In the Qing Dynasty, in Quanzhou Anyongde and other places, there was a custom of making rat qu moeh, and now to eat authentic rat qu moeh can only be found in the countryside.
In the spring of March, the fields of Anxi are overgrown with rat grass, also known as Fole grass. Ratweed is a small weed of the Asteraceae family commonly found in the fields, and it is also called Qingming vegetable in some places in the south. Rat grass into the dish, in fact, has a long history. This lightly grassy snack is the most simple and solemn offering at the Hokkien Buddhist Festival.
In the countryside of Quanzhou, the custom of making rat koji has a long history, and it is not known when it originated. Some places also have the habit of "February 2nd, the dragon raises its head" to make rat koji kon, and some places offer rat koji kon on the birthday of Guanyin Bodhisattva, as the saying goes, "February 19, please ask Guanyin Niangniang to eat grass"; there are also many people who use it as sacrifices during the Qingming Festival to worship ancestors and remember their ancestors.
When the Qingming Festival came, Yuexing Village in Jiandou Town, Anxi County, was surrounded by the scent of rat queh. Walking into the Shanghai home of the villagers, adults and children make rats and kons together. According to reports, the local practice to maintain the authentic tradition, need to go through at least 3 times into the stone mortar pounding process, before and after dozens of hammers after the rat koji kun taste better.
In the childhood of the country doll, I believe this must be an interesting memory.
According to reports, in Anxi, although every household will make rat koji, but the time is not the same, each village will set a "rat qu koeh day", the township villagers take this opportunity to visit each other, chat about the past and talk about the past.
According to the "Compendium of Materia Medica", the stems and leaves of rats are soft, the leaves are long, and the white fur is like the hair of the rat's ears, the Chu people call it rice qu, and the northern call is the mother. Can be used in medicine, flat, sweet taste, can expectorant cough.
It is reported that rat qu kang is also called green kun, Qingming kun, ci shell kun. When there was not enough food in the famine years, sage grass even became a life-saving grass for people. It is reported that at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, the Yuan soldiers invaded, the soldiers were in chaos, hunger and cold, and the common people had to nibble on grass roots and eat wild vegetables to survive. Inadvertently, not only non-toxic, but also fragrant sagebrush was found. Later, some people used it into the kon, and named this type of kon as rat koji.
Because it has an alias of "Qingming dish", the frequency of rat grass appearing in the Qingming season is also very high. The Qingming dumplings in Jiangsu and Zhejiang are also mostly made of sage grass as raw materials. However, unlike the southern Fujian and Chaoshan regions, the Qingming dumplings in Jiangsu and Zhejiang are mostly round and mostly filled with bean paste. Most of the rat qu gong in southern Fujian only appears on Buddhist ritual occasions such as Tiangong's birthday, and the Qingming Festival is used less. And the rat curl is almost all flat oval, in addition to a special "turtle" shaped mark, which can be called a feature.