Wang Zengqi, a native of Gaoyou, Jiangsu Province, born on March 5, 1920, is a representative figure of contemporary Chinese writers, essayists, dramatists and Writers of the Beijing School.
What kind of person is Wang Zengqi?
He was named "China's Last Scholar-Doctor", "Lyrical Humanitarian", "China's Last Pure Literati".
At the Southwest United University, Shen Congwen once said: "His novels are better than mine."
In Beijing, Lao She said: I am afraid of two people in the Beijing Literary Association, one is Wang Zengqi and the other is Duanmu Hongliang.
Huang Yongyu said: Only he understands my paintings best. His weight in my heart is too heavy to write.
Shi Hang said of him: There are many cute old men in this world, but it is not common to be cute like Wang Zengqi.
Jia Pingwa said to him: He is a wen fox and has cultivated into an old spirit.
Huang Bao once said that everything he had was poetry.
Liang Wendao said his words: like a bowl of white porridge, boiled just right.
On May 16, 1997, he wanted to drink tea and said to his little daughter, "Give me a cup, turquoise!" Translucent Dragon Well! "But before the Dragon Well came, he died."
Wang Zengqi loves to eat, knows how to eat, can eat, and can write and eat, the tea is fragrant, the years pass, the evolution of life, Taoist cuisine, fireworks, condensed in the book "Old Taste".
1
"It's good to be alive"
Chinese is a food lover, is a big food country, we have thousands of years of eating culture, can connect the Chinese in all corners of the world, in addition to black hair and yellow skin, suppressed Chinese words, I am afraid it is my Greater China cuisine.
"Old Taste" is a book about eating, a book that can be called a book that encompasses the food culture of China's Tiannanhaibei. Using simple and delicate words, he told the food that Wang Lao had seen and heard in his life, namely the "Yunnan flavor" of the Southwest United Congress, the "old taste" in the memory, the "hometown flavor" of childhood, the "umami taste" after the journey and the settlement in Beijing, a vegetable and a meal, which seemed sparse and ordinary, but all revealed Wang Lao's love for life and his infinite yearning for the ultimate happiness in life.
Wang Zengqi loves to eat, even in the face of adversity can find delicious, self-enjoyment, the opening chapter is written like this:
How nice it is to be alive.
The purpose of my writing these articles,
That is, to make people feel,
How nice it is to be alive!
In the "hometown flavor", recalling the fried rice and crumbs of childhood, the turbulent and barren years, the childhood Wang Zengqi is calm, the threat of life is not mentioned, and the fun of childhood is self-contained.
The Red Cross is located in the Lianyang Temple, which is a Taoist temple. Our family took a little luggage into the Lianyang Temple. The grandmother commanded, with special care, to bring a pot of fried rice and a pot of burnt crumbs. I am extremely interested in this kind of unconventional life. At night, I climbed upstairs to Lu Zu and watched the fire of the guns and artillery of the two armies light up in the northeast somewhere, feeling a little nervous and very funny. Many people live in the house and can't cook rice, so we spend this night making fried rice and soaking crumbs. Without a bed, I put together a few Futons for Taoist chanting and slept on them for the night. It was a romantic night I spent as a kid.
The next day, it was all right, and everyone went home.
Fried rice and crumbs are related to poverty and chronic turmoil in my hometown.
2
Poetic recipes
Wang Zengqi loves to eat, can eat, write better, the food presented in the "old taste" is tangible and colorful, sound and taste, foodies seem to be addicted, the more they look hungry, the more hungry they are.
Dry silk. This is Huaiyang cuisine, the old only blanched thousand silks, the dried white tofu slices for thin slices (a good knife master a piece of dried tofu can be sixteen slices), and then cut into fine wires. Mix soy sauce, vinegar and sesame oil and set aside. After the dried shredded silk is blanched with boiling water, put garlic rice and ginger shreds on top (to tender ginger, cut very finely), and the seasoning is drizzled down. ...... The history of boiling dried silk I think is no more than a hundred years old. On the soup (chicken soup or bone broth) add shredded ham, shredded chicken, shredded mushrooms, shrimp seeds boiled together (anything fresh can be put in), under a thousand shreds, add salt, slightly add soy sauce, make slightly colored, cook two or three times, add ginger shredded, you can serve.
Yuan Zicai said that "those who have taste make it out, and those who have no taste make it in", and the dry silk is cut very finely before it can enter the taste.
