People in different time and space, the feeling of food is completely different, the so-called "food is not tired, not tired of fine", is a huge satisfaction of food after the luxury demand. The memory of the taste buds is often like the new and tired of the old, a kind of finely made delicacy, if it becomes your daily routine, you will also get tired, the taste buds pursue the "peculiar taste", not the "same taste". However, it is also sometimes "like the old and dislike the new", because the food eaten in a special environment will leave a deep mark of the times on the taste buds.
Perhaps, when you first enter a luxurious restaurant, you are shocked to taste the exquisitely crafted dishes, and perhaps, the extravagant sense of ceremony and high-end courtesy service will make you forget the memories of your taste buds, and remember only the oppression of space on you. On the contrary, the dishes and noodles that you occasionally eat in the kind of "fly shop" that are not neat and clean can make you unforgettable. Therefore, the memory of the taste buds is often the hunting of the "odor" of food, rather than the looting of occasions and rituals.
My deepest memories are several contrasting prey behaviors when I was sixteen years old and went to the countryside to join the team.
When I steamed the fragrant belly I had brought from Nanjing on the head of the rice cooker and asked the neighbors who were carrying rice bowls to taste it, they couldn't eat what kind of raw materials it was made of, but they were surprised that "there is such a delicious thing in the world"! They spend their lives in coarse tea and light rice, have not tasted the cooking production of "food is not boring, not tired of fine", they often imagine the "peculiar smell" of food in the city like A Q, even if they go to the market town to eat a plate of fried shredded meat, they all lament the chef's exquisite craftsmanship, because it is different from the "Weizhuang", the food in the city is not only a capital to show off, but also a wonderful feeling of taste bud travel, which is the "urban and rural difference" in the eyes of the countrymen. And when a "city person" tastes the food of the original style of the countryside, his taste bud memory is also an eternal freeze frame.
When the barley was yellow, when I first tasted the batter made of yuan wheat flour, I was surprised why the local farmers used it as feed for "strong pigs", and that special "strange smell" wandered between my teeth for days, and even for decades I always remembered the desire to drink a large bowl of buckwheat paste. Holding a bowl of thin buckwheat paste in one hand, grasping a steamed bun or burrito in the other hand, and boiling pickles or kohlrabi shreds with small fish, this rough rural cuisine has become an eternal memory on the taste buds of the era on the Northern Jiangsu Plain. What is "acacia" and what is "nostalgia", perhaps the memory on the taste buds will be better than the lyricism of thousands of languages.
Autumn harvest season, the first time I tasted the new rice "Nongken 58" boiled rice porridge, that fragrance left in my sixteen-year-old taste buds memory rings forever lingering, I can not describe the kind of "heavenly things" taste left between the teeth, in order to be able to eat the taste of "new rice" every day, I use the "imperial grain" supplied by the grain management in the first year of Zhiqing to the countryside - aged rice and the villagers to exchange "new rice", there are neighbors who say that I am "obsessed", because "new rice" has a lot of moisture, and the rice rate is extremely low. At that time, for hungry farmers, eating enough was the first major event in life, and "new rice" was delicious, but could it be hungry? This may also be another kind of "urban-rural difference". Since leaving the countryside, I can no longer taste the taste of "new rice" in a short period of one or two months, although the logistics are now extremely developed, and the "new rice" continues to flow to people's dinner tables, but the strange fragrance of "new rice" can no longer be found, is there a problem with the variety, or is the memory of the taste buds wrong? I don't know. In the annual rings of time, I look for the "nostalgia" and "lovesickness" of the past; in the vast space, I am looking for the coordinates of the city and the countryside - the memory of the taste buds is unpredictable in the interlacing of time and space, is the food gene mutated, or is the affinity of people for nature gradually drifting away?
The place where I joined the team was Hu Shiyan's Baoying Water Town, and a song "Nine Nine Sunny Days" would bring us into that sour, sweet and bitter fiery era.
In the summer of 1969, Baoying County, located in the depression of northern Jiangsu, suffered a major flood, and in a vast ocean, all the laborers participated in the work of "stepping on the ocean". The so-called "stepping on the ocean" is to set up all the primitive wooden water wheels, a group of six people, twenty-four hours a day to take turns to pedal the water wheels, at that time a production brigade has at most one or two pumping machines, simply can not complete such a large pumping task.
The soles of people's feet are swollen, fatigue and drowsiness needless to say, the most troublesome thing is that they can't resist the problem of hunger, the more they like to talk about the "food" they have eaten in their lives, and the more they hang out the "hungry worms", the more vigorously they talk, the more they feel hungry. It is really "hoping that plums will quench thirst and thirst and be more thirsty" and "talk about food to suppress hunger and hunger". Therefore, some people go down to the rice field to catch long fish (yellow eels) and make night meals (supper), in fact, at that time, long fish is the most worthless aquatic product in the water town, but the average person does not let it enter their own table, just because eating long fish is really fuel-consuming, and oil-free is fishy. In that era of lack of oil, people could not have the luxury of a return, and it was a common thing to take advantage of "stepping on the ocean" to shake the oil of the collective. There are many members who like to do this kind of thing, and they come to grab it with their hands, dig half a basket of rice from the rice pier of the production team with a bucket, go to the electric irrigation station, cut a large handful of two-knife leeks, and scoop up half a scoop of rapeseed oil in the tank of the team library. The members of the company who held the spoon greeted each other, and everyone roared with muddy water, holding a rice bowl in the production team, and fried long fish with the oily leeks, and they thought that they were the happiest gourmets in the world, and even more so, if there were two or two small wines, even if they gave an emperor, they would not change it. In that environment, people's taste buds remember the clearest, more than half a century has passed, Huaiyang cuisine in the housekeeper dish "fried soft pocket" has eaten countless flavor varieties, including Huai'an water town unique pu cabbage as an accessory "fried soft pocket" innovative dish, but can no longer eat the taste of that night. It can be seen that sometimes the memory of the taste buds is not an objective and neutral judgment of food, it is often transferred to the feeling that people are in a specific environment, that is to say, the taste buds have a strong ideological memory function, as long as they touch its sensitive nerves, it will definitely leave a deep impression in the human brain groove, and can not delete or modify its password and program.
