Chinese civilization has a profound foundation and a variety of forms. Speaking of the food customs of the winter solstice festival, the whole country is not the same, that is, the small southern city where I am located, the winter solstice customs of the townships under its jurisdiction are also varied and flavorful.
The winter solstice is the last festival of the year, and eating dumplings around the table is a feast for many people in this festival. In the north, it is said that eating dumplings on the winter solstice is related to a historical celebrity.
Zhang Zhongjing was a physician of the Eastern Han Dynasty, known as the "Medical Saint" of Nanyang, Henan. When he resigned and returned to his hometown that year, it was winter, and the villagers he saw along the way were hungry and cold, and many people froze their ears.
Therefore, he and his disciples built a tent to support the pot, and on the winter solstice day, he gave away the ear-like medicine "Jiao'er", which cured the illness of the villagers. In order to commemorate Zhang Zhongjing's medical ethics, later people learned to wrap food in the shape of "delicate ears", that is, dumplings.
I remember when I was a child, I spent the winter solstice, and my mother would make her own winter solstice dumplings almost every year. This season, the crops in the fields have been harvested, the farming has been idle, and the raw materials for making winter solstice dumplings are available.
The steamed rice noodles are kneaded by hand into the shape of a mooncake, then fried on the surface and ground into a powder mixed with brown sugar or white sugar. There is a saying in my hometown that "Qingming eats one tight one, and winter solstice food eats one loose one", which is quite consistent with the complicated and simple seasonal agricultural affairs.
But there is also a winter solstice one year, and my mother makes tofu skin bags. As long as there are raw materials, the method is simple, and I learned to do it when I was a child.
When making tofu at home, the tofu skin left behind is spread over glutinous rice or fried vermicelli bean sprouts, rolled into long and square strips, cut into several pieces, and fried in a large iron pot with a little lard until yellow on both sides.
On the day of the winter solstice, there are also mashing mochi in the village. Although the work is not complicated, it is also a test of people's physical strength.
After the neighbors steamed the glutinous rice flour, they poured it into the stone mortar while it was hot, and then the strong men turned over, pounded it with a wooden hammer until they were tough, out of the mortar, carried the powder ball to the board, pressed it into a dough cake several centimeters thick with a flat shoulder, and then cut it into pieces with thin hemp rope. When pounding mochi, there are often many people around the stone mortar to watch the liveliness.
My first winter solstice after I joined the work was spent in a small county. It was from that day that I learned that everyone in the small city was going to eat dumplings on the winter solstice day. That night, a group of widows and orphans, singles, ate dumplings at a street dumpling stall.
It was freezing cold that night, and only the heat of white flowers escaping from the blackened aluminum pot from time to time could make people imagine that the dumplings in the pot would be hot.
While everyone was eating in Xingtou, I inadvertently looked up and saw that from the nostrils of the mother-in-law who made dumplings, a long, thick, white worm-like snot had been hung up, flowing into the plate containing the dumpling filling, and she stirred it into the filling without incident.
Since then, I have not eaten, drunk, wontons and other foods wrapped in flour, even if I see it on the street now, I can't say how much discomfort I feel. Usually, when I make dumplings at home, I will either fry cold rice or rub rice outside.
More than twenty years have passed since this scene, and it is the winter solstice this year, and the family is naturally indispensable to make dumplings. With the encouragement and expectations of many relatives, I finally ate a bowl of dumplings, although I couldn't say what it tasted, and there was an urge in my stomach to throw up, but after all, I took a difficult step.
I give a thumbs up to myself for this winter solstice.