In the new year, start by eating well and take yourself seriously

"One Man's Apron"

In the past New Year's Day holiday, have you enjoyed the food? I believe that for many people, no matter how busy the work is, how fast-paced life is,

Every time I feed myself with a long-awaited delicacy, the warm and healing corner of my heart is reawakened.

A good meal may not only represent the satisfaction of the moment, but also contain our pursuit of memories and enthusiasm for life.

Writer Hong Aizhu uses food to string memories in "Old-School Girl's Shopping Route", and writes the "history of home eating" for three generations of a family. Hong Aizhu said, "Through cooking and writing, I slowly got to know the terroir of my hometown behind the food.

At the same time, it is also a deep nostalgia for the time that has passed, the family that has not been able to accompany me, and the deep nostalgia for my childhood, which I want to recall through words in part.

In these stories, the food is fragrant and hot, and the elders are all alive, and they are alive. ”

Not long ago, Hong Aizhu came to a table and chatted with everyone about those things at the table. In the new year, start by eating well and take yourself seriously.

This article is reprinted from the official account "Yixi" (ID: yixiclub)

, Ideal Country is authorized to publish, with abridgement

。 Speech / Hong Aizhu, Editing / Dakai

，

Design/49, flex

The terroir of the people, at the family table

Hello everyone, it's a pleasure to come to Shenzhen. I'm Hong Aizhu and I'm from Taipei, Taiwan. I'm a graphic designer, but I wrote a book of essays a few years ago called "Old-School Girly Shopping Routes", so it was my writing that brought me to you today.

How could a person who was originally a designer suddenly write prose, I would say that I had no choice but to do it. Because my mother had a serious illness a few years ago, and about two years later, the illness took my mother out of this world.

As a close caregiver during her illness, a daughter who felt like she was going to be left alone all the time, I had to find a creative form to record the rich and rich time I spent with my mother.

This time, in retrospect, was very ordinary. It was my favorite, and it included my mother's energetic appearance in the kitchen preparing feasts and family food, as well as the complete childhood memories of three generations of the family eating Chinese food and lunch together.

So then I slowly wrote a lot of old family dishes, and while I was writing, I tried to learn how to cook them, and I learned these dishes. At that time, I thought that my mother didn't know when she might leave, so if there was no one in front of her, it was a means of self-preservation to cook a home-cooked dish repeatedly and carry it with her.

In fact, this is how I feel today, my dearest family left me first, and I was able to stabilize the rest of my life by relying on this little home-cooked food in my hand.

You can see that in the picture is my mother, and the back is my grandmother, and I grew up in their care.

This three-generation family actually has its geographical location. This is a map of several important settlements of the Han people in the Taipei Basin at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and my family is in this small place where Guanyin Mountain meets the mouth of the Tamsui River.

▲ Source: "Journey to the Ancient City of Taipei" Yuanliu Publishing Company

It used to be a rural village for a long time, until now Taipei has become very urbanized, and this area still has that relatively leisurely rural style, so some food culture has been preserved. Some snacks that are not very readily available in downtown Taipei today, can be tasted here. After my mother's family settled here, they barely moved anywhere else for 200 years, just in the same country.

I was originally going to write about people, but then I wrote about people and added food, and finally I connected food with terroir, and one thing I found was that people's terroir can be presented at the family table.

In this photo, you can see that the two old gentlemen in straight suits are my grandfather and uncle, and my mother is on the far left. On the back of this group is a whole whole pig, which is a typical scene in the early 80's when my village went to say goodbye.

A family that is so keen on worship, there are many sacrificial foods, New Year's foods, and traditional foods at home, so I will share these dishes with you today and talk about snacks.

new year

Let's start with the beginning of the year. This is the food we eat during the Chinese New Year, and I almost began to wonder or think about my life experience from this dish. I would write it as "dou mein", but most of the time, we call it "tau-mi" in Taiwanese or Hokkien. Tau is actually a dynamic, which is the dynamic of slowly heating and stirring the wet slurry into a dough.