In the past two decades, people have crawled out of the gastronomic foot to find the taste of the farmhouse dishes of the past, but it is difficult to gain something, because it is difficult for people to understand that the philosophy of food is the dialectical relationship between people and the living environment.
Ci mushroom is a well-known aquatic product in Baoying Water Town, and now with that kind of noodles of small ci mushrooms and pork belly braised, its oil brine through the surface structure of ci mushrooms, directly to the texture of ci mushrooms, so that many people in the city have come to the conclusion that its meat is not as good as ci mushrooms. As everyone knows, the mushrooms of that year were used as a staple food for people to spend the spring famine, and every day they were fried with a small half pot of oilless and tasteless shizu mushrooms, so that the servants ate with complaints, and the sour taste of the mushrooms was made, even if it was a pollution-free ingredient, the memory it left on your taste buds was also bitter.
Don't think that farmers in water towns can eat fish every day without meat, in fact, in addition to marrying relatives and holiday pilgrims, they usually do not eat fish and shrimp, especially crabs, and no one cares, because it is fishy and meatless. Do not eat fish and shrimp, one is because the oil-free fish and shrimp are fishy, not ordinary people can afford to enjoy; the second is to catch the big fish and sell it for those who have oil to enjoy, for their own sake, it is also a lot of money to earn a subsidy for the family. Only when the mud and slag are swept up to the small fish and shrimp, people will take it home and boil it with the big pickles, so that the pickles will become crispy, if you add the right amount of oil, sprinkle a handful of garlic flowers when you start the pot, it must be a good side dish for porridge under the rice. At that time, a popular local cooking trick was "more oil is not a bad dish", but who has oil? In those days, the amount of oil used was a touchstone for measuring the gap between rich and poor in a family.
Another dish derived from this dish, "crucian carp grilled pickles", which is not on the table, has forever remained in my taste buds and has become a home-cooked dish in my recipes. Sauté the crucian carp in oil into a brown and blister, then braise it to taste, then pour in the sautéed pickles or snow lees, cook them in a large bowl, freeze it in cold weather, fish and pickles, delicious both! To this day, I occasionally cook to find the memories of my former taste buds.
The water town where I joined the team is close to Huai'an Pingqiao, and the tofu in Pingqiao is still very famous, when every day there were tofu picks walking through the streets and alleys passing through the village, and a long tail sound of "Tofu Hey-" woke up people's appetite. The tofu of Yu Nai was drunk, which disturbed people's moods, so some people knocked on two pieces of tofu for two cents with their rice bowls, and they had to eat a meal of meat today. In the era of cutting the tail of capitalism, a family could only raise two chickens, and all the daily expenses were counted on this bit of silver, and the family could eat a meal of tofu, even if it was meat. A piece of tofu is exactly the price of a pack of matches, two pieces of tofu is already luxurious enough, with pickles to cook the lowest rice, when the rapeseed is harvested, it is even luckier, the oily tofu roast pickles are like a meal of braised pork, enough to make the boys happy for a day. A few years later, when I read Mao Dun's "Whistle Selling Tofu", the beginning and end of it made me write a cone of words: "When I woke up in the morning, I heard the whistle selling tofu whimpering outside the window." Every time this whistle caused me a lot of confusion. A whimpering sound shattered the frozen air past my window. I listened intently, and I seemed to have read countless words from this monotonous whining. I jerked open the window and looked at the sky behind the house. What did I see? All I saw was a white haze of sorrow. "For a moment, I remembered the happiness of eating tofu in the bleak life in the winter sun, the taste of old brine tofu that can never be erased on the taste buds."
So, in my countless dreams, the sound of tofu that seemed to have a hint of sadness and romance and poetry woke me up from the ripples of broken dreams, let me hear the groans coming from the darkness of distant history, let me see the sorrow and joy in the real world, and let me hallucinate into the alienation of human nature in the future world.
Perhaps, in the evolution of the eating process, human beings are gradually surrounded by a stepped "differential order pattern" civilization, and the ritual sense of eating has become a gorgeous evening dress when eating the stomach, and in different time and space, whether the eater is eating culture or completing the instinctive needs is indeed a confusion of the choice of survival philosophy.
In the primitive era of Ru Mao's blood drinking, when people's eating behavior was similar to that of beasts, they grabbed food with their hands and swallowed it alive, and the rapid and fierce movement was probably without any ritual, perhaps only at the moment of entering the civilization sacrifice, they had a sense of ceremony, that is not the act of devouring food for survival.
Now, when you sit in a palatial restaurant and taste a variety of cuisines, can you remember the kind of "food" that is swallowed up in a special environment?
Written on June 16, 2021 in Nandawa Garden
Ding Fan