With this article, I dedicate it to the seventieth anniversary of my alma mater!
I went to college in 1988, and I often wrote about food in correspondence with high school classmates who were studying at various colleges and universities outside the province at the same time. A classmate who studied at the Shaanxi Mechanical College said that their school must be accompanied by 5 kilograms of coarse grain in the monthly ration, and the cornmeal nest that accompanied him for 4 years was a nightmare of college time. And several other students studying in the north talked about the school food, as if there was nothing remarkable except for the braised pork chops that must be grabbed every day, which were all cooked under the soup juice...
In contrast, my food experience at Nanchong Chuanbei Medical College during that time can be described by the word sweet, perhaps because my alma mater is located in Chuannei, and the taste is not much different from before, or perhaps because my alma mater is kind and always tries to ensure the oil and water in the stomach of the students. But in any case, to sum up these five years of food, just one word - good! Two words – Bashi!
There is a picture with the truth, which is a despicable student ID.
One of the dishes at my first lunch at my alma mater impressed me – sweet potato stir-fried meat! Northerners usually call sweet potatoes sweet potatoes sweet potatoes, but this melon is not a sweet potato, and the sweet potatoes in the southern population are the roots of a vine plant, the scientific name of soybean potatoes, also called cold potatoes, and sweet potatoes are native to the Americas. This thing is very common in the south, I used to eat it basically as a fruit, sweet and juicy, but it was the first time I saw it with stir-fried meat. In the years of study after that, this dish was often diced, sometimes sliced, and stir-fried with some watercress sauce, and the taste was quite good.
This is what we southerners call sweet potatoes, and the sweet potatoes in the northern population are actually red amaranth.
Although sweet potato stir-fried meat is not unusual, it does not have its shadow on the menu of most restaurants in Sichuan.
Remember that at the end of the 80s, most of the meat dishes in the school canteen were 7 dimes a piece, and the meat or sauce fried meat was cheaper than 6 corners, probably because it was mainly fat, and vegetarian dishes were generally two corners. After entering the 90s, the food is more abundant, most of the time there is a meat supply for lunch, the price seems to be 8 corners, there are steamed lamb chops in winter, every three to five, you can also eat watercress whole fish, a dollar a piece, a about five or six two weights ... The habit of making buckle meat in the south is winter vegetables as the base, and other places use sprouts, and the production process of winter vegetables and sprouts is roughly similar, but more spices are added and the fermentation time is longer, so the flavor is unique. Nanchong's Qingju brand and Smoky Mountain brand winter vegetables are very famous in Kawauchi, Nanchong's five years of study time have changed my taste to a certain extent, and now as long as it is not used for winter vegetables to base the buckle meat, I will be regarded as not authentic!
Nanchong tender tip winter vegetables.
Winter vegetables buckle meat.
Dinner is going to look a little dull, and in the two years of freshman and sophomore year, dinner in the canteen has almost no meat dishes except for buns and scribbles. The school buns were filled with leeks and spicy seeds, and I personally regarded them as the founding master of the dark cuisine of the university cafeteria, so I didn't leave a good impression in my memory. The scribe is thin-skinned and stuffed, but can't stand the tragic experience of being "fighting the autumn wind", took a copy of the scribe's way from the canteen to the bedroom, there are always other people's spoons to reach into their own bowls, Zhang San, Li Si, Wang Wu, and in the end, he can't fall into a few, so choosing to eat scribes at that time is equivalent to eating loneliness... Later, a big god invented a trick, after buying the copy, each one bit a missing first, and then slowly walked to the bedroom, so that the phenomenon of "fighting the autumn wind" was almost extinct...
Chuanbei Medical College old campus dormitory, when I was in this building is a girls' dormitory, people send Ya number "Panda Hall".
The main force of dinner is porridge and steamed buns! Nanchong people love to drink porridge is famous, there is a classic Nanchong people ridicule their own passage may have been heard - when the car is still on the West Mountain, you can already hear the sound of the people of Nanchong drinking porridge under the mountain... This is similar to "the sound of the people of Chengdu playing mahjong can already be heard on the plane".
As for why nanchong people love to drink porridge so much is now untestable, anyway, into the countryside, I also drink porridge every night, both to relieve the heat, but also to bloat, drink not fast! It's just that this pure carbohydrate diet can't last long, half a pot of lettuce leaf porridge + two large steamed buns, two bubbles of urine and a, only less than 9 o'clock on the hungry eyes, so they are full of supper all over the world.
There are only four or five video records of my college days that can still be found, and this is one of them, and I happen to be drinking porridge.
In the evening, the canteen serves noodles, noodles from the noodle workshop located between the basic department building and the animal laboratory, and various leftovers at noon are fried with watercress and boiled into toppings, and sometimes there are omelettes. This supper that I look forward to every day will increase the additional expenditure of 4-6 cents per day, so my mother specially sends me 20 yuan more living expenses every month, and my father writes in a beautiful thin gold body in the appendix column of the remittance slip - no windfall is not rich, the horse is not fat, the night grass is not fat, and the night grass is specially allocated!
