Speaking of sauce garden shops, the Songling people who lived in the 1960s and 1970s used to be called soy sauce shops. This type of shop is almost well known to women and children, and no one knows it. In people's lives, seven things are opened every day: firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, tea, four of which (oil, salt, sauce, vinegar) to buy in the soy sauce shop, there is a saying called "there is no open soy sauce shop", it can be seen that the soy sauce store is indispensable in the daily life of the people, sauce products are a must for families in that era.
In Songling Town, in the city, East Gate, North Gate three major markets and county hall street, all kinds of shops and shops, such as meat shops, cloth shops, dim sum shops, restaurants, tiger stove tea houses, photo studios, tobacco miscellaneous shops, south goods stores, pharmacies, bathrooms, barber shops and so on. But the most needed to maintain people's livelihood is probably the soy sauce shop, "go to the bottle of soy sauce", "go to the street to buy salt", "go to weigh the pickles", which has become the most memorable piece of housework given by parents in the children's imprint of that era.
In Songling business, although the soy sauce shop is not a big shop, it is related to the daily necessities of each household, so the attention to the soy sauce shop is more than that of other shops. If you want to follow some stories of Songling soy sauce shop, it is worth a book.
Looking at the development of Chinese sauces, there are sauces in the spring and autumn. From the sauce to the sauce, from the sauce to the sauce industry, the Chinese people are accompanied by the sauce through the spring, summer, autumn and winter. Of course, the products that protrude from the sauce line have brought the sauce industry and sauce culture to the fullest extent, adding a strong color to China's food culture.
Looking back at the situation of the sauce industry in Wujiang, the situation of the sauce industry during the Republic of China years is also rich and colorful, and the old shops are dotted with famous shops. In the urban area of Songling Town, there are Zhang Wanmao, Wantai, etc.; Shengze has Hengrui, Xiangyuan, Zhengmao, and Tiansheng Sauce Garden; Tongli has Gonghao, Yilong, and Xiangfengrun Sauce Garden; Luxu has Hongchang Sauce Garden; Eight Di di you have Yishengchang; Pingwang has Dashun, Jushun Dexing, Dalong Sauce Garden; Lili has Xunlong, Gongsheng, Yulong, Lao Wansheng, Daxing Sauce Garden; Zhenze has Hengfeng, Ronghe, Yida, Fumei, Wencheng, Ruilong Sauce Garden, and so on. By the early days of the founding of New China, songling town also had Zhang Wanmao, Yuanda, Yuantai, Wang Zuli, Dafeng, Qiao Nansheng (above in Xinsheng Street), Wantai, Chia Tai, Zhao Zhongxian, Cao Yongming (above in Zhongshan Street), workers, Tyson, Cooperation, Dacheng, Dafeng (above in Beimen Street), Lida, Yongxing and other 17 sauce gardens, wine sauce stores, these numerous sauce shops, support and assist the people of Wujiang to open the door. Of course, all kinds of rural downward extension shops (later called supply and marketing cooperatives) are even more numerous.
Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden
The former site of Zhang Wanmao's retail store in Shengjiakuo before the liberation of Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden
In the Songling sauce industry, Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden can be called a leader, its scale operation, occupation area, product quantity, branch distribution have occupied a certain advantage, formed their own unique brand. Among some centuries-old shops and famous brand-name merchants in Songling, there are "Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden, Yuanda Sauce Garden, Xuanxi Raw Fish Shop, wuxiangxing South Goods Store, known as songling's 'four court pillars'", which can be said to be the only commercial trend.
On an early spring afternoon with a beautiful day, the author went to the Hubin Elderly Apartment and visited the elderly Zhang Cuiying, a descendant of Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden. 88-year-old Grandma Zhang, mentally strong, clear thinking, because Grandma Zhang and the author's mother are familiar, so for my visit, the old man is very happy to see. As soon as the words were opened, the scene of Songling sauce industry and the past of Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden were presented in front of my eyes like a movie.
Zhang Cuiying old man
Most of the old shop name names are taken from the meaning of auspiciousness, prosperity, prosperity, and prosperity, which is a cultural phenomenon in the Chinese business tradition that "business prospers all over the world, and the source of wealth reaches the three rivers", and Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden is no exception. Grandma Zhang said that Zhang Wanmao's sauce garden was opened from her old lady, later passed to her grandfather Zhang Boying, then to her father Zhang Yuanshan, and before liberation to Grandma Zhang and her husband Zhao Weide. Zhang is the original surname, and Wanmao is a business name, which means Wannian Maosheng. For a long time, the name tag of the shop overshadowed the owner's real name. Just like Sheng Jia Hui Wu Xiang Xing South Goods Store, it is also such a store number. Mrs. Zhang is a Shaoxing native, and in addition to being famous as "Master", Shaoxing people also travel all over the world with "three cylinders" (sauce tank, wine tank, dye tank). Therefore, Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden can also be regarded as a source.
Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden was founded in the late Qing Dynasty, and the site of the garden is located near the Taiping Bridge in the south of Shengjiahui. At that time, the area was deserted and cold, all wasteland, the Zhang family with tenacity and dedication to entrepreneurship, early in the dark, thrifty, and finally opened a sauce garden at the end of the city, the north side of Wujiagang, and opened a sauce garden career. The old man left a message: "No matter how much you save (the meaning of thrift and thrift), it will take three days for a bead of oil to eat." It can be seen that the Zhang family's thrifty family style of running the family and eliminating waste has been passed down for generations.
In the garden, there are two large pieces of work (work) for sake and sauce. The liquor factory is responsible for brewing liquor, mainly producing rice wine, but also producing a small amount of liquor. Glutinous rice is used to go through multiple processes such as steaming, fermentation, and refining. The seasonality of winemaking is strong and is generally carried out in winter. Sauce is a sauce garden's workshop, mainly producing sauce, soy sauce, pickles, milk curd and so on. When making sauce, it is necessary to go to other places to pick up good soybeans, the particles should be full, yellow, oily, and flour is equally important. First soak the soybeans thoroughly and steamed, then mix with the sticky loose noodles (flour), after pressing, then put them into the mold, spread the cloth for many days, and then pull into strips and cut into pieces. It is then placed on the plaque shelf and sealed with mats or other items to allow it to ferment. In the late fermentation stage, the white hairs on the sauce blank are brushed with a brush, and after about 20 days, the sauce can be completed.
In the town of Songling in the 1960s and 1970s, most families in the yellow plum season, will also make some bean paste, peel it with broad beans (or soybeans), and use flour to knead into a piece of cake-like pattern, called "yellow seeds", arranged in the plaque, placed in an airtight place to ferment, after growing mold, brush off the hair into small pieces and put it into a large basin, soak in cold salt boiling water to expose, during the drying sauce can not rain, stir twice a day, until the block cake is crushed and turned into paste, at this time the color of the sauce has become the sauce red, It can be stored in small cans with a lid and storage, which is easy to use later. Therefore, a small vat of sauce is made every year to save money on dishes at home and enrich the mixing of dishes. If you put a little shrimp, dried tofu, russet, edamame and the like in the sauce, it is considered a fresh dish. Therefore, "three years of rice and a jar of sauce", this saying still has some truth.
Songling soy sauce has white soy sauce, red soy sauce, Songling people like to be light, so red soy sauce is used less. Soy sauce is made of soybeans and flour as the main raw materials, artificially implanted seeds, naturally exposed and fermented, and soy sauce is also an extension of the sauce. Songling's white soy sauce is also more unique, the color is light and slightly red, translucent, suitable for cold mixing vegetables or dipping sauce, delicious and harmonious, unique flavor. However, many counties and cities not far from Wujiang only have red soy sauce, and people even find the name of white soy sauce strange.
Zhang Wanmao also makes pickles and selects high-quality raw materials, such as purchasing radish in Taihu Lake, purchasing cucumbers locally, purchasing eggplant from horizontal fans, and purchasing raw melons and peppers from Zhejiang. At that time, the varieties of pickles were still relatively monotonous, most of them were Taihu radish and raw melon as the main ingredients, and after processing, cutting, turning and other processes, pickled out a variety of pickles of various tastes, such as sliced radish, sauce cucumber, sauce pepper, spring immortality, tender ginger and so on.
In the Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden Workshop in Shengjiahui City, there are fifty or sixty large sauce tanks in the field, and it is all up to them to make sauce and pickles. The cylinder is equipped with a canopy cover to prevent rain erosion. In addition to the workers, there are also head masters in the workshop, various processes, various varieties, and many kinds of tricks. Just making a dish of sauce and cucumbers, there is a lot of attention. First of all, we must go to the countryside to select fresh and good textured child cucumbers, which are especially optimistic about small cucumbers with small melon shapes, dense thorns and green colors, and melons with elbows or large bellies are eliminated. Then put salt for salting, a few days later, fished up and then added to the dough yeast (lump koji) fermentation into the sauce tank. The cylinder surface is covered with a canopy cover, the cover is opened for ventilation on sunny days, and the cover is covered in rain to prevent rain. The cucumber produced in this way is fresh, tender, crisp and sweet, which is very popular with the People of Songling and is a good accompaniment for ordinary people to eat porridge. Although there were more than a dozen Songling sauce garden shops in that year, only two could start construction, and Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden Workshop was the largest one. In addition to the sauce garden workshop, Zhang Wanmao also has a retail store, "Songling Town Chronicle" records: "During the Republic of China, the largest sauce garden in Songling was Zhang Wanmao, and there was a retail store in Dacangqiao in the city, making homemade pickles, sauce, soy sauce, milk curd, spicy sauce, etc., wholesale and exported to various ports." Later, Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden opened three retail stores in Beimen, Chengcheng and Shengjiahui, specializing in homemade products. Other small soy sauce shops in the town and small shops around the town all go to Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden to buy wholesale.
