Memories of New Year's goods
迟子建
My memory of the New Year's goods began with the slaughter of pigs in the lunar month.
pig
Thirty or forty years ago, there was no one in the mountain forest town of Daxinganling who did not raise pigs. Ordinary people catch piglets in the spring and feed them for a year, no matter how big they are, when they enter the Layue Gate, the butcher will carry a knife and come to the door to ask for their lives. The pigs squirmed as they were slaughtered, and the crows smelled blood and flew in with their crows. But a good butcher will make it not even taste a drop of blood. The blood was brought into the basin and eaten with blood sausage! After the pig was dismantled, the family would eat the meat with an open stomach, and then store the rest as New Year's goods in a large wooden box in the warehouse. Afraid that it would dry and taste bad, people sprinkled snow in the meat storage box. Daxinganling doesn't take advantage of anything else, just take advantage of the snowflakes, and sprinkle as much as you want. Some people simply bury their meat in the snowdrifts in the yard to save their worries. But when I went to eat it, I found that there was less meat! It was not people who were robbers in the night, but weasels who could fall into holes! They had the ability to drag things away.
Ryūzi
With pork, the meat-filled dumplings on Chinese New Year's Eve have the backbone. But meat alone is not enough, there must be chicken, fish, tofu, apples, celery and green onions on the table that night. Chicken is "auspicious," fish is "surplus," tofu is "good fortune," apples are "peace," celery is "hard work," and green onions are "smart." All of these are indispensable! You can't eat sauerkraut during the Chinese New Year, because it's "bitter," and you can't touch cabbage, and you can't touch it.
chicken
After Layue slaughtered the pig, he had to slaughter the chicken. To slaughter a pig, you have to hire a butcher, and the average hostess can do the slaughter of chickens. When the frost fell, the chicken rack was carried from the yard into the stove room and lived with people. These wintering chickens are basically hens, raising them to continue to lay eggs in the coming year, and the big roosters of the chicken rack, but one or two, the owner keeps them for Chinese New Year's Eve, so they can only live for half a winter. After the rooster dies, we will pluck off its beautiful feathers and use copper coins as cushions to make chicken feather shuttlecocks, which can be regarded as a New Year's gift for girls.
fish
The fish on the table of Chinese New Year's Eve are usually frozen fish, fathead fish, mackerel, saury and the like. This is the fish that can be bought in the era of the supply system. You can't chop off the head and tail when you make fish, and it is said that "there is a head and a tail", and the year is good. If the hostess's kitchen knife accidentally hurts the head and tail, she will be very panicked and worried about the twists and turns in the future, so the kitchen knife during the New Year does not dare to be sharpened too quickly. On the fish, in addition to the kitchen knife, it is also necessary to protect against cats. If you don't pay attention, most of the fish will be wiped out by it! Therefore, many cats will be locked up in a small black house at this time. During the Chinese New Year, the cat is suffering, and its sorrow can be imagined.
Is it possible to eat fresh fish? It depends on the skill and luck of the male owner of the family. In the ice hole of the glacier and the fishing net, gourd seeds and willow root fish can sometimes be caught. These fish are not big enough to be served on the table. Whoever catches catfish and flower fins will win the lottery! This kind of fish that can withstand the Chinese New Year's Eve banquet will make the male owner who comes home from the glacier straight waist, and after entering the house, there is a hot face of his wife to greet him, a hot wine to greet him, and of course, a hot kang head after blowing the lamp at night. It's just that there are very few men who are so lucky, and the vast majority of them are people like my father, who return empty-handed.
tofu
Compared to fresh fish, tofu is readily available. There are two tofu houses in our town, and in addition to money, you can also exchange soybeans for tofu. Generally speaking, more soybeans are used for dried tofu than for water tofu. When the men carry the beans to the tofu house, you can tell from the size of the bags on their shoulders how much tofu the family needs for the New Year. The white water tofu enters the house, which is nothing more than two destinies, one is cut into small squares and fried into a golden tofu bubble, and the other is placed directly on the outdoor wooden board, and when they are frozen solid, they are put into a cloth bag and eaten at any time.