His food has a voice, and his own food "stuffed meat back to the pot fritters" is written like this, "the fritters are cut into small pieces of inch and a half long, and the inner layer is pulled out of the gap with your fingers, stuffed with minced meat, green onions, and squeezed vegetables, and re-fried in the frying pan." "The fritters are extremely crispy, and the chewing is really loud and moving." Write when I was a child, my grandmother ate the mushroom soup in the long fast: "A large bowl of mushroom soup is served first, the vegetarian stuffed dumplings are fried until crisp, poured into the soup, snort, the mushroom is full of aroma, the taste is not evil." ”
He writes about the food that is dynamic, writing about the "duck eggs of the Dragon Boat Festival" in his hometown, "as soon as the chopsticks are tied down, the red oil will come out." ”
The food he wrote can also make readers laugh and see, during the Southwest United University, writing soap horn ren "Yunnan people take it to eat, it is really unheard of." "Soap horn kernels should not be eaten much. When we passed Tengchong, there was a beet made of soap horn kernels at the banquet, and a Hebei brother poured down spoon after spoon. I warned him that this way of eating would not work, and he did not believe it. As a result, the old man left the seat and went to the toilet. Soap horn kernels are too slippery and will fly straight down in the intestines. ”
He wrote about food and wrote about the sentiments of life: "I don't like to visit the shops, I love to visit the vegetable market. Looking at those turquoise and fresh melon vegetables, it makes people feel the joy of life. ...... People who cook generally eat very little. After my dishes were served, I just tasted two chopsticks at each, and then I sat down and smoked, drank tea, and drank wine. From this point of view, people who are willing to cook for others to eat are relatively unselfish. ”
There is also a bit of a sense of picture. Food is not only the favorite of gourmets, the reason why the name "beauty", there must be a little aesthetic significance in it, he wrote Kunming's "torch pear", "because the skin color is yellow with red, some are actually red." If this pear is hung on the tree, the sun shines, more like a small torch lit one by one. "Fiery red pears, golden sunlight between the gaps in the green leaves, after watching this paragraph, I feel as beautiful as the movie picture." The movie "Hero", the desert, the poplar forest as the background, Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi two beauties dressed in big red clothes, wide robes and large sleeves, green silk flowing, in the sky yellow leaves, clear sunshine like flying sword fighting, sword qi arrived, yellow leaves flew. Although I really don't like the movie and can't remember what the smoke is, this picture is really beautiful, and it is frozen in my mind. Maybe Elder Wang's memory of delicious food is sometimes because of such a little aesthetic significance.
There are also characters related to food, which are still alive in front of you after a long time:
This don is really capable. When the guest ordered, he remembered clearly (the former restaurant did not remember the menu), and then announced the name of the dish to the kitchen. If two tables have ordered the same dish in succession, add a loud sentence: "Tomato scrambled eggs one for two" (one pot fried two plates). Hearing the sound of the spatula in the kitchen, knowing what dishes have been cooked, they quickly went downstairs, (the kitchen is downstairs, in the store hall, the dishes can be fried, handed out by the window on the wall) In the blink of an eye, another hand holds a plate of dishes, quickly goes upstairs, steps on the stairs, and gags, and slips away. He went downstairs this day, not knowing how many trips. Cumulatively, the road he has traveled in the sky is afraid of tens of miles. After the guest finished eating, he had already calculated the account in his heart, and loudly reported the number of money downstairs: a few down, a few tens of yuan and a few corners. His hands, feet, mouth, and eyes are non-stop, and his mind is clear and sensitive, and he never makes mistakes, which is really a hall with personal energy. It is gratifying to see an energetic person.
3
Tea houses in Kunming
Wang Zengqi graduated from southwest United University, and he stayed in Kunming for seven years, five years of study, and two years of teaching. In addition to his hometown of Gaoyou and Beijing, this is the longest place in his life. These seven years were the most wonderful seven years of his life, young and carefree. In addition to reading, it is wandering. Of course, there was a time when Poverty was so poor that there was no money to eat. But spiritually, it is extremely free. As Wang Zengqi himself said: "The place that makes me such a person, such a writer, not another kind of writer, is the Southwest United Congress." ”
Old teahouse
"Old Taste" begins with "brewing teahouses", Kunming's teahouses can only be divided into two categories: large teahouses and small teahouses, college students patronize small teahouses, the joint gate, wandering, specially attracting college students to the new style of teahouses, Shaoxing boss's teahouse that sells dim sum,
The "director's son" of the Ludong Tea House and the "blind rap" in the tea house, the American star on the wall of the Wenlin Street Tea House......... They are all decades of indelible old memories, and a poem on the west wall of the small tea house in Ludong:
Remember the old days,
Follow Daddy to tea.
