When it comes to snacks, what figures come to mind? Is it potato chips and shrimp strips, beef jerky and pork ribs, or jelly lollipops, or melon seeds and peanut pistachios? In order to facilitate the "delicious dogs" to feast on their mouths, Chongqing has released a "Chongqing Snack Map", listing the representative snacks of various districts and counties, and Dachang Snow Jujube in Wushan County is one of them.
It is said to be "jujube", but this jujube is not another jujube, and Dachang snow jujube has nothing to do with fruit. Dachang snow jujube is a traditional snack with a history of hundreds of years in Wushan County, because of its shape like a jujube, eight or nine centimeters long, two or three centimeters in diameter, the surface of the white powder clothing, such as frost like snow, so the name of snow jujube, is evaluated as: "Eight sides of the exquisite body like snow, crispy on the outside and crispy mouth." "Dachang snow jujube, with a skin as white as jade, no impurities, the inner silver wire full of belly, the characteristics of melting in the mouth, giving people a sweet, crisp and refreshing feeling."
Dachang snow jujube is made of glutinous rice, honey, etc. as raw materials, and the process is complex, and it is processed through more than 30 processes before and after. The selection of materials is exquisite, the production cycle is long, even the glutinous rice must be soaked for more than a month, and then it is slurred, cut, oiled, sugared, and finally fixed with white sugar and refined glutinous rice flour .
As a snack, how can Wushan snow jujube be passed down for a hundred years? The story has to start from the early days of the Republic of China.
According to the Records of Wushan County: At the beginning of the Republic of China, the warlords were fighting, a unit was stationed in the ancient town of Dachang in Wushan, and Liu Jisheng, the local "Yue LaiXing" Zhai Guo shop owner, treated a soldier, and in order to repay the favor, the soldier passed on the ancestral secret recipe for the production of snow dates to him. Liu Jisheng called this snow-white pastry "snow jujube", and opened a "snow jujube shop" in Dachang Xinglong Street, exclusively producing and operating snow dates, which soon became a must in Wushan.
Later, the Dachang Yipeng family learned the production method of snow jujube from Liu Jisheng's son and taught apprentices, so there were more shops producing snow dates, and gradually became a well-known specialty food in Wushan and even the Three Gorges River Basin, and exported to all parts of the country and even Southeast Asia. By the early 1980s, Liu Jisheng's descendant Liu Dayou and others organized the production of "Goddess Brand Snow Jujube" was rated as "Sichuan Province's Local Famous Excellent Sugar Products" and listed as a banquet food in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
Source: Hualong Network, Shanye Chongqing