Author: Elegant Beard (Wu Yonggang-Max)
The annual customs of Jilin City are based on the habits of the flag people, and are constantly integrated into the customs of immigrants in Guannei such as Jinjilu. In the seemingly hectic and festive preparations for the New Year, the old Jilin people have both handy work and will encounter matters that are afraid of the end, such as steaming noodles, which has caused the old Jilin people to feel headaches.
Rao is usually considered a Manchu word, but in the Ming Dynasty Yang Shen (1488-1559) wrote the "Sheng'an Waiji" said that "the Beijing people Hubobo, the southern people blackmailed for grinding", I think the word 饽饽 has a profound origin, and the meaning is not unique to the Manchu language. In Jilin City, rao is purely a sign of Manchu food customs: it refers to all pasta such as steaming and roasting, which can refer to staple foods or pastries - not only wheat noodles and various types of sticky rice noodles, but also dead noodles and hair noodles. However, the development of rao began with sticky gluttony - originally rao was a food made by the qi people from common grains such as yellow rice, steamed and roasted, and wheat flour became the main raw material of rao should be a new habit gradually formed in the Qing Dynasty.
Jujube Mountain
Since the late Qing Dynasty, the wave of immigrants who broke into the Kanto region has caused many immigrants from wheat-producing areas to move into the urban and rural areas of Jilin Province. Because the climate and soil around Jilin are only suitable for grain production, wheat has not been able to be promoted in a large area due to low yields, resulting in flour is always the so-called "fine grain" (for details, see humble Jilin Spring Festival customs: frozen dumplings). After arriving in Jilin, the immigrants had no choice but to follow the customs of the countryside and accept grain as the main food. However, the Spring Festival involves the worship of ancestors and gods, and the traditional feelings rooted in the heart can no longer be perfunctory for expediency. It is recorded that on Chinese New Year's Eve, the people in the city who are engaged in business or well-off families usually set up offering tables in the courtyard in advance, put incense burners and wax tables, offer elephant trunk steamed buns, jujube mountains, and three glasses of wine ("Jilin Folk Customs in the Past"), and the parents lead the men in the family to perform the ceremony of welcoming the god of wealth. In the solemn ceremony, noodles such as steamed buns and jujube mountains appeared.
Since the middle and late Qing Dynasty, Chinese has eliminated Manchu and become the common language of Jilin City. After seeing the Han industrial and commercial households in the city to worship the gods, they can often "make a wide source of wealth", and after figuring out the reasons, they gradually accepted the "noodles are rich", so in the process of the busy year, in addition to the original sticky noodles "rice cakes", they also began to prepare dumplings (noodles) and dumplings. So much so that in the late Qing Dynasty, the compilation and revision of the "Jilin Tongzhi" and the Republic of China's compilation and revision of the "Yongji County Chronicle" invariably recorded "(around the beginning of the year) steamed cake with sugar-wrapped noodles, known as steamed dumplings" as the annual customary characteristics of Jilin City. In the busy year proverb, it is also agreed that "(WaxIng Moon) Twenty-Eight, Hair the Face" is a must-do job.
Cooked to make skillful, because in the old days, the people of Jilin City staple grain, living at home rarely eat wheat noodles, even if they eat, but also "dead noodles" noodles, dumplings mainly. Due to the lack of practical tradition, the noodles and alkali have always been regarded as a difficult cooking technique by the "smart women". At the same time, once the production of pasta is lost, no matter how large the alkali is small, the final work will appear the visual effect and failure taste of "bumping the bar", so when preparing offerings and "chewing grain" in the past busy years, many families in Jilin City will "ask people to send noodles and steamed steamed steamed buns" to ensure that the noodles are foolproof, and families with good conditions even "invite the noodle master of the restaurant to come to the house to make noodles and make alkali" ("Jilin Folk Customs in the Past").
In Yongchang Hutong, where I lived in my childhood, the Jin family and the Peng family, who had the strongest noodle making skills, often helped their neighbors make noodles on the 28th of the waxing moon. The grandmother of the Jin family is a native of Harbin and learned the skills of making pasta from her Russian neighbor before marriage; the grandmother of the Peng family comes from a large family in Shandong, and her hometown is a famous wheat-producing area, and the technology of making pasta is excellent. Unlike their neighbors, these two families make noodles before the Spring Festival to make "jujube mountains" - from large plates of dragons and phoenixes, small to flowers, birds, fish and insects, and colorful pieces of flowers and flowers can be called works of art. The production process can not only attract children to see the fresh, even the adult neighborhood, there are many people crowded in the house to watch the scene.
As flour becomes more and more common in the daily diet of the people in urban and rural Jilin Province, and the continuous popularization of noodles and alkali technology, the "steamed dumplings" before the Spring Festival have gradually become as important as the frozen dumplings - kneading the good noodles and making steamed buns filled with bright red dates, or pinching, rolling slices, kneading sugar triangles, or wrapping red bean fillings into chengsha buns. Before steaming in the cage drawer, if the color is monotonous, it will also be dipped in the edible color with chopsticks, and decorations such as red dots will be pointed, drawn, and painted...
Among the various noodle chewing grains during the Spring Festival, the most popular noodle dish of the people of Jilin City is called "Xiao Rao". The small dumplings are smaller than the white bean buns, and when they are wrapped, they will be stuffed into the dumpling mold to set the shape. After the stereotype, the small dumplings are gently "bumped", and this work is also named "bumping". With the help of the concave and convex lines in the mold, the bean bun blank is squeezed, showing a beautiful appearance such as almonds and mooncakes, and the auspicious patterns and words engraved by the mold are printed, so that the small dumplings are rich in a layer of festive atmosphere.
In addition to the appearance, the filling of the small dumplings is also diverse, in addition to sesame sugar, red bean puree, some families will even wrap in hawthorn cake granules, pork fat particles, lard residue and other fillings, so that the small dumplings in the material is not rich in the era of hidden more surprises. Deliberately blurring the boundaries between staple foods and dim sum, small dumplings with elegant appearance and rich fillings have become extremely popular foods during the Spring Festival.
After the various pasta dishes are steamed, they are also frozen like frozen dumplings, using the outdoor natural refrigerator to freeze solid, and then poured into a tank or cabinet for the New Year's day. During the Chinese New Year, because the dumplings only need to be eaten through water (tēng), it is more convenient than boiling frozen dumplings, so it is highly respected by the main stove people in the family during the Spring Festival when entertainment and rest are supreme. Today, although the food during the Spring Festival is greatly abundant, thanks to the convenience of eating, as well as the harmonic effect of hair (wealth) and steaming (steaming), it is in line with the people's expectations for the New Year, so the custom of making noodles and steaming before the Spring Festival is still retained by most families in life.
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