"Paste spicy soup, paste spicy soup, freshly out of the pot meatball paste spicy soup ..."
In the early morning, loud shouts echoed through the streets, waking up sleeping people. Half dreaming and half waking up, I suddenly felt that my stomach and intestines began to return to work little by little, grunting intestines, active stomach squirming, as if the elves in my stomach were reminding me: Man, bao sleep, hurry up and eat spicy soup!
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Get up, get dressed, wash up, take the pot and walk to the paste-spicy soup shop.
The store is not large, about a dozen squares, and the door face is only three or four meters wide, which is bland. At the head of the door, a pair of dark blue curtains, on the book a few eye-catching white words: meatball paste spicy soup.
Outside, a row of small plywood portable tables and chairs are neatly arranged, and some diners sit at the table and feast. Inside the store, the pale yellow wooden tables and chairs, each one is only 80 centimeters wide and more than one meter long, and there are eight tables, most of which have been occupied.
Some customers drink colorful soup with spoons, some break the snow-white lumps into buns the size of thumb nails, some scoop orange-red oil from chili cans and pour spicy oil on them, and some add brown aged vinegar to bowls.
The owner was about fifty years old, medium in stature, slightly fat, and was busy scooping soup into a bowl. In front of him, there is a huge soup bowl about 1.2 meters in diameter, and inside the pot is the protagonist of the shop, the meatball paste spicy soup.
Meatball paste spicy soup, also known as Eight Treasures Soup, is a traditional snack in Xi'an. The beef is first crushed into a filling, marinated with a variety of spices, then turned into meatballs and cooked for later. Then wash the potatoes, carrots, zucchini, lotus white, celery and other vegetables, cut into diced vegetables, add water to the pot, simmer until soft and rotten. Add the beef balls and beans and continue simmering, until the beef flavor and vegetables are perfectly integrated, and then it is ready to come out of the pot.
A bowl of meatball paste spicy soup, fused with a variety of fresh vegetables, paired with beef balls, can be eaten with the lump bun. Pale yellow potatoes, orange carrots, light green zucchini, off-white lotus white, green celery pink beef balls, yellow and brilliant cooked soybeans, gathered in the bowl, it is not lively. With the sound of sucking and sucking, vitamins, proteins, starches, minerals, together under the belly, nutrition and delicious balance, really worthy of the eight treasures of soup.
But looking at the text, you still can't grasp the magic of this soup. You need to go out early in the early morning of autumn and winter, pace to the spicy soup shop, order a bowl, and then pair it with a lump of steamed buns, add a little spicy oil, and slowly taste; a bowl of belly, dried soup, steamed buns, lips and teeth remain fragrant, warm all around. It is a street delicacy and one of the joys of life. Eat, go to work, go to school, start a new day full of vitality.
Since I can remember, this mushy soup shop around my home has been doing a lot of business. Every morning, cars come and go, ushering in a group of diners, bustling, and sending them to one diner after another. With the passage of time, the boss boy of the year has now become an uncle. And the diners of that year also grew from teenagers and children to middle-aged people.
What remains unchanged is the colorful soup of the paste, and when the bowl is lifted, it is still the aroma of the soup, the familiar taste, the porcelain solid of the lump, evoking people's beautiful childhood memories.
For a while, because of work, I went out to live in the south. Eight hours away, I searched the streets and alleys, but I was disappointed repeatedly. The city is lined with high-rise buildings and busy traffic, and there is no shortage of endless crowds, daily gold projects and rapidly changing rhythms.
In the vast city, in the mornings accompanied by small dumplings, red bean dumplings, sake brewing, and beef noodles, the meatball paste spicy soup is like a first love, although it is thousands of miles away, it makes my soul haunted, and I am extremely worried.
And one by one asked the morning shop, the bosses replied with a confused face: "I haven't heard, I don't know, I haven't eaten." Watching my local colleagues eat happily, my gastrointestinal spirits have repeatedly protested: the meat bun is too oily, the tangyuan is too sweet, and we have to drink the paste spicy soup.
