——Shenzhen 7,000 years, there are stories you don't know
https://image.netwin.cn/cms/2021/10/25-22-06-193393.mp3
【Anchor】
Liu Youyang (Chief Reporter of Reading Innovation/Shenzhen Business Daily)
【Column Introduction】
Discover Shenzhen is an influential cultural weekly magazine under the Umbrella/Shenzhen Business Daily, dedicated to excavating the unknown history of Shenzhen, and has been popular with the public since its opening. Now we will make the content of "Discover Shenzhen Weekly" sound, 5 minutes a day, and tell you a little knowledge about Shenzhen's history, folklore and culture.
【Contents of this issue】
Many People in Shenzhen have encountered such a problem: they want to bring some local specialties home during the New Year's Festival, but they don't know what to bring. Shenzhen seems to be a city without local specialties. In fact, Shenzhen not only has local specialties, but also rich in products, dazzling, today to talk about fried oil horns and steamed dumplings.
Fuyong fried oil horn, Songgang wrapped steamed dumplings
◎ Liao Honglei Peng quan
Fried oil horn, commonly known as "horn boy". Many of the ancestors around Fuyong were immigrants from the Song and Yuan dynasties, bringing with them the custom of eating dumplings in the north along the way. "Oil horn" is derived from "fried dumplings". The harmonic pronunciation of "dumplings" is "jiaozi", which refers to the "alternation of the child time" between the old year and the new year in the Chinese New Year's Eve. The ancients attached great importance to this "intercourse" moment, which is not only a node of the celestial object, but also a ardent expectation of people for the future good times. So the villagers made dumplings from the rice harvested in the new sickle, thanking the gods and ancestors for their protection, and at the same time comforting themselves. In this way, the "non-dumpling" food customs such as fried oil horns have been inherited in the south after hundreds of years of continuous evolution. Making fried oil horns and sugar rings is both difficult and not difficult. It is not difficult, and then the family can do it. The difficulty is complicated. In the early days, there was no flour, I had to go to the grain to grind rice at home, and then use the rice flour to make rice flour, put the sieved rice flour (later with flour), add sugar (the proportion of one pound of flour and half a pound of sugar), eggs (two) and lard (a little), mix with warm boiling water to knead into a soft and hard moderate powder ball, and then roll the powder into thin slices, use a small glass to press out the round skin like a dumpling skin for later; take peanuts, white sesame seeds and fry them, crush them, add coconut, sugar, and white sesame seeds, mix well, wrap them into the flour (noodles) skin, fold and knead tightly, This becomes a wrapped half-finished corner boy. Pick up the oil wok again, fry the horns to a slight golden brown and fish it out. Then fry the second batch and the third batch of horns, and wait until the original first batch of oil horns are cooled and then put back to fry them, so that the fried oil horns are more crispy.
In the past, when frying oil horns in the countryside, they often combined snacks such as sugar rings, fried heaps, and loose eggs together. Therefore, the people of the village brought several relatives or neighbors to their homes to do it in a lively and lively way. The housewives together to cut the grain, step on the mortar, scoop the flour, peel the peanuts, fry the sesame seeds, wrap the horns, and then come to your house to help fry, and after frying, it is my turn to help fry. The house was full of oil horn incense, and the whole house was full of laughter.
"Wrapping rice and steaming dumplings", making preparations five or six days before the Dragon Boat Festival. First cut the rice dumpling leaves, some to the river to cut two or three feet long, three inches wide, the leaf edge is full of thorns of the reed leaves, some to the bamboo forest to pick the hemp bamboo leaves larger than the palm, some cut the mangosteen leaves, reed leaves or winter leaves, etc.; the harvested rice dumpling leaves cut off the leaf thorns, soaked in water bubbles for a day and night, and then boiled off the bitter grass smell, cut into a certain size specification, dry (now supermarkets sell processed rice dumpling leaves). The next day, soak glutinous rice, japonica rice, mung beans, red beans, mushrooms, shrimp rice, prepare salted egg yolks, marinate pork belly and other ingredients, and then wrap the above ingredients with rice dumpling leaves, conditionally add roasted meat, ham and other fillings, tie tightly with water grass, put into a large wok and cook for more than three or five hours, and then make a salty dumpling. If you make water dumplings, you also need to soak the grass and wood ash with water bubbles, after precipitation filter ash, take "gray water" soaked glutinous rice to steam, so that the gray water dumplings are also called water dumplings. Gray water dumplings have no filling, and at most only a small piece of "su mu" or a few red dates are wrapped in steamed rice dumplings, and then dipped in white sugar or syrup to eat, so they are also called sweet rice dumplings.
Songgang rice dumplings are divided according to shape, and there are two kinds of triangular rice dumplings and long rice dumplings. In the past, in order to facilitate the distinction between salty dumplings and sweet dumplings, people wrapped sweet dumplings (枧水粽) into triangular dumplings, and wrapped the salty dumplings into long strips. Because the long rice dumplings range from 5 inches to 8 inches per strip, the diameter is 3 to 4 inches, the capacity is large, and the filling can be put in more, usually half a pound to about 2 pounds per rice dumpling.
Songgang Subdistrict belongs to the Pearl River estuary system, the rivers are staggered, and the history records that the indigenous people are mostly "water troops" and duck farmers. The "water army" is the descendant and subordinate sailors of the famous Southern Song Dynasty general Wen Tianxiangbu who fell to the Songgang and Fuyong areas of Bao'an County after the martyrdom of Linglingyang against the Yuan. For hundreds of years, following the customs of the water army, the Dragon Boat Festival, after paying homage to Qu Yuan and Wen Tianxiang, held a grand dragon boat race on the Maozhou River to show the majesty of the water army. "Grilling (rowing) dragon boats" and eating fragrant dumplings are customs that have been passed down in Songgang for more than 600 years, of which the "dragon boat racing custom" was announced by the Shenzhen Municipal and Guangdong Provincial Governments as a municipal and provincial intangible cultural heritage protection list in 2007.
In Hecun, Xin'an Street, there is a unique "Qiu Poppy Square Dumpling", the raw materials and methods of zongzi are the same as other zongzi, except that the leaves of the zongzi are called "qiu poppy", which is similar to the Hakka "reed leaf". The Shanghe Qiu Qiu Fang Dumpling was selected as a Bao'an District-level Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Project.
(The author Liao Honglei is the honorary president and folklore scholar of Shenzhen Local Culture and Art Research Association, and Peng Quanmin is the supervisor of Shenzhen Heritage Protection Association and an expert on cultural relics protection)
Review: Tan Lugang