Grinding the shell in front of the door,
The alleyway is muddy.
Perhaps this rich experience in the city has led to the writer Wang Zengqi, who in an "old-fashioned" small teahouse with a shisha pipe, Wang Zengqi and two foreign language classmates often sat at the window table early in the morning, each looking at their own books, sometimes all morning, without talking to each other. I only started writing at this time, and my first few novels were written in this teahouse. The tea house is very close to The Green Lake, and the wind blowing from the Green Lake has the smell of water floating lotus. ”
What impressed me the most was a woman in a small teahouse.
The first small tea house on the right hand side of Fengyi Street,
There are only three tea tables, and the tea sets of different sizes and shapes are also relatively rough, and a few blue flowers are drawn randomly. In addition to selling tea, large bunches of straw shoes and sweet potatoes (what Hunan people call cold potatoes) hang under the eaves, which are also sold.
Zhang Luo's tea house is a woman. The woman was very strong and her skin was quite white. She gave birth to a number of children. There are often two children around her, still holding a child in their hands. She often opened her arms, milking the long-overdue weaned child while making tea for the guests. Her husband, much older than she was, was like an ape and his eyes were sharp as eagles. He didn't care about anything, but every afternoon he held a large bowl of milk. The man was a breeding animal. This situation is quite puzzling to us. How could this fair, strong woman, who only sells a few bowls of tea a day, straw shoes and sweet potatoes, feed so many mouths and supply a lazy husband with milk every day? Strange! Chinese women seem to have a kind of amazing endurance that cannot be overwhelmed by any burden.
This should be the image of "Ma Bao Male" and "Wife Bao Male" that appeared earlier in literary works, and Wang Lao's caring female consciousness hit the face of "straight male cancer".
4
Fading cuisine
This book, like a real documentary, slowly unfolds, recording the food of the times, telling the memories of childhood, and regretting the taste of loss.
Steam pot chicken
At Kunming Zhengyi Road near Jinbi Road. The old shop with the plaque "Cultivating Righteous Qi" is the most authentic one in Wang Zengqi's memory, and when Kunming people bump into each other and want to eat steam pot chicken, they say, "Let's cultivate righteous qi." ”
There are many ways to eat chicken Chinese, the most famous of which are Guangzhou salt baked chicken, Changshu flower chicken, and I think that Kunming steam pot chicken should be the first. What are the benefits of steam pot chicken? Day: The most authentic taste of chicken. Steam pot chicken must put less than a few pieces of Xuanwei ham, a small piece of sanqi, the more "hairy" the chicken flavor. Walking into "cultivating righteousness" is not like walking into other restaurants, the five flavors are mixed, but pure and pure, a piece of chicken fragrance.
Burn bait blocks
Wang Zengqi has been unforgettable for more than forty years in the depths of the alley: "Burn the bait block yo..."
The bait seller fanned the charcoal with a persimmon oil paper fan, and the charcoal fire became more vigorous and red. Kunming people do not use sunflower fans, and fan fires mostly use persimmon oil paper fans that are shaped like sunflower fans. In front of the grate are several enamel handle jars, filled with different sauces, laid flat on a wooden board. After a while, the bait block burned thoroughly, the inner layer was soft, the surface was slightly shelled, that is, the bamboo slice was scraped out of the enamel jar, sesame paste, peanut butter, sweet noodle sauce, and oiled chili noodles, which were successively applied to the side of the bait block, folded in half, like an old-fashioned wooden comb, and handed over to the customer. Holding hands together, eating and walking, salty, sweet, fragrant, spicy, and merged into the hungry intestines. For more than forty years, I have not forgotten this taste. I can't forget the bleak and distant cry: "Burn the bait block..."
rice noodle
Rice noodles are pressed out of rice noodles like steamed dumplings, "rice noodles are white, smooth and soft." "Wang Zengqi" has a female classmate with slender figure, very white skin, and a nickname, which is called rice noodles. ”
The white soup of Xingzhong Temple is piled with rice noodles with half two pork buttocks, sheep blood rice noodles in Qingyun Street, cold rice noodles that sweat heavily in the summer on Zhengyi Road, dry-roasted rice noodles in The Old Street of Huguo Road, and cuan (cuan, ersheng) meat rice noodles, that is, fresh meat rice noodles, "rice noodles are boiled, dialed into the minced meat, and you can get it when you see two openings." "Braised chicken rice noodles, eel rice noodles, leaf rice noodles .... Shen Congwen's favorite rice noodles with tomatoes and eggs, the last appearance is the most expensive bridge rice noodles.
