Stone cake baked from cobblestones

During the Spring Festival, the hometown located in the Hehuang Valley not only slaughters pigs, but also makes a variety of Annual steamed buns. The most cooked are flower rolls and oil buns. The oil bun is mixed with clear oil in the flour as a filling, wrapped in a layer of white noodles, steamed out of the white inside yellow, delicious to eat, is specially for uncles or parents-in-law to use for the New Year. In addition to steamed flower rolls and oil buns, we also fry steamed buns, flowers, oil cakes, and oil fruits. During the New Year's Eve, each relative should take 16 flower rolls or oil buns, and then take 4 oil cakes or oil fruits, and there are also a handful of steamed buns or flowers.

In the past, the nearest road was carried by people carrying bamboo cages dressed with steamed buns, and those who were far away from the road rode donkey horses, and the steamed buns were placed on the back of donkeys and horses, and then there were bicycles, and a straw woven back was tied next to the back tray of the bicycle, and the steamed buns were placed in the back of the basket. When I arrived at my relative's house, half of the flower rolls were scattered and could not be placed on the face table of my relative's house. So people think of making a stronger and better-looking bun.

In 1974, a new trick was added to my family's annual buns— white-faced stone cakes baked with pebbles. That year, the gravel road in front of my house, which was connected to National Highway 109 in the east and to Hualong in the west, Xunhua and Huangnan, was paved with asphalt. The uncle's car, who drove a car in the commune, was pumped to the Xigucheng refinery in Lanzhou to pull asphalt. In July of that year, Grandma took my uncle's car out of the house for the first time and made a trip to Lanzhou. The biggest feeling of Grandma's return is that the dolls in Lanzhou City are evil! The one who ate the steamed bun was gone, holding a popsicle in his hand. Grandma, who has been living in the countryside of Hehuang, only knows that the children in the countryside are hungry and can take the steamed buns at any time, play in the village alleys, play in the wheat field or go to the fields to cut grass and collect horse dung, the children have a piece of steamed bun in their pockets, and when they are hungry, they take it out and nibble on it, especially lunch, whether adults or children, eat a piece of steamed buns, drink boiling water is a lunch, unlike children in the city who eat at the dinner table according to the morning, middle and evening meals a day. Grandma Lang Lanzhou's biggest harvest is to bring a jar of pebbles in the Yellow River, one by one are round, smooth and full, said to be picked up by the Yellow River in Lanzhou, for the New Year stone cake.

Those pebbles, swept by the movement of the Yellow River waves, experienced countless flash floods and continuous squeezing and friction in the process of flowing water, and the gravel lost their irregular edges and corners due to mutual collision and friction, becoming round and slippery, the size of the adult's finger eggs, one by one as white as jade. The hometown of Ping'an is the closest to the Yellow River, Guide, which is 100 kilometers away, and it is difficult for the croppers to go around without relatives to go around. Although the Yellow River to Lanzhou is a flat road, the road is even more distant, and people in the countryside cannot go once in a lifetime. The pebbles in the Yellow River are so far away from the hometown people, only if there are drivers who drive away and run far away, they have a chance to get it. Grandma took the Yellow River pebbles as a treasure, washed them with spring water and put them in a porcelain altar for preservation.

Fast forward to the twenty-third day of the Waxing Moon, after sending the stove family's mother to heaven, Grandma began to make New Year steamed buns. Grandma put the porcelain altar where the cobblestones were stored on the face cabinet in the middle of the hall, lit the oil lamp, simmered the cypress incense, knelt on the ground and prostrated, and recited the words in her mouth. Grandma said that stones have life no matter how big or small, and large stones are grown up from small stones, and small stones are born from large stones. In the river beach, I saw many large stones with many small stones of different colors and sizes on the surface, and those stone dolls would fall off the big stones when people were not careful, and then slowly grow up. To burn these pebbles, you have to put the stones in a pot and heat them, and the small pebbles will naturally lose their lives. Grandma lit a lamp and prostrated her head and begged the little stones to forgive her sins. Ordinary stones are prostrated on the cabinet by grandma and become mysterious and sacred, as if there is really a life on the stone.

