Unforgettable pickle urn
Author | Zhang Yantang
Whenever you eat, in the face of a table full of delicacies, you often have the feeling of stopping the cup and throwing the spoon and not being able to eat, all because of the childhood past. Remembering the past, there were three urns that could not be separated from the rural home: the urn that stored grain, the urn that stored water, and the urn that pickled pickles.
I was born in the 1950s, and I was lucky to be able to eat dried sweet potato pancakes three times a day. My fathers were afraid of the poor days, and they always stored more grain for the famine year, and pickled pickles to eat. In order to be able to eat a bite of pickles at any time, it can be said that eighteen martial arts are used. The three urns just mentioned are heirlooms, although simple and unpretentious, they are indispensable to every household. The reverse journey of all things in heaven and earth, the passers-by of hundreds of generations of time, generation after generation, the pickles in the urn are like the landscape of the hometown, with their own style, but also like the people of the hometown, they have their own taste.
In my opinion at the time, the pickle urn at home was simply a "treasure urn". The "treasures" in the urn are all kinds of dishes from their own fields, according to the fashionable saying now: pollution-free and natural. What's there? Spicy pimples, fluffy pimples, white radish, green radish, green bean horn, cabbage gang, cucumber barberry, coriander root, sweet chili pepper, spicy pepper, spicy garlic head, sweet garlic head, garlic moss, garlic seedlings, devil ginger, celery stalk, watermelon peel, pepper sprouts, pepper leaves, fresh ginger. Like the name of the dish in crosstalk, in fact, there are more tricks than said in that crosstalk. Sometimes it is strange that these plants between heaven and earth can be called by a name, and they are so appropriate.
In this pickle urn, the most common and delicious is the spicy knotty pickles. At the end of autumn, my father took the hot knots at home, and my mother carefully removed them from the basket one by one, like holding out a beloved fat doll. The autumn sun embraced my home obliquely warmly, and I sat next to my mother, sometimes getting in the way but not reprimanding. The mother carefully used a kitchen knife to cut off the small sand grains and small hair roots on the spicy knots, and then put them into a large tile basin. The mother finished cutting the hot knots, scooped the basin with water with a scoop, and began to bathe the hot knots one by one. Some naughty grains of sand were reluctant to come down on the hot pimples, so my mother used her fingernails to buckle them down one by one. My mother bathed the hot knots, poured out the muddy water and scooped them up, washed them a second and third time, sometimes I would grab the water scoop from my mother's hand and scoop the water into the tile basin, I scooped the water hairy hands, the water would splash on the mother's pants leg, and the mother would only lovingly touch my head and say, "Good boy, slow down, slow down."
And during this salting period, what kind of inexplicable chemical reaction occurred in the urn, no one at that time could say. Only in this process, the vegetables not only become resistant to storage, but also change their flavor. Salty, sweet and crisp radishes, and crisp cucumber strips that are refreshing and have a thick sauce flavor are all basic dishes. At that time, people's stomachs were full of pickles, adults were working uphill, children were reading and going to school, and they had endless energy around them... Now think about it, hey! Where did that spirit come from at that time?
In this way, I ate sweet potato dried pancakes and went out with pickles on behalf of my father, repaired the Changzhuang Dianzi Bridge, repaired the Songshan Reservoir, and went to Boshan to push charcoal... Sweat soaked the clothes over and over again, and when the clothes dried, they left white salt stains, like crystals precipitated from the salt water of eating pickles.
Now, the number of tricks on the table is increasing, and the three urns seem to have quietly withdrawn from the stage of history. The river flow stone does not turn, but the pickle urn is still "obsessed" and does not change. Because whenever I see it, I naturally think of my hometown and the scene of my mother picking pickles. However, in the blink of an eye, the white colt passed through the gap in a hurry, and the teenager became a man in an instant, which was really a floating dream.
Zhang Yantang is a native of Xingsi Village, Xinzhai Subdistrict, Linqu County, Shandong Province. A member of the Communist Party of China, former vice principal of Weifang No. 6 Middle School, an outstanding educator in Weicheng District, an advisor to The Culture Shandong Magazine, he loves to write, often writes clumsy articles, and occasionally wins awards.