▲ Canadian missionary William Smith's Yanggu County market in 1930'
By chance, when visiting the grocery store, Peaches would often linger in front of the shelves where she bought crystal mud, her eyes were shining, and when she asked her, she was very precious about the brand and performance of these things, and lamented with expectation that her mother said that she was poisonous and did not allow her to buy it, because some children would be allergic. I couldn't help but let her choose a box, immediately screamed with joy, and then struggled with which one to buy, touched this and put it down and picked up that.
This scene reminds me of the "sugar thinning" when I was a child.
▲ Thin sugar
"Tangled sugar" is a luxurious sweetness in winter for children in rural northwestern Lu. It is generally boiled with sweet potatoes or carrots, and it is also said that it is made of maltose, similar to the small pot of sugar dipped in sugar gourds.
Usually at the grocery stall where gadgets are bought: a dirty big white bowl, the mouth of the bowl is hooked with two circles of blue line of the ordinary big white bowl, it is filled with thin sugar, the surface of the sugar thin fell a layer of sand and dust and various unknown particles blown by the northwest wind, and next to the bowl was a small pile of small sticks folded from cotton firewood, thicker than matchsticks - that is, the tool for winding sugar.
bazaar
Selling for a penny, you can get a little more for two cents, and those who are willing to spend five cents to buy thin sugar are local tyrants, and the amount depends on the weight of the owner of the stall.
▲ Thin sugar
Two thin cotton sticks pick a lump of sugar thin, wrapped while walking, the technique of entanglement is nothing more than left and right pulling, into a "one" character - the length of "one" is determined by the operator's technical level and the viscosity of the sugar thin - the pulled "one" and then come together in the middle to build an "O", the right stick quickly passes through the circle, and then pulls into the "two" character of the upper and lower lines, and the two lines of "two" are twisted into twists and pulled left and right again... And so on until the honey-colored sugar thins "wrapped" into white, with non-stick clothes as the highest level.
Therefore, a group of children can often be seen in a circle on the streets and alleys, competing to see who is wrapped in white, who is more non-sticky clothes, and those who have no sugar to "entangle" can only watch from afar.
▲ Linqing Old Street Archway
Now think about the reason why I bought a few pennies of sugar and didn't deliver it to my mouth right away, maybe I wanted to have this sweet food for a while, so I would try my best to "play" with it, and when I was psychologically satisfied, I ate it in small bites.
Of course, there are clumsy guys who can't get entangled twice, so they drip to the ground, sticky like a donkey rolling, and can only lick the two cotton sticks with hatred.
▲ Thin sugar