In the northern Zhejiang region and the countryside of Jiangnan Water Town, there are many traditional foods, all of which are closely related to traditional customs and habits. For example, meat stuffing, muffins, rice dumplings, etc., where encounter relatives to build a house on the beam, into the house wine, sons, daughters betrothed, marriage, children full moon wine, etc., you must do a lot of flour food, that is, the glutinous rice dumplings mentioned above, there are fresh meat fillings, there are bean paste fillings, as well as brown sugar pine cakes, fresh meat dumplings, bean paste dumplings, etc. These powder foods are still circulating, and the kind of food to be said today has not been seen for more than twenty years, and it is estimated that it is about to disappear from the sight of ordinary people, and it is gradually moving away from the taste buds on the tip of people's tongues. It was a food with good color, fragrance and exquisite workmanship—rice flowers.
In many places, popcorn is added to sesame seeds and glued into pieces with maltose, which is called rice cake. There are also some places where rice is fried and soaked in sugar water, also called rice. Here, we make a kind of food made of glutinous rice water milled flour and made of oil to make a flower-shaped food, called rice flowers.
The farmhouse customs here are very exquisite. Before the daughter gets married, she will ask the tailor to come to the house to make a wedding dress for the bride-to-be for several days, and the clothes are newly made all year round. I will invite the hoop cooper to come to the house to make a few days, from the toilet, the foot bucket, the bucket to the bucket of dung that carries water and pours vegetables, just like the so many buckets sung in the Yue opera "Nine Pounds Girl to the Bucket Name". I also want to ask the master who plays cotton to come to the house to play a few quilts. Make seven or eight or even a dozen new quilts. In the dowry, there are several things that are not married at the time of marriage, that is, "pulling up the straw stool" and "the mat pillow", before the first summer after marriage, the mother's family should give the married son-in-law's family "sending the summer", "pulling the straw stool", "the mat pillow", and there are many baskets of rice flowers. When the rice flowers arrived at the son-in-law's house, they would go door to door to distribute them to the villagers.
After my two sisters got married, they both made rice flowers.
Before the summer, listen to the weather forecast, pick a continuous sunny day, and invite a few younger neighbor aunts. Put hundreds of pounds of glutinous rice with water, soak it, grind it into water mill powder with a machine, and then use hot water to stir the water-ground glutinous rice flour placed in a large powder bucket (like a child's bathtub) and stir it evenly, several young aunts, often roll up their sleeves, around the bib, pull up the bun, repeatedly rub the powder, hot water hot powder, steaming, little aunts powder face, sweat, nose wings between the eyebrows, will also be stained with some glutinous rice flour, especially playful and good-looking. This is just the raw powder of the head pot. Knead the dough on a wood stove, use a steamer, steamer. After steaming, and then use the powder bucket, knead the cooked flour balls, the glutinous rice flour, flexible, are driven out, it is completely dependent on the arm strength of the little aunt wrist strength, the powder is very hot, very sticky, this kneading of the cooked powder is not only a hard work, but also the technical work on the hand. Then use a large rolling pin, roll out into thin skins, and use a kitchen knife to cut into strips of about two centimeters. Then use a small rolling stick to roll out the glutinous rice noodles, and then make the noodles into a flower with six petals. The flower hearts are gluted together by the glutinous nature of the glutinous rice itself. The whole shape is actually more like a butterfly with its wings spread. The prepared rice flowers are placed on a clean reed curtain and exposed to the sun. These hundreds of pounds of flour, hundreds of rice flowers, bamboo curtains on the grain field, reed curtains, silkworm plaques, are all full of rice flowers, full of rice flowers.
The rice flowers that are gradually dried off the moisture slowly whiten and slowly harden up, turning into translucent rice blossoms. In the evening, it is necessary to carefully put it away and move to the house to avoid moisture. Also handle it gently to avoid breaking the petals.
The next day, it was the key. Pour twenty or thirty pounds of vegetable oil into a large oil pot, boil over a fierce fire, then boil for a few minutes, remove the raw flavor of the vegetable oil, and then slowly cool it down, to about 60 °, and then keep this temperature on a low heat, the rice flowers are poured into the oil pot, fried into a golden brown, the petals of the rice flowers will be fried into a bulging bubble like a goldfish, but it cannot be broken, the whole rice flower is so bulging with large and small bubbles, it is fried, and it is cooled with elongated bamboo chopsticks. The rice flowers that just came out of the pot are very crispy and very refreshing to eat, just like the current potato chips, because they are glutinous rice flour, and the potato chips are several grades higher, and because the shape is like a flower, like a butterfly, it is not comparable to the potato chips.
The fried rice, golden brown and crunchy, needs to be carefully stacked in a basket covered with a clean film, which is also wrapped in film to avoid moisture. Basket by basket, you need to pack more than a dozen baskets.
There are many waterways in the water village, and I like to use boats to walk the waterways, and send "pulling straw stools", "mat cool pillows", rice flowers, and a leg of pork to my daughter's in-laws.
The rice blossoms, which have lost their memories on my taste buds, still have a deep taste in my memory.
