In Tai'an, there is such a proverb: eat pancakes, one by one, the good grains are fragrant; and roll tofu and sauce, eat white and fat. I often wonder how such a piece of paper is not well made pancakes can make people enjoy it so much. How can it make the soul of The Tai'an people haunt their dreams? Even Pu Songling wrote a "Pancake Fu" to praise it.
Pancakes are the traditional staple food of the Tai'an people, and are said to have a history of more than a thousand years or even longer, because one of the ancient utensils unearthed in Dawenkou is the tweezers used for spreading pancakes.
Most of the Tai'an pancakes are made of soybeans, corn, millet and sorghum as raw materials, and the corn or millet grits soaked for a day are ground into a paste with stones, and the pancakes can be spread by heating up the tweezers in the yard. The pancakes are light and flexible, sweet and delicious to eat, and easy to store and carry. Peasant women often spread dozens or hundreds of pounds of pancakes in their spare time.
In the past, spreading pancakes was a craft that Women in Tai'an had to master, and it was difficult for girls to find a good mother-in-law if they could not spread pancakes. Pancakes can be wrapped in anything, lettuce, green onions, leeks, garlic moss, and a variety of wild vegetables, or small tofu, which is delicious and has a long meaning.
As the saying goes, "the people take food as the sky", which originally meant that "food" is the most important thing in life, but the Tai'an people are stunned that they are related to the sky. It is said that in the Song Dynasty, there was a rule that the twenty-third day of the first month was set as the "Day of Heavenly Slaughter", and the Tai'an people who ate pancakes put pancakes on the roof on this day, called "patching the sky". A pancake wraps the world, and the round pancake symbolizes the meaning of the world.
Whether the pancakes are produced by "supplementing the sky" has long been impossible to verify. But the small pancake has the heart to tolerate the world, which can not be said to be the big heart and grandeur of the Tai'an people.