College students' hometown diary: Bacon spans thousands of miles, connecting the new year of parents and grandmothers

Fat and lean pork belly slices, fry out of the oil, accompanied by green onions, dried radish stir-fried to make the aroma, add water without ingredients, boil and then put in the kimchi together with the high heat to stew, after fully into the flavor, put some fresh cabbage leaves out of the pot, bacon cabbage pot is completed. The sausage, salted egg pork liver, pork belly are cooked and sliced, plated in the shape of a flower, then sprinkled with pepper noodles, and a slice of white porridge is added to the mouth, and the multiple flavors bloom layer by layer on the tip of the tongue. In the latest video of Li Ziqi, bacon "cried" many netizens.

Bacon is Sichuan's food business card and the trailer for the New Year. After returning to my hometown, walk around, and there is bacon where there are people. Residential buildings in the city, balconies from top to bottom hung with sausages. In the rural house, I found a pit for roasting fire and looked up, and the pork leg meat worn by the rope was hung on the beam. When it comes to the bacon preparation method, every Sichuan person can tell you a lot, each piece of meat should be evenly smeared with salt, turned over once a week, about two weeks of marinating. Then wash the meat with warm water, hang it in a ventilated place to dry for four or five days and then smoke it with fire, the meat can not be too close to the flame, firewood, it is best to use cypress branches.

My hometown is in Sichuan, and every year I look for someone to make bacon. This year, the school holidays early, and I returned to my hometown very early after the exam, but my parents stayed in the city thousands of miles away. In response to the country's initiative to celebrate the New Year in place under the epidemic, they abandoned their plan to return to their hometown for the New Year. Yesterday at noon, my father suddenly video called me and excitedly said that he had received bacon from my grandmother.

Last year, because of the serious epidemic, the express delivery was basically stopped a few years ago, and my grandmother asked my uncle everywhere, thought of a way, and failed to send the bacon of the new year, which was sad for a long time. This year can finally be sent, a large bag into the courier box, as if to make up for two years of the amount, pork legs, pork belly, tail, ribs, sausages ... It was packed with almost 40 pounds.

In the video call thousands of miles away, the father was like a child who received a New Year's gift, holding a mobile phone and shooting from all angles, as if showing off, he kept saying, "I have sent a lot, it is very difficult to carry it down." I asked my grandmother, and she smiled and said, not much, because this year I came back for the New Year, she didn't send too much, if I don't go back to my hometown, she will send more."

My parents stayed in a foreign country, my grandmother and I were in my hometown, and the family could not be together for the New Year, and I always felt a little sorry. Fortunately, I can eat the bacon made by my grandmother and feel the taste of my hometown, and it is estimated that my parents will be at ease a lot. Looking at the bacon she made so much, Grandma would also feel that she was not busy in vain. In this way, bacon allows a family in different cities to achieve "reunion", which is not the strongest New Year's flavor. There are always people who say that the taste of the New Year is getting weaker and weaker, and the New Year is getting less and less fun, especially under the local New Year. If you go to the fireworks of life to feel it, take a walk in the wind, and soak in the water, you can smell the familiar smell of the New Year.

My parents told me that when they were young, their lives were hard, they raised a litter of pigs for a year, and the farm work was also done all year round, and they couldn't stop for a day. Only during the New Year can you kill a pig to make bacon. For them, that bite of bacon is the only flavor of the year. The newly made bacon and dried beans are boiled together in a tin jar, and no seasoning needs to be put away, and when they are cooked, they are fished out and eaten with potatoes. My father confessed that over the years, he had eaten too many foods in the north and south, and he had never eaten such a good meal. "If there is no bacon in the New Year, it is not a New Year," he concluded.

Their generation changed their fate by reading, so I did not have a hard life, and I had "food freedom" since I was a child. But for me, bacon is still the strongest flavor of the year. There are so many delicious foods and so many that I like, but bacon is still the most important, the most hearty, the most central dish on the table. When you eat bacon, you think of the reunion dinner, and you think of the liveliness and joy of the New Year.

This is the taste of the year, the taste of love, the taste of hometown. This is a kind of inheritance, the older generation eats bacon in the New Year, which is the improvement of the food that is bitter to the end of the year; the younger generation eats bacon in the New Year, which is a habit of the taste buds developed from childhood. Some traditions do not need to be deliberately passed on, times are changing, but people in them will always give the tradition their own unique memory. From generation to generation, bacon has become a new year's flavor that Sichuan people can't give up. Especially at the moment of the local New Year, it has become a medium of new year's taste, connecting urban and rural areas, connecting cities and cities, and connecting people of different ages.

The New Year flavor of Sichuan people is hooked by bacon, no matter where you are, where there is bacon, there is a New Year flavor. Every place, in everyone's heart, may have such a new year's taste medium, so that no matter where we are in the New Year, when we see that figure and smell that smell, we will burst into tears. The Spring Festival reduces the flow of people, but it cannot block the express delivery, which is a new Spring Festival Chinese. During this time, the couriers on the road were not all wrapped in these nostalgic flavors of mother's love and father's love, just like those sent to my parents by my grandmother.

Source: China Youth Daily client