At the end of the construction period, my heart was like an arrow. Early the next morning, not feeling tired from the journey, I went straight to the paste spicy soup shop. Order a bowl of mushy soup, pick up a lump of steamed buns, break open the buns, scoop up the soup, send it to your mouth, well, the familiar delicacy suddenly reverberates between the teeth, a sense of happiness rises from the chest, and the pores around the body seem to be ironed again.
In the past, I often read articles about late-night canteens and food healing, but today I experience it and feel the same way. No wonder popular science articles say that people's stomachs have memories. That's true.
In addition to the delicious taste of the meatball paste spicy soup, for me, it is also integrated with the love of loved ones. When I was a child, my grandmother took good care of me, and when I went to her house to play, in addition to making dumplings by hand, she often bought me a spicy soup for this hungry cat. The shop in front of her house, unlike near my house, was open from morning to night. Even if I sleep late on the weekend, I can still taste the delicious food at noon and in the afternoon.
A bowl of spicy soup, paired with beef sandwich buns, added a lot of joy to my table. In my grandmother's gentle gaze, I sucked and sucked on the soup and nibbled on the steamed buns, sweating profusely and enjoying myself. I also wondered, "Why do you just look at me and don't eat yourself?" Grandma touched my head lovingly every time and smiled, "Grandma will be happy when she eats the incense." Grandma will eat it later. ”
At that time, I was greedy and willful. After eating, the bowl was pushed, and I went out to play with my friends, never thinking about anything else. Looking back now, Grandma had four children and several grandchildren, a bowl of paste-spicy soup for 5 yuan, a bowl of beef sandwich buns for 10 yuan, and her retirement salary was only a mere 1,000 yuan. Plain, she must have eaten a home-cooked meal before or after I went to see her. The delicious soup of the paste spicy soup, she did not want to taste it again and again.
During the Mid-Autumn Festival of the previous year, I went home to visit as usual. Grandma, who was more than eighty years old at the time, lost her teeth, her mouth was deflated, and her spirit was not as good as before, she refused to go out, she only liked to lie down, and when she saw our grandchildren, she couldn't call out her name, but just looked at you with her eyes.
I bought a paste spicy soup to take home. The mother patiently fed it to her grandmother. A mouthful of soup, she smacked and touched in her mouth, and then swallowed slowly, about half a minute. Half a bowl of soup was drunk for almost an hour. The mother laughed and said that Grandma still likes this taste, you see how beautiful it is today. Oh, listening to this, I can't hide my sadness. If I could turn back the clock, I wish my grandmother could return to the time when she was in full bloom, chewing meatball paste and spicy soup with me, and laughing and laughing together. However, "the tree wants to be quiet and the wind is not stopping", life is always accompanied by many regrets.
Meatball paste spicy soup, which is a common street snack in Xi'an, has not been selected as one of the well-known Shaanxi dishes. Out of Xi'an, few people know about this soup. And it is this simple taste, fireworks homely, that opens up one busy morning after another, feeds one ordinary person after another, and passes on from generation to generation. Some friends who have been away from Xi'an for many years also remember Xi'an snacks deeply when they recall it.
In the first five minutes of the first episode of CCTV's 2020 hit drama "Loading Stage", director Li Shaofei filmed a close-up of the meatball paste spicy soup for tens of seconds, and it was this soup that Director Tie and Diao Dashun invited the foreign performance team to taste. Director Tie also proudly introduced: "This paste and spicy soup is the product of the combination of red cabbage soup and Chinese food culture." It seems that this street food, not only I and other ordinary people worry about, even the big directors, big producers, do not skimp on the camera, close-up publicity of it. The little mushy spicy soup even has such a highlight moment.
Author | Lemon semi-sweet | Xi'an people