Grandma gave the stone incense kowtow, in the yard with a hu mound to build a simple stove, the stove mouth of this stove is much larger than the stove in the kitchen pot, Grandma moved from the kitchen to a flat bottom cast iron pot that is usually rarely used, the hometown people call it "half along the pot", the diameter is more than 60 centimeters, larger than the usual cooking caliber and shallow, the bottom flat is conducive to the stone evenly spread at the bottom of the pot, along the shallow is conducive to operation. Half along the pot is scrubbed on the simple stove and heated with hard firewood that is usually reluctant to burn, which is the root of the tree cut from the field and the branches cut from the poplar, apricot and elm trees in the spare time, and these hard firewood are used only when the New Year festival is saved or when there are red and white things at home. After the pot has a certain temperature, put the pebbles into a porcelain basin, pour a little clear oil and stir, so that the surface of each pebble is evenly oiled to prevent the stones from sticking to the surface. Then pour the pebbles into the pot and spread them evenly at the bottom of the pot to continue heating, and Grandma is worried about the heat while constantly turning with the spatula to make these squeezed stones evenly heated. On one side, add flax or rapeseed oil to the fermented yeast noodles, roll in bitter bean flour and pepper leaf powder, add a small amount of table salt, and roll out the kneaded dough into a round pancake embryo. By this time the cobblestones in the pot were already burning very hot, and Grandma dug out some of them with a spatula to put into a small iron pot, and then laid the dough cakes flat on the stones. Then he poured the excavated part of the stone evenly on the bread, covered the cake tightly, and in a flash, the steam in the pot steamed up, and the hot bread also made a sound of nourishment. The hard wood still burned evenly in the stove fire, time passed quietly, the steam gradually dissipated, the stone cake was cooked, and then a wisp of mellow fragrance came quietly, burrowing into the nostrils of the person, refusing to leave for a long time. Each pie is covered with more than a dozen cobblestone pits, and the surface of the pie has a uniform layer of light burnt yellow. Grandma gave the first pot of stone cakes to the family to taste, it was crispy and sweet to eat, and the sound of "clucking" gave people a sense of endless aftertaste, and I wanted to eat one.

Stone cake is mainly used to give relatives who have a long distance to visit the New Year, the flour of a stone cake is similar to that of a flower roll, the stone cake is stronger than the flower roll, even if you go a long way to the mountain road, to the relative's house is still a small, but also more unusual, get to the relatives are very fond of, especially the children can not wait for the relatives to leave, crying and crying to eat stone cakes. Another feature of stone cake is that it has a long shelf life, and steamed bread is preserved for a new month even in the winter of the New Year, while stone cake is still fresh and crispy even if it is saved until february of the lunar calendar.

The news that Grandma picked pebbles from the Yellow River went away, many next-door neighbors came to borrow from the right, during the waxing moon, the pebbles went from the east to the west, and never stopped, until the night of Chinese New Year's Eve, according to the custom, everything borrowed in a year had to be recovered, and the pebbles came home, and the white stones of the past were busy for a few days after the waxing moon. Grandma put the pebbles into the porcelain altar again, offered them on the cabinet of the hall house, lit the lamp and prostrated her head, and said the same words in her mouth, thanking the stones for helping to make the crispy Annual Steamed Buns, asking the Stones to rest for a good life, and then helping to make the Nian Buns when the Waxing Moon comes next year.

In the future, every year in the Wax moon, Grandma and Mother would make stone cake Steamed Buns, and neighbors would also come to borrow them. On weekdays, when someone in the family or next door friend's family has stomach pain and stomach acid and other stomach diseases, they use pebbles to make cakes to eat, and the stomach will not be sore or painful after eating for a few days. The use of pebbles to make cakes was originally thought to be the invention of grandma, after the reform and opening up, life became richer day by day, and the gifts of the New Year were gradually replaced by canned rock sugar, and later developed into wine and tea, fruits, and then to large gift bags. Grandma used the Yellow River pebbles to make the bun also long forgotten, but decades later in the xining Wangfujing supermarket saw the stone cake made of cobblestones, curious to buy the family, first got the favor of the 2-year-old grandson, take a non-stop, eat one after eating, accompany the grandson to eat stone cake, can't help but think of grandma and mother, think of more than forty years ago grandma and mother in the old courtyard to make stone cake scene. A search in Baidu, out of a series of stone cake information, pictures and texts, after reading can not help but be awe-inspiring, and admired for the creation of ancestors. Seemingly ordinary stone cakes have a very long history and culture.

