Lu Jinle
On weekends, the author went on an outing in Chixiao. In a family, I saw the following old pottery objects, at first glance, like pots? Like arsenic? Still like a cylinder head? If it is a basin, why are there so many raised cogging grooves inside? If it is a cover, why is it so deep and has feet at the bottom? Usually it is rare that the arsenic is so large. Measured, it is 14 cm high, 30 cm wide in diameter and 2 cm thick. Curious, I asked Aunt Zhou, a native of Chixiao Lantian, to solve the mystery.
Aunt Zhou said that this old pottery object is called "sand pot" on the side of Chixiao, and some people on the side of Huashan call it "pulp pot". It was a kitchen utensil that almost every family in Huaxian County had. The bulging grooves in the pot are used to grind food, and this pot can be used to grind soaked soybeans, grind sweet potatoes, taro, lotus roots, and banana taro. It is also used to beat mountain herbs. Chixiao is backed by the mountain, and the medical conditions in the village were poor in the past. People in the village generally suffer from simple sore diseases, and Tulangzhong will go up the mountain to collect medicine based on ancestral experience, collect it back and use a sand basin to beat the medicine and apply it to the patient to treat the disease. Peanuts, sesame seeds, spices and mugwort leaves can also be beaten when used in pots, and sticks are usually made of the hardest wood in the region, and they are used for several years, usually the sticks are still rotten in the sand pot.
But after returning from an outing, I asked an old uncle from Huashan, and he said that this old object they called "pulp pot". The sand pot is not like this, the sand pot is used to raise flowers, hey, it has its own talk. But one thing is certain, there is no objection to the use of grinding and beating pulp. It is estimated that everyone calls it differently.
Later, I looked for it, and it turned out that our family also had this kind of pot. The hometown dialect is called 砺砵, also known as powder pot. It is just that the basin used in the hometown is relatively large, usually the diameter is fifty or sixty centimeters wide, the height is more than twenty centimeters, and the thickness is two centimeters. And the bottom is perforated, and the protruding cogging groove inside is relatively deep and dense.
The hometown is mountainous, with few mountains and paddy fields, and more semi-arid land. Therefore, every household will grow a lot of sweet potatoes (sweet potatoes), except for eating at noon (at that time, farmers usually only eat taro sweet potatoes at noon to send white porridge to fill their hunger). The rest is either dried sweet potatoes as a snack or made into powder (sweet potato flour). At that time, electrification was not widespread, and the grinding was all done by this large powder. I clearly remember that the family grinds one or two hundred pounds of sweet potatoes every year. The cloth bag containing the powder was wrapped in a large wooden barrel, and the powder was framed on it, and the mother took the cleaned raw sweet potatoes and kept grinding them along the coggings of the powdered pots, grinding one after another. Sometimes in order to grind the sweet potatoes as clean as possible, I occasionally accidentally grind my hands to bleed. The sweet potatoes are ground into fine powders and dropped from the powder bags, and then water is poured into the cloth bag filled with sweet potato powder. Use your hands to pound and rub vigorously. Sweet potatoes and wash out potato flour with water. After one night of precipitation, the snow-white starch can be fished out and placed on the bamboo shed for drying, and dried for a few days to store in the tank. The remaining potato residue can be used to feed pigs or fish.
Now there are still people in my hometown who make sweet potato flour, but they no longer use flour milling, but use machines to beat. Sweet potato flour in my hometown can usually be used as corn starch or beaten with meat balls, which tastes really good.
Whether it is called a sand basin, a pulp pot or a powder pot, a pot. With the popularity of electrification, electric mills are fast and good, and people no longer use sand basins. Coupled with the change of living environment, once relocated, old items are discarded. And the sand basin is a tile product, easy to break, very difficult to preserve and collect. Therefore, now the sand basin is becoming more and more rare, and the sand basin is slowly completing the historical mission and gradually withdrawing from the historical stage!