Bait blocks are common snacks in Yunguichuan. The rice is steamed and then pressed to form a lug of bait. In Yunnan, baits shaped like thick paper are roasted over fire or steamed in drawers, topped with pickled tofu (curd), sweet sauce and salty sauce. If you are not addicted, you can eat two stacks together, or wrap fried fritters. Bait blocks are not very attractive and are best used to pad your stomach at various times of the day.
Nowadays, Shanghai can also eat bait, which is a kind of fashionable fast food, rich in filling, ground peanuts, meat, sauce, vegetables, one bite down, thick and complex, the slight sweetness of rice products is completely suppressed, I think it is not like a bait block, at most it is some kind of Chinese burritos.
In my hometown, eating bait means hitting the streets. The bait-burning stall is located at one end of Vegetable Market Street, from morning to noon. It is common for stall owners to shake a fan to induce fire, Mars flutters, and people who buy bait blocks patiently wait aside. The bait block lying on the net frame bubbles up, turns over at this time, and the other side also bulges, yellowish, and cooked. I saw the stall owner "snap" the bait block on a wooden board, which was rubbed by hundreds of bait blocks every day and polished into a jade-like yellow run. The stall owner asked, do you want it? It means how the three sauces are combined. Some people say that it is a little more spicy. The stall owner uses a small wooden stick to pick the jar of pickled tofu and scoops up the skin stained with peppers and smears it on the bait. Practice makes perfect, and it takes less than ten seconds to spread the sauce. Then roll and fold again, at which point the temperature of the bait drops just right. The eater took it, his hands warm. Take a bite, soft, fragrant, salty, spicy, beautiful.
Cool bait blocks seem to be only available for sale at the elementary school where I was studying. The school building is a featureless townhouse of five floors, with one of the landings with bait stalls fixed to appear after the second class in the morning. It is said that it is a stall, it is a desk, and the bait blocks piled into a hill in the tin basin are covered with gauze. To save time, the bait is steamed in advance, spread with sweet and salty sauce, folded in half and stacked. If you want to add spicy, you need to buy when declaring. Fifteen minutes after recess, the hill quickly sold out, as if it were eight cents a piece. The cold bait cubes are slippery and sticky in the mouth, as if they can slip through the throat without chewing. After quickly eating a piece, the elementary school student felt sad and wanted to have another piece.
My dad said I was very hungry since I was a kid and didn't understand economics. Soon after going to school, he learned to take the family's national food stamps to exchange for cold bait to eat. After so many years, he still laughed and said that it was not worth it.
The stall owner who sells bait at school is a woman with short hair. Now that I think about it, I should be less than thirty years old, and I am very old in the eyes of elementary school students. Sometimes A female classmate in the class was seen standing next to the bait stall to help collect money. It turned out that the stall owner was her mother.
R's bait stall also makes a night market. On weekend evenings, my parents and I came out watching a movie at the only movie theater in the county, and there was a food stall on the street, burning bait blocks, roasting corn, and spicy skewers. The night reflects the flames and figures. Behind one of the stalls, there was R's mother, and her father, a thin deaf-mute man. The county town is small, everyone knows who, presumably the principal of the primary school sympathizes with his family's situation and lets him set up a stall in the school. Other stalls selling snacks such as pickled radish can only be done outside the school gate to do after-school business for students.
Some movies, as children don't like to watch, I was taken out of the theater by my parents in a half-sleepy state. Oddly enough, as soon as I walked to a street corner where there were food stalls gathered, I would magically wake up and look around. When I saw the R family's stall, I said, I want to eat the burnt lumps. (Silent)
![Jiang'an this bait block is known as the ceiling of kunming ordinary bait block, have you ever eaten it?[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)