Grandpa told me the story about Xiaogan Hemp Sugar here

"Xiaogan Hemp Candy" is a well-known local specialty of Xiaogan, and its craftsmanship is said to have been passed down in Babu Village, Wolong Township, Xiaonan District. According to the local elderly, during the Tang and Song dynasties in China, Babu Village was located in the middle and lower reaches of the Linghe River, relying on the convenience of water transportation, and could directly transport goods to Hankou. Among them, there is a family specializing in making candy for a living.

The man of this family, whose name is Li, is Li Xietang, because every year from the early winter to the Qingming Festival, he will boil some homemade small sugar cubes for locals to marry or hold banquets. Because it is an order production, and the local is a family, so the people who buy these sugar cubes began to call Li Xietang "like sugar", because, shouting smoothly, the local people are used to it naturally. Since then, the origin of sugar has gradually spread.

After nearly three generations of inheritance, the process of making candy has developed very maturely. However, due to the small number of specific customers who need hemote, relying on the local market is far from increasing sales. Therefore, Li Xiwang, the third generation of the Li family, took a boat to Hankou with his uncle who ran the transportation, and brought the boiled candy to Hankou to sell, so that back and forth for two or three years, the Li family could not only barely survive because of this craft, but also expand production.

Until the end of one summer, because Li Xiwang's father was ill, he almost spent all the family's savings, and in order to treat his father, he had to boil sugar cubes in advance in order to make more money to completely cure his father's disease. However, the weather is hot, and I am worried that the sugar cubes that have been boiled out will melt before they reach Hankou, and it will not only be difficult to look good, but also not easy to sell.

What to do? If you don't produce these sweets, you won't have the money to treat your father's illness? If you don't go to Hankou, you can't sell it? Going to Hankou will be difficult to sell because of the weather? At this time, his uncle, who had accompanied him to Hankou many times, gave him an idea, that is, to put the produced sugar into the fried dried cooked sesame seeds, so that he would not worry about the melting of the sugar.

Good idea! Li Xiwang couldn't help but be happy about this, and he kept cheering himself up: "It seems that my father's illness has been saved"!

After arriving in Hankou, Li Xiwang found that sesame seeds and xi sugar had been combined, and originally planned to make xi candy out and sell it, but it was impossible. In order to sell the candy as soon as possible and change the money to treat his father's illness, he could only make a mistake. Old customers who are accustomed to buying Li Xiwang xi sugar, at first did not think that there was anything special about this kind of candy, so they bought some and tried to eat it, but what they did not expect was that after the customer ate it, he felt that the sugar with sesame seeds was more delicious.

In this way, the first unexpected combination of sugar and sesame seeds gave birth to a new food - hemp sugar. Why is it called hemp sugar? Instead of sugar hemp? This is because sesame seeds are on the outside of sugar, so it is called hemp sugar. There is another reason, which is to call it smoothly.

Of course, the original Xiaogan hemp sugar was not as thin and crisp as it is today, but the result of continuous development and innovation. There is a small episode here, that is, when Li Xiwang was secretly happy that he was about to sell out of the sesame-sticky candy, a customer turned back and told Li Xiwang that such a candy was delicious to eat, but it was too thick to taste. As a result, for this reason, there are very few returns of buying ta hi candy.

On the way back, Xiwang remembered that his father wanted to eat shortbread, so he went around the Hankou market to buy them. However, due to missing the morning market, he did not buy shortbread. Near noon, in order to hurry, he and his uncle had to buy a few burnt cakes to fill their hunger. On the way, Li Xiwang was rowing a boat and eating burnt cakes at the same time, and he remembered the fact that customers said that the sugar was too thick. When he saw sesame seeds sticking to both sides of the cake, he had the idea of cutting the candy into strips. Later, in order to facilitate transportation, it was made into a half-moon-shaped block, which is the process of the evolution of hemp sugar into hemp sugar, and the process of hemp sugar evolving from a strip type to a half-moon shaped block.

According to the old people of Babukou, the craft of sugar making is generally passed down by the artists by word of mouth, and it is necessary to follow certain family rules and family training, such as: "Pass on the long and do not pass on the young, pass on the male to the female" and so on. With the development of history, the change of people's traditional concepts, in the selection of people, there is not so strict family rules and family discipline to speak of, but in terms of production techniques, it is still adhering to word of mouth, and pursuing the combination of natural time, geography, people and ecological elements, perhaps, these unique craft traditions are the reasons why Xiaogan hemp sugar production craftsmanship has a long history.