Kang Shuying
My hometown is located in Weiyuan County, under the Laojun Mountain, which is beautiful in the south and clear waters. Surrounded on three sides by a plain green field, surrounded by willows and meandering streams in front of the gate, it is only a mile away from the city. The Baling Bridge, which flies over the Wei River, is a must-pass place to enter the city, and there are many oil houses and water mills hidden in the Cuilin farmhouses along the coast.
When I was a child, I remember that at the end of the year, when all the farm affairs were over, the family always had to squeeze a few cylinders of flax oil. When the Spring Festival, the biggest event that the "little people" have been waiting for for a long time, they can eat fried oil cakes, but only to relieve their hunger. At that time, the seeds were unchanged, the wheat yield was surprisingly low, and for reasons such as climate and soil, every household was mainly based on grains, and eating white noodles was a very luxurious thing. I can't forget the kind of steamed "Wawa noodles" made of beans and jade wheat that have a sour taste, and although I eat it every day, I still feel very fragrant. That's all due to the fact that young people have a strong appetite. People often have no choice when they have no choice, because of the lack of dependence on their stomachs, they will also have a fondness for the flavor of the box.
Seven- and eight-year-old people, in addition to salivating over the fried oil cake that can only be eaten during the New Year's Festival, there are even dreams of the butterfly-shaped oil fruit. That's made up of three colors. Red is honey noodles, yellow is oil noodles, green is spinach water mixed noodles, they are rolled out separately and cut into strips stacked together, after the art of knife work, fished out of the oil pot, one by one like butterflies that want to fly, the colors are bright and dazzling. Compared with the oil cake oil fruit, after the annual summer harvest, the taste of the new wheat flour oil cake baked from the large pot is much inferior. Although it does not look very beautiful, it still lights up the eyes of the children, and it is a rarity in their mouths. As for the hot noodle oil cake, it seems to be a blank in the memory of childhood. Exactly what the reason is, I still can't say exactly. Maybe it's oil, maybe it's inconvenient to store, and in a large family with a large population, it is only used to temporarily entertain close relatives and friends who have come from afar.
Indeed, hot dough cakes must be eaten while hot. Just out of the pot it is soft and crispy, a chopstick down, creaking, golden, is a very enjoyable flavor snack.
To put it intriguing terms, I have never tasted authentic hot noodle oil cakes cooked in wheat straw and large iron pots (wheat straw iron pots are fast and evenly heated). I remember that in the 1990s, on the hot kang in my hometown, my sister-in-law used a large iron pot to burn wheat grass and boiled me a plate of oil cakes. At that time, it was very delicious, and I still remember her enthusiasm, but I always felt that it was not as crispy and fluffy as I said. Even so, it became a favorite in my diet. As you get older, your appetite gets worse and worse, and your food intake becomes smaller and smaller, but as long as you have hot noodle oil cakes, you will eat more and more.
The second time I tasted authentic hot noodle oil cakes, it was the fourth year of the new century. It was made at my sister's house, and my niece and daughter-in-law knew about my "mouth addiction". She made the scalded noodles into long strips, cut them into several pieces, and then rolled them one by one. Sprinkle the rolled noodles with bitter beans (a spice), drip the oil evenly, roll it into a stick, then stand up and press it into a lump, roll out into a round and thin dough, put it in a hot pot, sprinkle oil while burning, and only turn it over for a minute or two, and a golden, fragrant oil cake will be burned.
The third time I ate the oil cake baked by the old pot stove roasted wheatgrass was in recent years. The niece's daughter spent more than 3,000 yuan to install a hearing aid in Lintao, which needs to be maintained once a month or two. Every time she came, she would bring me a lot of hot oil cakes. In order to be soft and refreshing, she added a lot of oil, so that the "rotten leather jacket" praised by the old people became a "broken robe". The crumbs are crushed, but the taste does not reduce the "masterpiece" of the niece and daughter-in-law of the year, and I can eat a large (estimated) amount.
In fact, the key to the height of the hot noodle oil cake is not the technical content, but the scale of the oil is its key. Three hot noodle oil cakes in different periods were "born" in the socio-economic background of different stages, and they naturally left the imprint of reform and opening up from "crossing the river by feeling the stones" to accumulating experience and rapid development. Geese pass by, people leave traces. There is almost nothing in the world that has not left a trace. Whether it is from the 1940s to eat the oil cake oil fruit once a year, to today, 60 years later, as long as there is wheat grass and a large iron pot, no matter who can eat the authentic hot noodle oil cake, as well as a variety of oil steamed buns renovated, all record the great changes of the times.