The son of Bao Hua, an old high school classmate, came to Kunming on a business trip and brought me a macheng meat cake. I called him home, soaked a pot of raw pu, and the two talked to each other for more than an hour. Hearing this tall, Sven young man call me "uncle" one by one, it was a little uncomfortable at first, but I soon felt comfortable. The corners of his eyebrows were the same as his mother, Baohua, when she was young.
In my memory, Baohua will always be the quiet and well-behaved, understanding girl next door. She lived in the front row of my house, and we often walked together to and from school, and I took her on my bike. One spring trip, to a mountain full of rhododendrons five kilometers away from the county seat, on the way back to the county town I did not control the car, both fell into the ditch (at that time the road was too bad, out of the county town is all dirt roads), one of Baohua's knees fell bloody, people also cried a lot. We went to the school infirmary to apply the purple potion, and Paula had already stopped crying by then, and she assured me that she would not tell anyone that I had broken her on my bicycle. Later, she told her parents that she was careless during her spring trip and fell down the mountain. A few years later I met her in Huanggang, Hubei Province, the capital of the region where her hometown of Macheng County is located, and the two of them talked about it. It was a summer, and Paula lifted her skirt to show me her knees, smooth and round, without a single scar. Meaning, it's all right. Many years after graduation, Baohua is still tall, thin and thin, maintaining a charming figure.
Baohua's son works for a logistics company in Beijing. Not long ago, a French opera troupe performed in Beijing, and the young man bought a ticket, and specially bought a two-way ticket for Baohua, and invited his mother to go to Beijing to see the opera. Hearing this, I was a little moved. The young man said that his mother's unchanged hobby for so many years is to read books, watch movies, watch various literary and artistic performances, and there are many high-level performances in Beijing, so I always have to go to Beijing to see a few times a year, and by the way, I want to see my son. The young man also said that I was one of Baohua's high school classmates who often mentioned, "My mother said that it was not easy to enter the university in that era, especially to be admitted to Beijing. Mom said my uncle was talented. When we were in high school, the so-called "talented" was to take the exam. Because of this "talent", I have almost no other skills.
After the boy left, I stared at the meat cake for a long time. I try to recall how many years I haven't eaten it.
Meat cake is one of the traditional dishes that best represent my hometown of Macheng County, Hubei Province. As long as he is a Macheng person, you have to ask him "what is the best thing in your hometown", and what he blurts out must be "meat cake", without a second of hesitation.
The production process of meat cake is to dice and mince the fresh fish and pork after the thorn, then beat into a pulp, accompanied by a certain proportion of sweet potato flour, a little green onion, ginger, garlic, salt and other condiments, the large ball of thick paste is laid flat in a circular cage drawer, poured with a layer of egg yolk, steamed on the pot for 30 minutes, and eaten out of the cage. The general way to eat is to let it cool and cut a large piece, and then cut it into small strips of two inches long, one inch wide and half a finger thick, and make it into various dishes, steaming, boiling, frying and frying.
Regarding the origin of meat cakes, there is a saying on the Internet that during the Spring and Autumn Warring States period, the king of Chu liked to eat fish, but he was often stuck in the throat by fish thorns, so he was greatly displeased. There was a Macheng chef in the palace who stabbed the fish and made it into a meat cake to be offered. The king of Chu was very happy to eat, and meat cake was passed down as a Famous dish of Chu for more than 2,000 years. This legend is full of loopholes - first, the name of Macheng City began in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, and the establishment of the county system was as late as the Sui Kai Emperor's period, how could there be a "Macheng Chef" in the Chu King's Palace? Second, if the King of Chu does not like fish bones, and the chef can pull out the fish when cooking, why bother making meat cakes? Third, sweet potato flour, one of the main ingredients for making meat cakes, belongs to the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period, which belongs to "this thing should only be in heaven". Sweet potatoes were introduced to China and widely cultivated around the end of the sixteenth century, of course, the red flour used to make meat cakes can also be replaced by potato flour, but potatoes were introduced to China as late as the seventeenth century.
Folk dishes from all over China, but those who are a little famous, are actually mostly related to poverty, and are unlikely to come from the imperial kitchens or high-gate households. Because of poverty, it will carefully cook a limited amount of good ingredients and make them into delicious and easy-to-preserve foods, such as China's poor mountainous areas, which are generally good at making all kinds of pickled, waxed, smoked foods, bacon, ham, smoked fish and the like. The same goes for meat cakes.
My hometown of Macheng County, the birthplace of the Jute Uprising and the Red Fourth Army in 1927, has a glorious name called "Old Revolutionary Area", and the disgraceful title is "National Poor County", and it cannot take off this poor hat for many years. When I was a teenager, in the 1970s and 1980s, even among county residents, eating meat was a luxury. At that time, meat tickets were required, and I remember that our family of four could only buy two pounds of pork a month, and only about one or two days a week could eat meat dishes.
This bit of meat can usually be dealt with, but it is not enough to use it in the New Year. In that year, people were heavy, and there were many relatives and friends in the New Year, and when they came home, they could not let people go out hungry, and they always had to come up with some decent dishes to entertain, and two pounds of meat were enough to entertain guests during the month. So I don't know which local high-ranking person, starting from the Year of the Monkey, Ma Yue, came up with a way to make meat cakes. I think the best thing about meat cake is that it is similar to magic - it turns a small pork into a large meat cake, but the taste is no less than or even more than eating meat directly.
