Mother cooks
Text/Zhang Jun
Until I was 30 years old, I grew up eating my mother's cooking. At that time, I felt that my mother's cooking hands were like a beam of light, which warmed and illuminated my life path for 30 years.
I remember when I was a child, we rented a house with an earthen stove and cooked on it in the winter. When it's hot in summer, I boil water on an earthen stove in the corner of the yard and cook it. At that time, coal was 2 cents a catty, and I was reluctant to burn it, so I bought less for pressing the fire, and sunflower stubble, corn stubble, corn gourd, and dry branches were the best hard firewood for burning fire. Later, when I was 5 years old, my family moved to a house we bought, and my parents bought a small iron stove and a large kang for cooking firewood.
At that time, after the autumn harvest every year, people would be busy carrying firewood. The corn stalks of the production team are the best firewood for burning kang, but unfortunately they cannot be used casually, and the production team should distribute and use them according to the number of people in each household and the amount of work they earn. Every time, it was the mother who carried the corn stalks back (my father refused to be at home when he was working outside) and stacked them in the corner of the yard, because there were not many of them, and they did not dare to waste them when they were burned. When I was in the fifth grade of primary school, my parents asked me to be with a resident teacher at the school in order to discipline my studies, so I slept in the school at night. After the autumn harvest that year, the straw of the 1 acre of corn field planted by the school was gone, and Mr. Ma told me in time, just in time for Sunday, I went with my mother to carry it, although I was a little tired, but when I thought of the fire in the stove in winter, my body was suddenly full of strength.
Sunflower stubble is rarely available, because there is not enough food rations, and the production team does not dare to plant crops that are used for luxury. The corn stubble had to be dug in the field by itself, so families without labor did not have much right to use it. The best dry branches fall on the ground in the woods, but they will soon be picked up by the diligent people. When I was in elementary school during the autumn vacation, I would go to the river beach to pick up some soft firewood such as artemisia, and the soft firewood and corn stalks were mixed together to burn, which was not bad.
On a winter morning, my mother got up before dawn, went out and brought back a handful of firewood, passed some of it to the stove under the kang and lit it, and cooked in an iron pot with a steady edge above the stove. When the rice was cooked and the kang was hot, my mother called my sister and me to get up and eat. Generally, what I make in the morning is to boil porridge, and I order old pickles, and my stomach is hot. Eat a few porridges, eat a small meal, eat small rice, and sometimes stew some potatoes and squash and other dishes, even if it is a tooth sacrifice.
Lunch was sometimes made on the stove, sometimes on the small iron stove, and as soon as we got out of school, the meal was ready. For lunch, I generally eat cornmeal cake, put some saccharin when mixing noodles, and taste sweet and silky (my mother rarely makes wowotou, the same is cornmeal, and the cake is troublesome, but it is smooth to eat), and the dishes are generally potato stewed pickled cabbage and the like. Sometimes my mother would make us cornmeal dumplings to eat, stuffed with shredded potatoes mixed with dried vegetables, some sauce, and some chopped green onions. When eating cornmeal dumplings, dip them in vinegar and chili peppers, and I still drool when I think about them. We ate a yellow cake about a week at that time, the most memorable thing is that after a long time, my mother would cut 2 taels of pork back to stew vegetables and make cakes (in the mid-to-late 70s of the last century, pork 1 catty 6 cents, in the early 80s it rose to 1 catty and 1 yuan), at that time, it was rare to encounter a little meat a year, and the pork raised by the people also tasted delicious. As soon as we opened the door after school, the smell of meat came to our nostrils, not to mention the excitement at that time. I eat the meat and vegetable cake every time until it lasts, and then it will have a long aftertaste.
Our dinner is thunderous and untouchable, every day is to boil raw corn batter on the old pickles, corn fried and grinding noodles to boil the paste is indeed delicious, but there is no raw cornmeal to boil the paste out of the rice. At that time, although corn accounted for the largest proportion of the grain distributed by the production team, the amount was not much, and I was afraid that I would not be able to save the next autumn grain distribution if I saved it. Every night, my sister called the raw cornmeal batter, and my mother and I thought she was quite a metaphor. Besides, drinking some paste at night is easy to digest, and you won't feel hungry in the middle of the night after falling asleep. In my hometown, Wei County, there is a folk proverb that "porridge in the morning, cake at noon, and yam (potato) in the evening". The food mentioned here is the highest level of home-cooked meals for ordinary people in the past, and ordinary people can rarely eat it every day. Take potatoes as an example, the production team allocates most of our family's pockets every autumn, but we don't dare to cook them extravagantly and put them away, my mother counts them every day to spice up each meal, and most of the time they are used for cooking.
In the summer, my mother cooks under a shed built in the yard on a coalcake stove made of bricks and mud. After cooking, boiling water, breaking a few pieces of coal cake on top and buttoning the fire, is very convenient. In the evening, when we come back from school, it would be nice if there was an old cake, cut a piece of old cake with a kitchen knife, stick it on the casserole hanging on the fire, it will be hot after a while, sprinkle some salt noodles on the top of the cake and smear some raw oil, don't mention the fragrance of eating.
After the production team was disbanded and the land was contracted to the households, our family used all a few acres of land to grow millet, millet, potatoes, sunflowers, only a small part of corn, half an acre of rice field and a few vegetable fields. After the annual payment of the public grain, the remaining grain is enough to eat. Our family also bought a hair dryer and built a hair stove in the yard, so that my mother could cook with less effort and no longer have to worry about the shortage of food, and our family really lived a life of "porridge in the morning, cake at noon, and yam in the evening".
When I was 30 years old, my mother became ill from overwork, and my wife, who was also sick, cooked the food. My father and I spent all our savings, borrowed a lot of foreign debts, and used all our strength to treat my mother for two years, but in the end we could not save my mother's life......
Now the conditions of people's homes are better, ordinary people first have rice cookers, and then replaced with rice cookers, as well as cooking tools such as induction cookers, electric baking pans, microwave ovens, etc. Clean and hygienic, no need to smoke gas, the most important thing is to save trouble. White flour, rice, and meat have become common ingredients.
I eat white flour, rice, and meat every day, but I always miss the raw cornmeal batter, steamed cornmeal cake, and cornmeal dumplings that my mother cooked for me back then. Those warm scenes of the past will always be engraved in the depths of my memory and will never be forgotten.
About the Author:
Zhang Jun is a native of Wei County, Hebei Province. He loves the land and the cultivation of pen and ink. Over the years, he has been on the road, moving forward silently.