There are many early settlements in Northern Taiwan, such as Sanchong, Luzhou, and Wugu, and this dish is the food that these old Han Chinese settlements would eat. It is completely impossible to order in a restaurant because it takes too long and is very labor-intensive, so it is a family "private food".

Different families will call it by different names, for example, it may be called "Pocket Money" or "Gold Silver", or it may be more directly called "Sticky Money". After hearing so many names, gold and silver, everyone knows that the great significance of this dish is as a carrier of auspicious words.

It is to stir-fry and stick a lot of good ingredients together through this slimy sweet potato powder slurry, which has both the meaning of gathering and the lip gloss of fortune, so it will especially appear during the New Year's Festival.

I grew up with this dish every year, until I left my hometown to go to college, and I found out why my classmates didn't eat this dish very much, and I wondered if it had something to do with my ancestral hometown.

Later, I slowly noticed the situation of this dish in other places, such as the Chinese in Malaysia, and I remembered seeing an old lady whose ancestral home is Nan'an, Quanzhou, and she made this dish at home, and she called it "Mudou".

Then I saw a show called "Breakfast China", and there was a similar food in this show called Hokkien paste, but they cooked it into a soup version. I thought it was so interesting, I started with this dish and thought, maybe food is not just food, it may have an ancestral migration trajectory, or there is a local character in it.

Our family usually makes the noodles in the afternoon of Chinese New Year's Eve, eats them until the second day of the new year, and after the day, they fry them in an oil pot and dip them in garlic soy sauce.

My uncle only goes to the kitchen once a year for this dish – because it's so hard to stir and stir so much that sometimes the spatula breaks.

What else will we eat on New Year's Day, we will eat mullet roe. Mullet roe is a very popular ingredient in Taiwan, and I think it is a big reflection of the fact that this is an island area, and every winter, especially around the winter solstice, schools of mullet pass through the Taiwan Strait.

The ovaries and eggs of the mullet are taken out, salted, flattened, and air-dried, so that it can be preserved for a relatively long time. Now that the freezing technology is good, it seems that mullet roe can be eaten all year round, but in our home, mullet roe is still a slightly more ceremonious dish, and it often appears on the table of New Year's dishes or banquets.

It's a very salty and fresh dish, so when we eat it, we bake it first, then slice it, and serve it with winter radish and garlic for a popular cold meat appetizer.

This is an old shop that we liked when we bought mullet roe, and my grandmother grew up in this area in Dadaocheng.

It's a 100-year-old shop, and when you go to buy mullet roe from him, he often turns on a bright light to shine on mullet roe, much like torturing a prisoner. Then you look through the light to see if it's very oily, if it's bloodshot clean – that means it's a good piece of roe.

I especially enjoyed watching him turn the lights on, like a buying ceremony. I really enjoy following in the footsteps of my mother or grandmother to these old shops to find ingredients.

There is also a dish, which is my grandmother's New Year's dish. My grandmother's dish is called cabbage rolls, and it is an exotic New Year's dish, mainly because my grandmother grew up in the Japanese colonial era, so her dishes will have a bit of Oriental style.

Taiwanese people like to have a hot pot during the Chinese New Year, put some meatballs in it, put some cabbage, and have a soup to drink, at this time my grandmother will put the pre-made cabbage rolls in it. Because there are so many good dishes to eat during the Chinese New Year, cabbage rolls are often forgotten. So when I was a child, my impression of cabbage rolls was that I had forgotten about the dish in the hot pot, and I always thought it wasn't particularly delicious.

But the version of this dish I later ate was many years after my grandmother left.

When my brother came to Japan in his first year of study, it was a very cold winter in Tokyo, so he found an oden stall and ordered a cabbage roll to eat. When he ate it, he felt that he missed his grandmother so much that tears were about to fall.

There are some dishes that you eat all your life, and you don't think it's special, but in fact, you already remember it, and it grows up with you. Later, my brother had a girlfriend and came to my house for the first time and said that he was going to make a dish, and he actually made this dish. Later, this girl became my brother and sister.