How many pounds of meat cake can be made with a pound of pork, I have not calculated, it seems that there is no fixed standard, in short, a lot, I think more than ten times it. Meat cake in the largest proportion of course is the most worthless sweet potato flour, followed by fish (Hubei is known as the "province of a thousand lakes", the natural environment in the 1970s and 1980s is good, our county is also lakes, rivers, ponds dotted with dots, fish is not lacking, do not need to rely on tickets, as long as there is money in the market to buy casually, the key problem is that everyone has less money, so it is not often eaten), the main ingredient with the smallest proportion is naturally pork. It is reasonable to say that this thing should be called amaranth cake (Hubei people call sweet potatoes amaranth), but the word "苕" is generally used to scold people in our place, for example, someone is a "amaranth", so it cannot be used; it should also be called fish cake, but fish is not a rare thing in the local area, and yellow-mouthed children can catch a few with a bamboo pole, showing the essence of this thing. So it's called meat cake.
In our hometown, making meat cakes, also known as "chopped meat cakes", is a major event during the Spring Festival in every household, just like the slaughter of pigs in rural areas around Yunnan. The meat cake is generally chopped on the twenty-fourth day of the Waxing Moon, and the so-called "twenty-four, fish bones" can only be started after the New Year and the sacrifice of the god of vesta. The meat cake project is still relatively grand, the meat cake to manage the whole month is enough to eat, just the use of materials to get several large pots, of which bighead carp (we call "fat head fish", the head is big and fat, but the meat is rougher, cooking is not delicious, it is suitable for meat cake) there are dozens of pounds. Usually, in the family, most of the father manages to scale the fish, cut the meat, chop the mud, and beat the pulp, and the mother manages the ingredients and steaming, but in our family, my father is purely a foodie, and there is nothing in the kitchen, so after the fish is bought back, the rest of the things are handled by my mother.
Every year on the day of chopping meat cakes, it is the most honest time for me and my brother, and we definitely don't go crazy everywhere. From the beginning of the morning when my mother began to kill fish and scales, our brothers squatted in the kitchen doorway, staring blankly, occasionally going out for a walk, and would quickly run back, as if they were not doing their duty as "overseers", and the meat cakes made would suddenly disappear. Four or five hours passed, and near noon, the happiest time of the year came—fresh meat cakes coming out of the basket. At that moment, the fog was steaming, the room was full of flesh, the corners of the mouth were salivating, and the immortals wanted to die. My mother moved the steamed meat cake to the board, divided it into four pieces with a kitchen knife, then cut a small piece from a corner, and then cut it into finger-sized pieces with thick blades and distributed them to me and my brother. We greedily and carefully chewed these small pieces of meat cake, and by the time we finished eating and wanted it again, my mother had already put away the rest of the meat cake and took it for refrigeration. For the next few days, I will not be able to eat meat cakes, and I will have to wait until the Chinese New Year's Eve Chinese New Year's Eve meal and the first lunar month.
The meat cake that just came out of the cage is the most delicious, that is called a fresh and tender tender, and then eaten later, in fact, it is "old goods", and the taste is far less than the moment when it was just out of the basket. When I was a child, I always thought, why not eat the meat cake in one go when it is just steamed and it is best to eat? You have to wait until you are aged before eating slowly.
At that time, there was no refrigerator at home, and the way to refrigerate meat cakes was to boil a basin of hot water and let them cool, cut the steamed meat cakes into large pieces and soak them in cold water, and go to the cold water to fish when they needed to eat. The water is changed every day to make sure it is clean. The winter in Hubei, especially in the mountainous areas of Eastern Hubei, is very cold, and the temperature in the waxing moon and the first month is mostly around zero degrees, so that the preserved meat cakes can be deteriorated for about a month.
The New Year's Eve is a great competition for the quality of meat cakes from each family. Generally speaking, when you go to a relative's house or a particularly good friend's house to visit the New Year, in addition to receiving the owner's cigarette candy, you can also eat a small bowl of meat cake (a few small slices boiled in water, with green onions floating on it). In this way, after a few days, there are many meat cakes in the stomach, you can be a judge of the food competition, relatives and friends gather, and the tasting of each meat cake has become a hot topic - whose meat cake is made of real ingredients, whose meat cake tastes good, whose meat cake is too watery (fish and meat are put less, fooling people), and so on.
Throughout the first month, meat cakes are the protagonists of the table. Feel free to eat a big table at any house, how many plates and how many bowls, other dishes can be no, a large pot of meat cake is a must. When the meat cake is served, it is also the climax of the whole meal. As long as it is a Macheng person, they are all experts in tasting meat cakes - first of all, look at the color, can not be too white, too white to show that the proportion of sweet potato flour is large, fish and meat are put less, the best color is slightly dark, white and red; secondly, with chopsticks, good meat cakes must have a little tenacity, a clip is broken, can not be clipped in the bowl of meat cakes to explain the comparison of "water"; finally tasted with the mouth, must be tender and chewy, a taste that is difficult to describe in words - in short, you have to eat the "content" to call the meat cake. Eating in that year and month, the most important thing is "real", sometimes eat a little fish bones or meat residue in the meat cake, obviously the host's family is not fine enough to leave when chopping the meat cake, but the guests often do not mind, but will give a thumbs up: this is the real material!
Although they were poor at that time, but the economic conditions of each family were still high, for example, in the county town, ordinary workers' families are definitely not as good as cadre families, chopping meat cakes during the New Year, can not be as strong as cadre families (not so many meat tickets), so that the meat cakes are certainly not as "real" as cadre families, but the taste can not be bad, which has to work hard in other aspects, such as carefully mixing the proportion of onions, ginger, garlic, salt, pepper, but also to make a good taste. Some also chopped the water chestnut into riga, and the flavor is very unique. All kinds of tricks in short. This matter is sloppy, it is related to the reputation of the housewives of each family, the meat cake is done well, the housewife of the family will be exaggerated for a month, and relatives and friends will have face when they visit the door.