Sauce jar
On the eve of the liberation of Wujiang, for various reasons, the Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden Workshop was stopped. In 1956, when the public-private partnership was established, the liquor and sauce industry was included in the food cooperative store. Zhang Wanmao's retail store in Shengjiahui merged with another store to form the second cooperative store in Songling Town, the retail store at the Cangqiao bridge in the city was called the first cooperative store in Songling Town, and the retail store outside the North Gate was also closed. By 1964, the town's cooperative shop was converted into a food store, and the site of the former Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden Factory was changed to Songling Brewery, which mainly engaged in soy sauce, pickles, wine, and sugar, and according to the house number at that time, it was No. 105 Xinsheng Street. The plant was upgraded to a state enterprise in 1966 and later converted into a collective enterprise, which ceased operations in the 1990s. Songling sauce industry ace Zhang Wanmao Sauce Garden has since disappeared, and the people's table has no chance to eat local well-known brands.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there were still 6 soy sauce shops in Songling Town, 3 in the city, 2 in the East Gate and 1 in the North Gate. Due to the characteristics of the times, some shop names have also been quite distinctive, such as the innovative liquor and sauce store in Cangqiaotou, the Liqun liquor and sauce store in the north gate, the Lixin tobacco and liquor sauce store in the middle of Zhongshan Street, the sauce shop called Shengli Street (later renamed Xinsheng Street Sauce Garden Store) in the east gate, and the Changqiao tobacco, sugar and liquor sauce store in Hangqian Street. At that time, the products of soy sauce shops were slightly rich, and there were foreign pickles, soy sauce, sauce products, and condiments entering the Songling area for sale, such as Shanghai's mixed vegetables, radish heads, snails, red square milk curd, sesame oil, etc., which were more in line with the tastes of locals. There are also cloves of radish, rose kohlrabi, sweet and sour garlic, tender ginger, gluten radish and so on in the surrounding areas also circulated to Songling. Due to the different locations, these shops are slightly different in operation, located in cangqiao dongkuan soy sauce shop is located in the bustling downtown of the town, the streets are bustling with people, the only soy sauce shop is naturally a must for people to shop, of course, there are regular meetings in the county party training class in Cangqiao Xikuan, which will also bring additional business to the soy sauce shop.
Kurahashi soy sauce shop
Lixin tobacco and liquor sauce shop on Zhongshan Street
The old house of the Long Bridge Tobacco, Sugar and Liquor Sauce Shop on Hangqian Street
Soy sauce shops along the street mostly have "┙" or "┗" shaped counters, convenient for more customers to accept, the store has a variety of varieties, there are wine, pickles, oil, salt, seasoning, etc., these table goods for the town residents and the surrounding countryside to bring a lot of convenience to life. They also maintain a good traditional way in service, warm hospitality, accurate weighing, and old people are not deceived. The management is under the unified jurisdiction of the Songling Town Commercial Company, which is uniformly priced and quantified by the commercial company, and the company's accountant comes to the door once a month to inventory and settle the account with the bookkeeper in the store. In the years of the planned economy, some commodities had to be supplied by ticket, so for wine and oil, soy sauce shops somewhat "monopolized" resources and became the envy target of people. At that time, the store sold oil and soy sauce utensils "terminals", but also left a deep impression, "terminals" from small to large, divided into one or two, two two, half a pound, one pound, every time the customer came to shop, the clerk will be based on the quantitative, choose the "end" and copy. Wrapped pickles are generally made of lotus leaves and artemisia rope, and their wrapping method is very exquisite, which will neither leak out the sauce soup nor make the package loose. There are also paper triangle bags, paper bags and other packaging forms.
The old house of the soy sauce shop on prefectural government street
With the transformation of town construction, Songling Old Street gradually disappeared, and those old shops and shops slowly faded out of people's sight. More abundant goods quickly filled people's needs, the demand for sauces on the table was far less than in previous years, coupled with the disdain for sauce pickled products in the scientific diet, the sauce industry almost fell into a trough, and it was difficult to find an authentic soy sauce shop. The memory of the soy sauce shop is only left in people's minds.
Soy sauce shop on Sheng Jia Hui
Despite the poor situation of sauce, China's sauce industry, like traditional Chinese culture, is still tenacious, after all, the concept of "the people take food as the sky" is deeply rooted and difficult to regret. Nowadays, in many supermarkets and some shops in Songling, bottled pickles and bottled soy sauce are still seen, and the circulation of goods makes sauce products more colorful and people have more room to choose.
From the must-haves on the table to the condiments, the sauce has witnessed the progress of society and the improvement of people's living standards year by year. The closure of those soy sauce shops and the disappearance of the old brands, on the one hand, we lament the rapid changes in the transformation of this era, which is dizzying; on the other hand, we should also save more thoughts, after all, it is the sauce that helped us survive that poor era, and it is those old brands that make the sauce refined, so that we cannot forget the sweet sauce aroma in the depths of our souls.
Looking back at the Songling Sauce Garden Shop along the way, I will be grateful for its silent contribution yesterday and the persistence of the old brand. Recording the Songling sauce industry is also a silhouette of recording the lives of the people of Songling.
Author: Ma Changhong
(Photo by Ma Changhong and the Internet)
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