Cabbage rolls are typically eaten in oden, and my grandmother turned it into a very Taiwanese version – wrapped in cabbage on the outside, and she would always put a little water chestnut in addition to the usual fish paste and minced meat. Water chestnut is a crispy ingredient that is often found in products made of ground meat and fish slurry such as chicken rolls or meat rolls.

So I always think that home-cooked food is migrated, but in the last version of the family, there is often a bit of housewife ingenuity. This is my own version that I later Xi did.

Grandma also has a dish called taro dates. Taro jujube is a dessert in the middle of our New Year's dish, it is mashed with taro paste, add a little fat, add sugar, add a little starch, knead it into such a golden jujube-like ball, and then go to fry.

This dish is my brother's favorite New Year's dish, but after my grandmother left, none of us had any exact recipes. We didn't see her do it either—it was often Grandma who was busy for days and we enjoyed a dish on the table.

So my brother and I, we spent a long time in the kitchen, tried three or four different fats, several different sugars, different proportions and starches, and finally with memory, with the mood of not wanting to give up a New Year's dish, we simulated this dish, and since then this dish has returned to my family table every year.

summer

There are a lot of deep-fried, very rich dishes during the New Year, and then it's summer. I am a child who grew up at the foot of Guanyin Mountain, and Guanyin Mountain is the most important production area of green bamboo shoots in Taiwan.

Many bamboo shoots are long and pointy, and the characteristic of green bamboo shoots is that the shorter and fatter they are, the more delicious they are, so we call them horn shoots, which are bamboo shoots with a wide bottom and a curved head. Such bamboo shoots cannot be exposed to the surface of the soil, and must be found from the ground in the early morning, otherwise they will be slightly bitter as soon as the sun is basking in the sun, so farmers used to pick bamboo shoots in the early morning.

As soon as my mother heard the sound of Dada's motorbike from a distance, she would jump out of bed and quickly change her clothes, because the farmers were passing by our house along the way with their bamboo shoots to sell.

The people of Bamboo Shoots Township know how to grasp the time best, and my mother is going to take this bamboo shoot without stopping for a moment, immediately steam or cook it, and put it in the refrigerator on ice to make this cold bamboo shoot that everyone sees.

Many people say that the bamboo shoots in Guanyin Mountain are sweeter than pears, and I often muttered in my heart, because I think that pears are not as delicious as bamboo shoots, and bamboo shoots are fine and sweet.

Now that I start buying bamboo shoots in the morning, I know that I am a middle-aged woman, but middle-aged women can enjoy the summer gifts that the mountain forest behind them provides every year.

Dragon boat festival

The bamboo shoot season starts after the Qingming Festival, until the season of white dew, and the Dragon Boat Festival will pass in the middle.

Actually, this debate is very cute to me, because it's actually everyone who is maintaining their own taste from snack to big.

In the past, zongzi were not bought at all, they were made at home, if you have zongzi in your family, you can eat them for decades, for example, my father, my father reached the age of 60, and suddenly there was no mother's zongzi, but he had eaten it for 60 years, and he became an orphan in the zongzi world.

The southern zongzi are raw rice wrapped in raw filling and boiled, which takes a long time, so it has a softer taste, while the northern zongzi is a half-cooked rice wrapped in a cooked filling and steamed quickly to eat, so the glutinous rice is distinct.

I became an orphan in the zongzi world when I was 30 years old, after my grandmother passed away, my mother was gone, probably for many years, I felt that the Dragon Boat Festival was completely meaningless, it was colorless and tasteless,

Mainly because the family's zongzi can be compared to a handicraft. Whether it is a southern dumpling or a northern dumpling in Taiwan, a great feature is that the fillings in it are very diverse, and a different filling will have the feeling of missing a thousand miles.

Later, I felt that I couldn't go on like this, and in the spirit of self-help, I had to make my grandmother's zongzi back, so I learned to fry glutinous rice and learn to marinate pork. Although it is still tied up in a mess, it is always tied up.

