Sweet potato porridge, a favorite of that era

As soon as autumn enters, there are sweet potatoes sold in the market. Their scarlet skin, the fresh breath of the earth, immediately caught our attention.

My mother said, I'm going to buy a few sweet potatoes and go back and cook you sweet potato porridge.

To be honest, we have long since lost our love of sweet potato porridge as we used to. In today's constant renovation of various diets and endless patterns, it has long lost its former appeal. But the mother has always been obsessed, in her mother's words, no one can change her habits, that is the root of her life.

Come to think of it, for people her age, such words seem to have a profound truth, until now, some old people, when they mention sweet potatoes, have a sense of awe. Once upon a time, when my grandmother was alive, she once told me that one year during the Spring Festival, the family relied on dried sweet potatoes for the New Year. I believe my grandmother's words, but I really can't imagine the scene at that time, and sometimes when I look at the literature, it seems that most of them are described in this way, saying that sweet potatoes have fed a generation.

Leaving aside the historical role of sweet potatoes, just in terms of taste, I think sweet potatoes are still very good. I remember when I was a child, my favorite food was sweet potatoes, and the land in my hometown was also particularly suitable for the growth of sweet potatoes, one by one, the land was arched, and when harvested, a bunch of bunches, a toot, a big surprise.

There are many ways to eat sweet potatoes, and my favorite is to cook sweet potatoes in a large pot. When the pot is opened, lift the lid, and the whole house is filled with the aroma of sweet potatoes. Pick up one, the sweet potato is so soft that you are about to collapse in your hand, and you can't wait to take a bite, it's really sweet. Sometimes a dinner is a pot of boiled sweet potatoes, and the family has a full meal with rob pickles, which is also called pain.

My mother's favorite thing to do at that time was sweet potato porridge, maybe for porridge to be delicious, maybe to save millet, but the porridge cooked by sweet potato and millet tasted really good. In particular, the millet that has just been beaten down on its own land is golden and bright, and it also carries a primitive field atmosphere. And sweet potatoes, as if they were a lotus root that did not stain the mud, made their simplicity noble, and anyway, it was so perfectly combined that it raised our poor childhood.

One year, I went to the countryside with a few companions to collect wind, and at night I stayed at a local hometown home, and he cooked us millet porridge, which contained sweet potatoes and potatoes that I had been missing for a long time. At first, the fellow was afraid that we were not used to it, and said that he was embarrassed, until he saw that we had devoured the bowl clean, and then he did not say anything again. Later, when we heard from our compatriots that during the War of Resistance Against Japan, our soldiers ate such sweet potato porridge to fight the enemy, and we faced up to that kind of food. Later, I wrote in one of my own poems: You hide in history / The days are messy / You can't stop it at all / Your eager desire / Although you are ugly / You are forgotten like a dirt / And you are forgotten again / But you have indeed experienced the wind and frost / Your yellow skin / Where to put it / Also like my simple father and countrymen / Thick family history / Just extend from your roots a little bit...

That year, my mother returned to her hometown to visit her relatives, and when she came back, she brought a few sweet potatoes from her hometown. At dinner, my mother asked us what we wanted to eat, but unexpectedly, our brother said in unison: sweet potato porridge.