Just as I was eating night grass, Nanchong, a cultural ancient city, was also quietly developing and prospering, and when it came to the third and fourth years, the area around Jiankang Lane and Tiange Factory outside the school gradually became prosperous, and there were some vendors selling braised duck blood and other snacks outside the school side door at noon and at night, which made our dinner more good choices. Specifically in 1991 or 1992 can not remember clearly, there was a period of time suddenly came to a person in the wall root there sold Lanzhou ramen, a time the business is hot, some students even do not eat dinner in the canteen, hungry to go out to eat ramen at eight or nine o'clock in the evening, late at night when the school locks the door there are still people over the wall to eat.
This obviously brought trouble to the management of the school, but the school showed extraordinary management wisdom when dealing with this matter, and even from today's point of view, the measures taken by the school at that time can be said to be textbook-level: a month or two later, the school recruited the master who sold ramen into the school, became a temporary worker in the canteen, supported a board in the corner of the hall on the first floor of the canteen, and also made his ramen noodles, the safety of the students was guaranteed, and the ramen master unexpectedly got a stable job This is the real sense of "win-win", not some people's nonsense about "winning twice"!
This four seasons spring department store is very famous in old Nanchong, there is a restaurant on the side street, deduct 1 yuan 1 piece of meat, I have money in my pocket to go there to fight tooth sacrifice.
Since it is a school in the south, the staple food must be rice! The rice in the canteen of the alma mat is the same as the rice bowl, which is a common cooking utensil in the south, which can be understood as a steamer basket made of wood in the shape of a barrel, and the rice is cooked over high heat until it is half cooked, fished out to filter out the rice soup, and the rice is put into the koshiki pot until steamed. In the past, people in the south basically cooked in this way, and people who liked it were willing to eat, while some people, especially in the north, regarded it as a nightmare because of the feeling of the rice grains drilling in their mouths.
The advantage of koshiki is that the rice will not burn the paste no matter what, and the disadvantage is that the rice soup is filtered out, and the B vitamins in it are also filtered out.
However, a fatal disadvantage of koshi rice is that the rice soup is filtered out, and some nutrients in the rice, such as B vitamins, are also lost. It may be precisely for this reason that for a period of time, the school changed to the supply of steamed rice, nutrition is improved, but the students generally reflect that the amount of portions has become less and not enough to eat, and the students will know about it and negotiate with the canteen. At that time, the student council really wanted to serve the interests of the students, unlike now, they only knew how to play official. In order to be reasonable and well-founded, the student union also did a special experiment, concluding that a pound of rice made into rice should weigh about one pound of rice and four or two, and the school meal ticket is bundled according to the ration of 42 pounds of grain per person per month, so a pound of rice ticket should be bought as a meal made of one pound of rice instead of a pound of rice containing water... Without a word, the canteen announced that it "conceded defeat", put away the electric steam cabinet, and resumed the supply of koshi rice!
Finally, a little bit about breakfast. Since it is a school in Nanchong, breakfast must have the characteristics of Nanchong - rice noodles + dried oil!
Rice noodle companion - Nan chong oil dry, think of all drooling...
The production process of dried oil is very similar to the traditional early noodle nest in Wuhan, and perhaps it is also an imported product from Huguang filling Sichuan in that year. The dried oil of rapeseed oil is soaked in the red soup of beef rice noodles, and it is refreshing to eat all morning. All good for this bite, so if you want to eat rice noodles, you must get up early, which can be described as dry rice noodles and lazy sleep can not be both! If you get up late, you have to eat outside, there is a powder restaurant in Jiankang Alley that tastes first-class, and I heard that even some people have to ride bicycles from the petroleum institute every morning to eat. Remember that the rice noodles were two dimes one or two, the dried oil was three cents or five cents a piece, the boss looked five short, the action of playing condiments was a mess, the white pepper noodles and nanchong local fruit city MSG must draw a standard sinusoidal function curve in the air to fall in the sea bowl, and then use three fingers to pick up a pinch of coriander, from the outside to the inside to wipe off some of the powder that fell on the side of the bowl along the way, the whole set of actions down the clouds and water in one go, breathtaking!
The first process of making Wuhan noodle nests is to put the batter into a flat long-handled spoon at the bottom.
The second process of making Wuhan noodle nest is to dip a spoonful of paste into a frying pan and fry it.
The production process of Wuhan noodle nest is three, and the noodle nest is fried when it floats.
The boss always focused on his function curve and neglected the management of oil dryness, so some students with worrying qualities took advantage of this loophole. The boss Xiao Ben could not stand such a toss, so he took a 70-year-old woman from the countryside to specialize in oil dry management, and the situation was effectively suppressed...
A special tool for frying and drying, the bottom of the spoon is flat and slightly raised.
The masses generally reflect that the taste of this powder restaurant is significantly better than the famous old shop on Model Street, I have been in Nanchong for five years, I have eaten here for five years, but I only cared about the powder at that time, and I have not paid attention to the signboard hanging on the face of this door, and now I want to say the name of the person I obviously only have a share of haha, only vaguely remember that this boss seems to be surnamed Tang ...
Dried oil dipped in rice noodle soup is the pure blood of Nanchong eating.
Many years later, I returned to Nanchong, who had changed from a medical student to a doctor, but I could no longer find Boss Tang and his powder shop...