This is a typical grandma's zongzi will have the filling, there are often salted egg yolks in them, and later grandpa high blood pressure, but still want to eat egg yolks, grandma changed to half - this is the family zongzi, he can tailor it for everyone in the family. The only change I made was to put green bamboo shoots in.

I thought to myself, I started to make zongzi every year from now, it has reached the third year, my daughter was born this year, she is only 10 months old and 0 months old, but since she has a memory, every Dragon Boat Festival, my mother will wrap her a zongzi that belongs to her memory, then there is some taste in this family to continue.

Gongfu Na

Just now, you saw that there is a dish in the zongzi that is braised pork, and braised pork is a kung fu dish. When my mother was seriously ill, the only thing I asked her to show me was this stewed pork, mainly because I couldn't live without it.

When I was studying in the UK, I ate local food every day for the first week, and I ate sandwiches and all kinds of potato products for a week, steamed potatoes, baked potatoes, fries, and mashed potatoes. After a week, I felt like I couldn't live anymore and I had to save myself.

I think when the will to survive starts to happen, the first thing that comes to mind is that the dish that comes to mind may have a special weight in your life, and in my case it is braised pork.

Braised pork is a classic Taiwanese taste, and if you go to Taiwan, it is easy to eat braised pork rice in the night market or food stall, which seems to be a very iconic food.

However, the aroma of braised pork and the method of braised pork will be transformed into more than 100 different products due to different ingredients, different ways of cutting pork, and different parts, so it is a dish that praises pigs.

This is the so-called home-style braised pork, which is a bit like braised pork in size, and is cube-shaped rather than thin strips. There is also fried shallots crisp in lard, black bean soy sauce abundant in Taiwan, a little rock sugar, rice wine, white pepper, and a small amount of garlic. This is my family's version, and it will be a little different from home, but it will be like this in general.

When my mother cooked this dish, it took a long preparation. Here's a piece of meat that she has specifically designated, and you can think of it as a gourmet's part, called Taixing.

After my mom left, I went to the pork stall and said, "Tell me where Taixing is." My pork stall vendor was a very strong man, and he came out and said, you imagine I'm a pig, and that's it.

He said that the pig had forelimbs, and there were two triangular pieces of meat here with the front legs attached to the armpits, which was Taixing. There are only two pieces of meat in a pig, which move with the forelimbs, but they are not over-active like the hind legs, so these two pieces of meat are flavorful, but not firewood, which is very suitable for long-term stewing. I get it.

I've also heard that there are some other names, such as Hong Kong, which may be called "not seeing the sky", as you can imagine. My mother would specify this piece of meat for it.

Shallot crisp is the soul of this dish, so we will slice it by hand. Taiwanese people are sensitive to the aroma of shallots in many places, for example, we often eat a good bowl of clear soup noodles, with a little shallots crisp on top for decoration, and when making zongzi, the shallots crisp is almost kneaded into the glutinous rice. So sometimes, the crispy shallots are faint and faint, like the background of the aroma of a dish, but strangely, you smell the smell as if you have lit a lamp.

So what is braised pork, I think it is the dependence and deep understanding of black pork in rural society, the unique soy sauce taste of black bean soy sauce origin, the taste of shallots, and the addition of sugar or sugar cane. Black soybean soy sauce is a little thicker than soybean soy sauce, and it may not be delicious when eaten alone, but when it is stewed or boiled for a long time, it becomes a very deep flavor.

This is the dish that my grandmother passed down to my mother, and my mother passed it on to me. I would say that it is a taste that is more than 100 years old, because when my mother-in-law, who is in her 80s, first tasted the braised pork made by me, a post-80s generation, she intuitively remembered the taste of her mother, and I thought to myself that it was the taste of a hundred years ago.

snack

My prose often starts with a person, then thinks of a scene, and ends with a food. I've talked about my maternal relatives before, but at the end of the day, this food is cut noodles, and this person is my grandfather. He is a masculine synthesis of the adjectives handsome, tall, and smart in my life experience.