In his writing, the snacks in the city seem to be full of Han, and all kinds of food are unseen and unheard of.
Forty years later, after the reform and opening up, back to Kunming, the rice noodles in the memory are gone, and the intestines from Guizhou are sold everywhere. "Intestine" is pig intestine, "Wang" is pig blood, and several southwestern provinces call pig blood "Blood Wang" or "Wangzi". Wang Zengqi sighed: "Why can the intestinal rice noodles bring braised chicken and meat... All knocked down and turned into a intestinal rice noodle domination of the world? Is it stewed chicken and meat that no one loves to eat? Labor-intensive? Not making money? It doesn't seem to be either. I couldn't figure it out. ”
The steam pot chicken is not as good as before, and the chicken used in the past is not an ordinary chicken, it is a "Wuding strong chicken".
The bridge meter line is also much worse than before. There are no chicken slices like that, no slices like that, no knife work. There is no soup like that. That kind of soup had to be simmered with fat hens, and there were no fat hens like that now.
The bait block that burns the bait block is still there, but it is not oval, it becomes round. Nor is it as thick as before, a thin mirror-like disc, presumably mechanical. Do you still have so many sauces? Do you still use oak charcoal fire to burn?
How did these changes happen? Why is this happening? It's a sigh.
Times have changed, development is fast, people do not have the patience in the workshop in the alley, using "mule chicken" technology to deal with Wuding chicken, for cost considerations, who still use oak wood to bake bait blocks, efficiency first make money first, the memory of the food in this way disappeared in history. People are desperately running forward, no time and no mood to stop and look at the scenery on the side of the road, all the way to the end of the road but still far away, suddenly found that they really missed the beauty behind them.
"Old Taste" remembers the taste in memory, but also makes modern people think, we only want to move forward, rapid development and change in life, people are not throwing away a lot of precious and beautiful things,
Slow down the mind, as Mr. Mu Xin wrote in "Once Upon a Time":
I remember when I was a teenager
Everybody is sincere
Say a sentence is a sentence
Train station in the early morning
Long Street is dark and pedestrianless
The small shop selling soy milk is steaming
The old days became slower
Cars, horses, mail are all slow
There is only enough to love one person in a lifetime
The former lock also looks good
The keys are beautifully presented
You lock it, people will understand
A story in food
Wang Zengqi eats food, writes food, makes food, the history and culture behind the food, the story of celebrities eating food, folk proverbs, and eating methods everywhere must be examined, and it is also an interesting process to write.
Kunming's examination of the Song people eating papaya:
"Tokyo Dream Hualu Is Moon Lane Strange Miscellaneous Sale" has "medicinal papaya, water papaya". "Dream Liang Lu Fruit Product": "Papaya, green and small, the native slices are ripe, into the incense medicine goods; or sugar frying, the name papaya." ”
"Wulin Old Things and Fruits" has "papaya" and "Cool Water" has "papaya juice". It seems that the papaya sold in Kunming is a "water papaya". The water soaked in papaya is called "papaya juice".
Draught Bird's Testimonial:
In the spring, selling a kind of wild game called "鶸" ,....... Guo Pu's note in "Erya Shi Bird": "Out of the northern desert." "Nice. It is also occasionally sold in Beijing in winter. The mouth of the sand chicken is short and red, and the legs are also short. We have waterfowl with long beaks and long legs. There is a world of difference between the taste of the crane and the sand chicken. The sand chicken is coarse and slightly sour, while the meat is extremely fine and very fragrant.
Even the pickles that the common people are accustomed to eating, Wang Zengqi, can study the north and south of the world, Beijing eats water knots, Tianjin eats winter vegetables, Baoding and Suzhou eat spring not old, Lu Xun's hometown has black dried vegetables, Yunnan Qujing's leek flowers have excellent flavor, Guizhou's mustard pickles are called rock sugar acid, North Korea has spicy vegetables, Yanbian pickled bracken is sold to Beijing, unfortunately, it has not eaten Fujian's yellow radish. There is even an ancient book to examine the origin of pickles.