vegetables
The green onions at the Chinese New Year's Eve banquet are stored in late autumn. In my eyes, the green onion is a hibernating vegetable, it seems to freeze in the bitter cold of minus thirty or forty degrees, but when you enter the warm room, you throw it in the corner, and overnight, it will be relieved and its waist will become soft! After a few days, it will actually give birth to emerald green shoots, and the frozen green onion will become a fresh onion! As for celery, it also comes from the garden, but it is different from the green onion, if it is frozen, it will really freeze to death! Celery is cut and bundled in the autumn, and it is lowered to the outdoor vegetable cellar. The vegetable cellar two or three meters deep stores potatoes, radish, Chinese cabbage and other wintering vegetables, and celery breathes and shares the fate with them. However, celery is not as tolerant as them, and the leaves quickly turn yellow, but fortunately, its stems have not completely lost their moisture by the end of the year, and can still be used as a filling. When I was a child, when I heard adults scolding and cursing each other to hell, I thought, what is terrible underground, it snows all over the sky in winter, but the cellar is spring!
Cold dishes
The only cold dish in the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner is apples. Apples can be served fresh or canned. At that time, we preferred canned food because it was sweet! These two kinds of apples were obtained at the supply and marketing cooperatives, and money was used to buy them. In addition to buying apples, we also have to buy tobacco, alcohol, sugar, tea, peanuts, melon seeds, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar, frozen persimmons and frozen pears. The most important thing is to buy a stack of new bowls and plates, plus a pair of chopsticks, which means that the family is prosperous and imported.
steamed bread
When it comes to buying New Year's goods, everyone in the family will take action and perform their duties. The housewives had to go to the supply and marketing cooperatives to pull pieces of cloth, beg the tailor to cut them, and step on the sewing machine to make new clothes for the family. The cry of the pig in the wax moon is always the same as the clicking sound of the sewing machine. After the work on the sewing machine is over, they still have to steam all kinds of dry food, steamed buns, bean buns, sugar triangles, vegetable buns and so on. At this time, the steamed bun became a little girl who loved beauty, and the women would dip their chopsticks in the mud and dot it with a round red dot in the center, which was the center of the steamed bun's eyebrows. In addition to these, they also make fried Jiangmi noodles and banana leaves as a snack for the Spring Festival.
lantern
Those boys who are usually naughty have to be busy at this time. They are responsible for buying firecrackers, buying them back and putting them on the hot kang and letting them dry so that they can be set off louder. They had to pick up axes and chop a bunch of thin pine halberds to make the stove fire on Chinese New Year's Eve! They also had to help the adults erect lantern poles and buy colored paper lanterns. In our house though, sticking lanterns is my thing. Because I was born when the Lantern Festival was about to get dark, my father gave me a breast name "Yingdeng", and my family decided that there was light in my name, and I was the only one who pasted the lantern. However, I paste the lantern on the condition, that is, to enjoy the fried snacks in advance, although my mother is reluctant, but for the sake of the lantern, I have to comply. After I paste a circle of red paper on the round palace lamp, I will use golden crepe paper to hinge flowing tassels for it, stick it to the lamp base, and let the lamp grow a golden beard!
Fukuji
At that time, there was no printed Spring Festival couplets, as the principal's father, because of the good writing of the brush, many people in Layue begged him to write the Spring Festival couplets and the word "Fu". People brought red paper, and I helped cut it, and my father waved it. Write one pair, and when the ink is dry, roll it up and put it aside, and write another one. Sometimes my father asked me to write Spring Festival couplets, and he also adopted a pair, which was pasted on the warehouse, and I remember that I embedded his nickname "Mancang" into it. After my father finished writing the Spring Festival couplets, he would make us a lamp made of wooden seats and canned bottles. In order to get the perfect lampshade, he had to retrieve the canned bottle hanging with frost and snow hanging from the outdoors, and then quickly poured a ladle of hot water down so that its bottom would fall off "pop". Of course, it is not easy to take the lampshade, sometimes a scoop of hot water goes down, it is completely broken, and it can only be discarded, and sometimes the can and bottle is like a martyr, and the hot water is splashed, and it is still the same. My father had to run back into the snow to rummage through cans and bottles.