My grandfather was a very serious man, and my father used to describe him as saying that he and my mother had never looked at my grandfather's teeth since we met and married. Until one year, the moment I was born, he said that he had seen his grandfather's teeth since then.

I was my grandfather's favorite child of the first grandchild, and according to the rules of traditional Taiwanese family meals, it was impossible for me to sit in that position in the picture, but my grandfather always kept me by his side.

Then what do I do, I help my grandfather light a cigarette and pour wine. From today's point of view, it is very unscientific to let children exhale second-hand smoke, but we used to think that it was a very intimate relationship.

My grandfather was very fond of eating sliced noodles. Cut noodles are a particularly prosperous form of snack in Luzhou, the soup base is large bone broth, and the noodles are Fujian yellow noodles, that is, yellow noodles with alkali. Yellow noodles are actually cooked when they are sold, so they only need to be warmed up quickly in the hot soup before eating.

The name "Cut Noodles" is a multi-layered complex, and the action of shaking it up and down is actually called "tshik", which we write as the colloquial word "cut", which is also the name of the basket.

In the past, the hedge was made of bamboo, because it swayed back and forth, and when it was upside down in the soup, it was an oval mountain, like a woven shape.

Everyone goes to eat cut noodles, not to eat that noodles, but to order a lot of side dishes, and these side dishes are actually boiled warm pork, that is, pigs that have been raised for a long time, and you only need to use the way of white cut to feel its deliciousness. The form of cut noodles with boiled pork is called black and white cut, which means to cut a little casually.

Taiwanese eat cut noodles very tricky, it is a black and white cut from the nose to the tail. Let's take a look at what this menu will have, we have pork heart, raw intestines, large intestines, three-layer meat, mouth meat, bone meat, and lean meat, powdered liver, liver lianlian, powdered sausage, and pork skin.

What is the position of the liver, it is a small piece of meat next to the pork liver, with tendons, what is called raw intestine, raw intestine is the oviduct of the sow, what is bone meat, bone meat is the kind of gelatinous meat in the skull. What does this mean, it responds to the kind of dependence and respect for pigs I said earlier, if a pig is to be slaughtered in the countryside, no part will be wasted.

So how do we eat different parts of pork? The proprietress usually says, "What do you order?" and everyone orders different noodles and rice noodles for each of the soups. When all the questions were finished, the proprietress asked my grandfather again, "What kind of meat do you want to cut?" and my grandfather said, "Cut it." What I mean by this is that you can cut me a portion of any part of your store from beginning to end.

Why can my grandfather order like this, because we are a big family of twenty or thirty people eating noodles together, although it is a snack, but it is eaten with a huge family, this is a very rich memory of my childhood.

Today, I still go to eat cut noodles from time to time, but as a metropolitan woman, I have lost so many partners to eat, so I can only "cut three things".

This is because during the epidemic, I really missed the cut noodles, so I packed these cut vegetables and brought them to my home. You can see that it's three layers of meat, shark smoke (smoked shark meat), and flower branches, and some cartilage next to it, and I want rice noodles for soup.

As someone who has grown up in a dining environment full of love and laughter, I feel that my confidence and courage all come from the nourishment of that table.

It's a dinner time for a family in the suburbs of Taipei. Through cooking and writing, I slowly got to know the terroir of my hometown behind the food. At the same time, it is also a deep nostalgia for the time that has passed, the family that has not been able to accompany me, and the deep nostalgia for my childhood, which I want to recall through words in part. In these stories, the food is fragrant and hot, and the elders are all alive, and they are alive.

A lot of people read these essays and say I'm going to learn how to eat chop noodles with Ai Zhu, and then say, "Cut and cut." So I think everyone probably has these few dishes in their hearts, and there are also people who cook them. In today's increasingly busy society, in this era when take-out is very easy and delicacies from the mountains and seas are available with one click, home cooking, I think it is still important.

If everyone thinks about the origin of their home-cooked food, those dishes will shape us. So I would like to wish you all the best to be able to eat well and cherish our family table.

Thank you very much.

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