The memory of the crystal cake

The memory of the crystal cake

Zhou Yangjun

At the end of the weiyang district writers' association activities, Chairman Zhang Ying gave him a box of food with five eye-catching characters written on the box: "Zhikuan Crystal Cake". I'm a sweetsie person, especially like crystal cakes, but because I am worried about rising blood sugar, I have been asking myself to eat less.

To tell the truth, crystal cake is not a rare thing, but in the 1950s and 1960s, rural children could not see it unless they were in the Spring Festival, and they might not be able to eat it when they saw it.

People are often like this, the more things they don't get, the more they crave. I remember one year, I went to visit my relatives alone, and I couldn't help but steal a piece of crystal cake on the way, and when my grandfather found out, I beat him up. In those days, we collectively referred to snacks similar to crystal cakes as dim sum, which was rarely packaged in boxes, generally wrapped in a brown coarse paper, and the lower four stacks were two pieces, and one in the middle of the top, just one pound. If you remove the top piece, the whole package collapses, and the rope for the snack is obviously loose, and even a fool will find it. At that time, I was young and greedy, and I didn't think I would be found, until I was beaten in the ass and regretted that I shouldn't have done something wrong.

In fact, my grandfather also loved crystal cakes, and when he was eighty years old, he often asked his grandmother to heat snacks for him to eat. A snack, two small glasses of liquor is his favorite and must-have of the day. At that time, I was already at work, and most of the snacks he ate were also bought by me. He knew all that. Maybe it was out of concern for me, maybe he remembered the things that had beaten me for a snack.

Speaking from the heart, I don't approve of my grandfather eating snacks, because after all, he is old, and eating snacks is not easy to digest. But the old man loves to eat, and he can't help but let him eat, this matter was once tangled by our whole family. Later, everyone restricted my grandfather from eating snacks from two aspects, one was to buy less, and the other was to let him eat only one piece a day, and he had to eat it hot.

The countrymen call the white skin snacks bought in the store crystal cake, after going to work in Xi'an, I learned that there is a difference between dim sum and dim sum, only the good dim sum filled with rock sugar and green and red silk is called crystal cake, and the best is the production of demao Gong's family, and later there are some brands of Weinan and Lintong, and then later it is Zhikuan's crystal cake.

Maybe it was the lack of sugar in those days, and I found that most of my colleagues in the unit also liked to eat crystal cakes. Once in the northern suburbs of the grass beach construction, at noon can not find a restaurant to eat, a brother hungry, just bought a pound of crystal cake in a nearby store, sat on the ground and ate a clean light. It was also at this time that someone noticed that my brother was stretching his neck and rolling his eyes. Everyone panicked. After a teacher found out, he hurriedly asked for a cup of tea from a tea stall, and without hesitation, he poured it on the master brother, and after a while the master brother returned to normal. It turned out that the master brother was choking on the food. Several unknown people surrounded the brother and asked the reason, and the brother shook his hand and said, "It's okay, it's choked, but this time it really made the crystal cake beautiful." The master criticized the master brother for not eating so many crystal cakes, let alone eating too urgently, but the master brother blushed but said that it was still delicious.

In recent years, I have returned home to visit my father and found that my father also loves crystal cakes, and he has to eat one piece almost every day. I asked him if our Zhou family had the genetics of loving crystal cakes? The father laughed and said that he had loved sweets since he was a child. I told my father that older people still eat less sweet food. Father said that this is the crystal cake of the Zhikuan family, with less sugar, less oil, soft and delicious, and easy to digest. It is also said that the owner of Zhikuan Crystal Cake is our Chang'an people, good character products, and bright brands. I asked him how he knew. The old man said that Nie Zhikuan's reputation was great, and everyone in Xi'an knew it, and he also said that I was lonely and unheard of. Think about my father, who is in his nineties, and what else is restricting him from eating? Fortunately, my father's health has always been very good, and everyone is relieved to eat Zhikuan's food.

On the way back to Xi'an, I thought of crystal cake again, I really don't know if eating will have heredity, why do generations of our family like to eat crystal cake? My grandfather faced the loess with his back to the sky, and he had dealt with the soil all his life, and when he died, he was 86 years old, and although my father had worked in the government for many years, he had suffered a lot when he was young, and now he is more than ninety years old. Fathers and grandfathers are people with long lives, is this longevity related to eating crystal cakes? I really don't know.

September 28, 2020