles into a cheeky shape and put an appropriate amount of cold noodles that already have garlic puree vinegar cucumber shreds. The combination of red, white and green colors looks like a mouth-watering appetite, and the cool noodles in the mouth with the taste of garlic balsamic vinegar pickles are refreshing with cucumbers, which makes people feel the taste between the teeth and the tip of the tongue. The variety of pickles enriched the table and remained in my childhood memories.

When I was seven or eight years old, I went to elementary school in my village. Every afternoon when I came home from school, I used to fish out a radish pickle from a pickle urn, cut a piece with a knife, break a nest from the dry food basket hanging on the roof beam, and then jump and eat and run out of the house to play with my friends. The little friends in the alley have basically the same hands as I took them. Everyone jumped and ran together, eating and playing, completely immersed in the kind of "teenagers do not know the taste of sorrow". The sun was about to set, and I bounced back home. At this time, I also feel thirsty. Lift the lid of the water urn under the old jujube tree, pick up the gourd scoop floating on the water and scoop up the half scoop "Gollum" and pour it into your stomach. When you walk up, you can hear the water in your stomach "rattling".

In those poor days, the family came to beg from time to time. I remember one day, my family came to five or six gangs to eat, and finally couldn't get dry food to give to others. Grandma asked us to fish out two radish pickles from the pickle urn and give them to the family. The person who wanted the meal was very grateful to take the pickle and happily took it away.

The days of the rainy season are raining heavily for several days in a row. The roof with wheat straw was dripping with muddy and dirty eaves water at the beginning, but the pickle urn under the eaves could not get in the slightest rain. After a day or two, the water from the eaves became clear and transparent, and the family deliberately opened the lid of the urn to let a small amount of rainwater drip into the urn. Blended with nature's seasonings, the pickles will be more crisp and sweet.

Because the amount of high-salt ingredients such as pickles is small, it is also more convenient to carry, which is the best choice for delivering meals. During the busy season, families will deliver rice to the field or drying field, and a variety of pickles will be presented in people's sight. When I was in junior high school, I could only go home once a week. Bring enough dry food for a week at a time, and eat lunch and dinner warm in the school cafeteria. Every time the family cut some radish or spicy knotty pickle strips, sautéed in a pot, and then put in a canned bottle for me to take to school with dry food. I remember that in the classroom, the students took out their own pickles, and everyone tasted each other and laughed and laughed, and after a while, they were full of dry food.

Time is like an arrow, and the years are like shuttles. Today, the pickle urns of each family have withdrawn from the stage of history. Meat, fish and vegetables on the table and various side dishes replace the original monotonous pickles. Some families have also removed pickles from the table for healthy salt control. Now there are almost no pickles in the family, and the supermarket is full of pickles. Occasionally buy some food, but I can't find the taste of the pickle urn at home. Although I rarely eat pickles now, the pickle urn comes to mind from time to time with the joys of my childhood.

About author:Lu Zechun, High-tech Office of Zouping City. Veterans. He is a member of Binzhou Writers Association, a member of Binzhou Poetry Society, and the deputy secretary-general of Zouping Poetry Association. His works have been published in Shandong Shangbao, Zhangqiu Today, Wudi Volkswagen, Binzhou Literature, Liang Zou Culture, And Zouping Today. Many poems have been published in Chinese Poetry and Poetry Monthly.