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Entering the eighth year is the year. "Twenty-three, sugar melon sticky." Every year on the 23rd day of the lunar month, people have a tradition of sacrificing stoves, and every household will buy a few sugar melons to resign the stove.
"Chen Jia Lou and Yan Jiazhuang, who doesn't have a broken sugar basket?" This saying, which is widely spread in the local area, tells the custom of making sugar melons in several villages near Chenjialou in Laiwu. Every year in the tenth month of the lunar calendar, the villagers here set up a sugar pot early and prepare to make sugar melons. Chen Lou sugar melon, which began in the Qing Dynasty and has a history of more than 100 years, has been selected into the list of intangible cultural heritage of Shandong Province.
Chen Tongqi, the inheritor of the provincial intangible cultural heritage "Chen Lou Sugar Melon" project, has been learning to make sugar melon with his father since he was 20 years old in the sugar mill in the village, and has been 50 years now.
The main raw materials of sugar melon are yellow rice, sticky grain rice and barley malt, which are mixed in a certain proportion and made by boiling sugar, pulling sugar, forming, sticking sesame seeds and other processes.
At about 3:00 a.m. on January 13, following the sound of gollum pushing sugar, a reporter from Qilu Evening News qilu came to the sugar mill of Chen Tuoqi in Chen JiaLou Village, Yangzhuang Town, Laiwu District. Chen Tongqi's sugar mill was opened by him and 8 villagers, with a total of two sugar pots, the large one with a diameter of 1.5 meters, which has been used for 60 or 70 years since his father's generation.
Chen Tongqi said that the seasonality of making sugar melon is very strong, although it is only more than two months ago, but it is really a tiring and hard work. They have to get up at one or two o'clock in the morning every day, get ready for work, start boiling sugar, boiling two pots a day, and one pot takes more than an hour. At the beginning, one person stirred with a stick, and after the syrup thickened, two people took turns pushing with a wooden shovel like a paddle, and could not stop for more than an hour. The two pots of sugar are fried, and when the sugar is cooled, they each go home to eat rice, and come back to continue drying.
The subsequent sugar extraction and forming work is not easy. The sugar embryos that began to cool were taken back into the room, at this time the room was filled with steam, no one could be seen two meters away, and the room temperature reached about 30 ° C. Several workers blow with steam while pumping sugar on the sugar embryos. Finally formed outdoors, indoor and outdoor temperature difference of thirty or forty degrees Celsius. The temperature in the early morning of the same day is about -7 ° C, in order to form fast, but also with the use of industrial fans to blow non-stop, people naturally have to "bathe" in the artificial cold current. The whole process of several people division of labor and cooperation, can not be chaotic at all, just like a war, until noon to glue the sugar melon sesame seeds.
After a break of an hour or two after lunch, they began a new round of work, and could only take a break while waiting for the malt and millet to ferment. In this way, every day was repeated for more than two months, and the sugar stove was never extinguished from the time it was lit.
In 2015, Chen Tongqi's sugar mill ushered in a highlight moment, his sugar melon on the "tip of the tongue of China", he also cooperated with an e-commerce company in Laiwu to sell Chen Lou sugar melon online.
Nowadays, Chen Lou sugar melon has not worried about sales. Many business owners have changed the tiring sugar frying process from manual production to mechanized production, but Chen Tongqi still insists that all processes are manually operated.
He said that in the past two months, although he often slept only for three or four hours for several consecutive nights, he obviously felt that his body was a bit overwhelmed, and even tired to the point of mental trance and could not see the objects in front of him, but in order to be worthy of the persistence of the big guys and the trust of customers, he still adhered to this traditional pure handicraft, he said, only in this way can he keep the original taste of Chen Lou sugar melon, and can he continue to inherit and develop this ancient skill.
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