Ordinary stone cake, whose development history can be traced back to the Paleolithic Age, as early as 1.8 million years ago, our ancestors learned to drill wood for fire, and then used hot stone chips to process prey or fruit. In the Neolithic Age, primitive agriculture was formed, and cooking was cooked with rice added to burnt stone, and stone chains appeared. The earliest stone chains were polished thin stone chips that could be heated under fire. The Stone Age is known as the "Stone Cooking Age" by the culinary community. The Book of Rites has "burnt porpoises", and the Eastern Han Dynasty Zheng Xuan notes: "There are kettles, rice and meat, added to burned stones and eaten". The stone is hot, the grain is directly placed on the stone and cooked, mainly the use of stone heat transfer is slow, heat dissipation is also slow, the heat is relatively uniform, in order to control the heat, the baked cake is not easy to burn and can be cooked thoroughly. Shanxi is the birthplace of Chinese civilization, but also the birthplace of stone cake, folk stone cake is still roasted by stone heat and eaten, bumps and scars are like the image of grain burning, so it is called the "living fossil" of ancient cooking. From the primitive society to the time of Emperor Yao, although pottery flourished, stone cooking still existed. According to the "Origin of the Noodle Road", Shanxi folk have the legend of "Yao made stone cakes, noodles flowing fang": Yao Shi's new wheat harvest, heavy rain caused the granary to collapse, and the wheat was smashed into powder. After the rain, when it was sunny, people laid flour and wheat on stone slabs to dry for collection, but they emitted a strange fragrance. Yao Nai taught people to crush the wheat with stone plates and stone sticks, and to burn the flour cake with the method of "burning the yellow" to celebrate the harvest of grain and the prosperity of the descendants, and since then the stone cake in Shanxi has entered the second stage of development. Nowadays, after the wheat harvest in the southern Jinnan region, every household must bake stone cakes, go to relatives and friends, and celebrate the harvest, and whoever has a daughter-in-law has given birth to a child, the mother-in-law must also bake stone cakes to visit to show congratulations. This ancient custom, because of the Yao, folk also call the stone cake "Yao Wang Cake" or "The First Cake of China".

In the Tang Dynasty, stone cakes were also known as stone buns as tributes to the emperor. According to the "Chronicle of Fanzhi County", during the Zhengde period of the Ming Dynasty, Emperor Zhengde of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Houzhao, went out to Beijing to inspect and taste scar cakes. Because the stone cake has a bump scar, the locals also call it scar cake. In the Qing Dynasty, stone cakes were operated by professional workshops in the Three Jins such as "Wan Dechang" and "Sanhetang", and were circulated in the north and south of the great river, and Yuan Ming, the author of "Suiyuan Food List", praised it as "natural cake". In 1937, the Northern Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and the Office of the Eighth Route Army in Jin moved to Liu Village, Linfen County, and the local people made stone cakes to comfort them.

Stone cake is not only delicious and easy to preserve, but also has a certain medical effect. The calcium, iron and other trace elements contained in the pebbles are immersed in the cake, which is rich in nutrients and is a health food.

At the same time, there is a gelatinized layer on the surface of the stone cake, which can neutralize stomach acid and inhibit gastric acid secretion. Because it is relatively hard and crisp, it needs to be chewed carefully and swallowed slowly when eating. Therefore, it is considered to be an ancient dietary treatment method for stomach diseases, and it has the effect of "nourishing the stomach" when eaten.

Over the past 40 years of reform and opening up, people's lives have undergone earth-shaking changes, fine white noodles are no longer rare, and chicken, duck and fish meat has become a common dish. Stone cake as a commodity also changed the old use of white noodles with clear oil, bitter bean flour and pepper powder frugal practice, the use of ingredients and production is more exquisite, into a new stage of development, and noodles when adding eggs, cakes added to the filling, there are thick and thin, thick soft sponge. In order to meet the needs of different customers, it can also be made into a variety of fillings, including bean paste, brown sugar, white sugar, as well as five kernels, pepper leaves... Stone cakes have become a good food and beverage for tourism, and even into high-end restaurants and supermarkets, becoming a good food and gift.

Every time I walk into the supermarket and see the stone cake in the bag and the grandson have a taste to eat the stone cake, I can't help but put my hand into the grandson's food bag, pick up a stone cake and put it in my mouth, the crisp and fragrant stone cake reminds people of the scene of the grandmother baking the stone cake in the courtyard of her hometown more than 40 years ago, and the smooth and shiny pebbles appear in front of the eyes.

Author: Dong Dehong Source: Qinghai Daily