Year-painting
Around the time I was a child, I would go into the city with the girls in the neighborhood to buy New Year's pictures. It seems that girls are born for New Year's paintings, and we should buy them. The town is more than ten miles away from the city, and the moon days are usually minus thirty or forty degrees Celsius, and we wear thick clothes, but halfway through, our hands and feet are still numb from freezing. We knew that chilblains didn't taste good, so we ran. If you run fast, your blood will flow faster, and your body will be less cold. When we were running in the snow, the sparrows were running in the gray sky, and I don't know if they also went to buy New Year's pictures. When we enter the Xinhua Bookstore in the city, we must carefully look at the hanging New Year's pictures, remember their numbers, and buy them according to the wishes of adults. My mother told me that I should not buy the tiger in the picture, especially the tiger going down the mountain, and that I should not buy the heroic figures. She likes carp ingots, unicorns and phoenixes, mandarin ducks and butterflies, and longevity peach flowers in the picture. And my father likes classical character paintings, such as the New Year paintings of "Dream of Red Mansions" and "Water Margin". My mother has the final say at home, so the New Year's paintings I bought were based on her aesthetics, supplemented by my father's. When such a New Year's painting is spread out, it is an ideal country.
candle
After buying the New Year's paintings, we would go to the department store and choose a hair silk, hairpins, socks, fake collars, and buy a few packs of red candles and two decks of playing cards. At that time, there was no electricity in our town, and candles were the god of lights in the house. After the task was completed, we ran to the People's Hotel opposite the department store, bought a twist flower for each person, ate it while standing, and hurried back while it was dawn. In winter, it gets dark early, and the sun sets at about three o'clock in the afternoon. If you want to get home before dark, you have to go. The hot breath exhaled from our mouths blended with the cold air, and our eyelashes, eyebrows, and bangs were dyed with frost and snow, and we were beaten into old women by the cold wind!
Chinese New Year isn't just for yourself
People do New Year's goods for themselves, and they also do New Year's goods for their deceased relatives. The grave of the deceased may not be near. So as soon as the new year passes, the crossroads of the town will be full of fires. When people burn paper money, they don't forget to pour wine and sprinkle cigarettes. After the dumplings of the Chinese New Year's Eve are out of the pot, the first three dumplings are served in front of the spiritual seat of the relatives and invited to taste.
When I was a child, when my father and grandfather were there, we would only burn paper at the crossroads for my grandmother, who was buried far away. After my grandfather died, in addition to buying burning paper for my grandmother, my grandfather also had to prepare a copy there. When I grew up and my father passed away, my mother's burning paper was thicker than usual. When my lover passed away in a car accident 10 years ago, I returned to my hometown for the New Year, and after going to the graves of my grandfather and father, I never forgot to buy a separate piece of burning paper, and on the eve of Chinese New Year's Eve, at the crossroads at the foot of the mountain that my lover and I walked hand in hand countless times, I sent my concern for him returning to his homeland. The firelight swept away the paper money and left me in the long night.
I am almost 50 years old, and the years have given me strands of gray hair, but I will still travel thousands of miles to rush back to Daxinganling every year for the New Year. We have long since moved from the mountain town to the small town, and the lanterns and spring couplets are all ready-made, and we don't have to make them by hand. We've already had electricity, and we don't need to keep candles. As for the New Year's picture on the wall, it has become yesterday's scenery, and it is difficult to find its brilliant face. We ate fresh vegetables, but the vegetables from the greenhouse and the vegetables that were fertilized were not as good as the vegetables that were stored in the cellar from the fields of the year. Our life is becoming more and more convenient, more and more practical, but it is also becoming more and more tasteless and lacking in quality!
I miss the year thirty or forty years ago, and I miss holding the "Fat Pig Full Circle" written by my father When the banner was posted on the fence of the pigsty, I thought that the pigs had died and the pen was empty and laughed happily; I miss the happy laughter when the family sat on the hot kang head and played poker, in order to relieve the tiredness, took out the green radish from the cellar and cut it as fruit to eat, and at that moment, the crickets were screaming next to the water tank in the stove room; I miss the lantern I made my own hand, on Chinese New Year's Eve, the small courtyard of our family was reflected red, and even the watchdog was reflected in joy; I miss the charming sound of my mother stepping on the sewing machine in the wax moon; I miss the sultry aroma of my own rooster after it is stewed; I miss the red candles, at the moment of alternation of the old and the new, like a red ladyStanding happily on the dining table, on the windowsill, on the water tank, on the stove, lighting up every dark corner!
In my memories of the New Year's goods, the most famous line in "The Peony Pavilion" - "It turns out that the purple and red are blooming all over, and they seem to be paid to the ruins of the broken well!" rang in my heart more than once. Fortunately, the prosperity is gone, I have a lingering fragrance in my heart, the light and shadow are gone, and there is still a candle flame dancing in my memory, so that I can still fantasize about spring at this time of year, in the extremely cold place!