In fact, these studies are only a place of interest, not necessarily a result, it seems that the delicious time between the lips and teeth is too short, and I want to taste it again mentally. At the end of the writing, it returns to literary creation: "Novels must have strong national colors, and it is impossible not to pickle in national culture and sauce."
5
Tolerance in gastronomy
Wang Zengqi wrote that eating southeast, south, and northwest, ancient and modern, all-encompassing, "literati are light on each other", in fact, not only do literati look down on each other, many old-style literati are their own big and do not pay attention to anything.
In "Old Taste", Wang Zengqi wrote about the cuisine of Tiannanhaibei, and also tasted the delicacies of all parts of the motherland, he ate any food, any taste can be accepted, eating this matter, it is really inclusive and eclectic.
He urged everyone to try more, especially literary and art workers:
I advise everyone not to be too narrow in taste, to try everything, whether it is ancient or off-site food, such as aoi and grass, eat a little. A person who eats cabbage all year round is not blessed. Many vegetables that everyone has become accustomed to, such as spinach and lettuce, are actually foreign dishes. Tomatoes, onions, decades ago China did not have, many people can not eat, now are not also very fond of eating? A lot of things, at first eat, eat unaccustomed, eat, eat taste.
A literary and art worker, a writer, and an actor have the best taste, from the bean juice in Beijing to the dragon lice in Guangdong (some of which I can't stand, such as the houttuynia cordata in Guizhou); the ear sounds are better, and I can understand several dialects, Sichuan dialect, Suzhou dialect, Yangzhou dialect (some words I don't understand, such as Wenzhou live). Otherwise, it's a loss.
The taste is a little monotonous, the ear sounds are a little worse, it doesn't matter, the most important thing is to be more interested in life.
From the time Beijingers did not eat bitter melons to the beginning of accepting bitter melons, Wang Zengqi thought that the taste of literary and artistic creation should be mixed, and not biased. "Don't easily deny or reject literary and artistic works that you are not accustomed to.
Wang Zengqi's tolerance for food is actually tolerance for life and culture, which is his concept of literary creation: literary and artistic creation should try more to have the interest of life. Presumably this is also Wang Lao's outlook on life, food is as delicious as life, eating sweet and salty in the south, spicy and sour in the east, glorious and noble, poor old and lonely, this is called life. Tolerance and appreciation, indifference, in order to be interesting.
6
"Evergreen"
Wang Zengqi said that most people who love to cook are not selfish, I think, so love food, Taoists often write such as delicacies and delicacies, city snacks such as people who see the whole table of Han, people who love to eat and understand will eat and can eat culture and love, people who can be confidants with food, not only are not selfish, but they are also a person who loves life in the wind and rain, laughing and watching the wind and clouds in the ups and downs.
An author commented on him this way: His pursuit permeates the smile of life, and even in the face of adversity, he can find beauty and enjoy himself. Shortly after the "Cultural Revolution" began, he was imprisoned in a "cowshed" because of the "rightist" problem, and someone asked him whether the experience was difficult, but his answer was "settle down with the encounter." "Encounter", of course, is an unsatisfactory situation, and "an" is also a last resort. Wang Zengqi said: "If you don't 'an', what can you do?" That's it, why not open some. As the Beijingers say, 'play with yourself'. Of course, it's not exactly about cajoling yourself. Life is very fun. "So, no matter how you look at it, this is a very chic old man, a person who can also live poetically in a chicken feather."
A lifetime of experience in the war in the displacement, the wind and rain, was classified as a "rightist", sent to labor, closed in the "cowshed", such a person, the soul must be full of scars, the End of the Cultural Revolution popular "scar literature", but from the old man's words, can not see these, whether it is a novel or prose, write the beauty and tranquility of life. Such a mentality is about innocence, not age.
At the end of "Old Taste", Wang Zengqi quotes Sherwood Anderson's "Little Town Deformity" to record an old writer's text that best answers his own philosophy of life: "His body is old, no longer of much use, but there is something in his body that is indeed completely young." "I wish I could be like this old writer, childlike and evergreen." Presumably this is the reason why you can enjoy poetic inhabitation in a place of chicken feathers and get a little sense of purity in the flow of floating life, what a cute "old man".
Autumn rain, the weather is getting cooler, taste a taste of life, stick a sticky fireworks taste, chaotic life, can not stop the footsteps, read Wang Zengqi, read the "old taste".
The water is poor, those people, those things, those delicious...
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