This article is transferred from the author | Zhang Dongfang
The onion is available all year round, the wine is everywhere, the feathers are white, it only appears in a short period of autumn, and one taste a day, fleeting, like time.
When we first saw Germany, it was late autumn, and my friend and I drove along the Rhine, and there was no one along the way. My surprise at the time was a bit like the way the male protagonist woke up in the movie "28 Days of Shock" and was alone in an empty world. Slowly, I realized that this was just the norm in Germany after the autumn. The first autumn rain and the first autumn wind of the year suddenly destroyed all the colors and light in the world, and the heavens and the earth were dull. The focus of people's lives shifts from the outdoors to the interior, the heating in the house is fully turned on, the fire in the fireplace is crackling, and the pots and pans in the kitchen have become the theme of life. It was also that autumn that I ate Currywurst. The aftertaste of the mouth made me decisively give up the consideration of vegetarianism. If you can't eat meat in a big bite, how can you survive the gloomy autumn and winter in Germany? Unlike the Germans, the old lady Hannah Loho and her wife, Viena, maintain the habit of eating vegetarian on weekdays and meat on weekends, and they even discipline themselves to the point of eating only vegetable salad and fruit for dinner, and their daily lunch is their meal. Entering autumn, their favorite is pumpkin soup. Pumpkin is a seasonal dish in autumn, the old lady will pick the freshest pumpkin, cut into small pieces, heat the pan under the oil, add the onion, medium heat, wait for it to become transparent color, under the pumpkin, fry until soft, crush with a blender, add coconut water, green onion, low heat, until the pumpkin soup "grunt" bubbling. The creaminess of the pumpkin meat, the tropical flavor of coconut water, the crispness of the green onion, a bowl into the stomach, the body is comfortable, can be described as the comfort of the autumn sun.
And when the family gathers for dinner on weekends, there must be no meat or no joy. Hannah Loch usually makes meat rolls (Rouladen). She would buy slices of meat on the upper leg of the cow' hind legs, sprinkle salt and pepper on the slices, smear them with mustard sauce, and slap the slices with a knife. As for what rolls of bread are in the slices of meat, it varies according to personal preference. When Germans ridicule their love of meat, they use meat rolls as an example: "The bread in the meat is still meat." Hannah Loho will sprinkle the meat slices with lean bacon cubes, onion rings, and sour cucumber strips, until the meat slices are rolled up like a secret scroll, fixed with small wooden sticks, heated, added butter, fried until slightly yellow, and finally pushed the meat rolls into the oven for two hours. The aroma slowly overflowed and burrowed into the corners of the room. In addition to the meat rolls, the old lady will be served with sweet and sour purple cabbage and soft sticky potato balls (Kartoffelknödel). Such a high-carb water plus high fat down, everyone dragged a heavy stomach, fell into the sofa, "a stumbling". However, after an hour, the cake on the table and the aroma of coffee wafting from the kitchen will surely reawaken them. The exception is the youngest grandson, Luca, who loves neither meat nor vegetables, but at cake time, he becomes active and will eat several pieces of crumb cake (Streuselkuchen).
Night fell early, and the son's family patted their stomachs contentedly, like crocodiles after a full meal, and hugged and said goodbye to the old lady. This is the typical German Sunday brab (Sonntagsbraten). On days when there is not enough material abundance, eating meat is not the norm. People work weekdays and have to bake a big chunk of meat in the oven on Sundays. Hannah Loch is from the Rhineland-Palatinate wine route. At the end of World War II, the family of nine was crammed into a three-room house in the Fa-occupied district, with a butcher shop downstairs. In Hannah Loho's memory, on Sundays, the mother always let each child have a slice of pork chop (Schnitzel) wrapped in dry bread crumbs on her plate, even if it was only a small piece. The days are getting better little by little, and the pork chops on the plate are getting bigger and bigger. On Hannah Lohe's fourth or fifth birthday, the gift she received was pork sausages from the butcher shop downstairs. Such birthday gifts were repeated intermittently until she reached adulthood. It was the happiest food memory of childhood. When the children and grandchildren heard Hannah Loho talk about this past, they could not imagine it. To the surprise of the children and grandchildren, it was not only Hannah Loho's sausages, but also Viena's chocolates. Wienne was born in the Ruhr district of North Rhine-Westphalia, a German munitions town during World War II. To escape the bombardment, seven-year-old Viena and her family left their hometown for a farm in rural Bavaria, south, where they spent three years of their childhood. One day after the end of the war, his one-year-old brother Helmut shouted at passing American soldiers, "Army! army! The black American stepped on the brakes and looked at Helmut. The little boy turned around in fright and ran, and slammed his heel on the threshold of his home, and by the time he turned back, the American soldier had taken something out of his pocket, handed it to him, said something similar to "Hi, boy," and turned and left. That day, Viena got his first taste of chocolate. After the war, their father came to pick them up and take them back to the Ruhr area. The farm owner at the time gave them 35 bags of potatoes. This is a figure that Vienna still remembers. On the day they arrived at their hometown, relatives pushed a two-wheeled cart to transport potatoes home. There is always a time when potatoes are eaten. One day, after returning from the outside, the mother kept wiping her tears and worrying: What else can I use to fill the stomachs of seven children today? The mother said at that time: "God's help will always come in the most urgent time" (Wo die Not am größten ist, ist Gottes Hilfe am nächsten). People in despair tend to pin their last hopes on God. At that moment, the doorbell rang and the postman delivered a parcel, not from God, but from Bavaria. There was flour, eggs and bacon inside. Hannah Lojo and Viena experienced material deprivation during and after the war, as well as the "economic miracle" of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960, at the age of 25, Viena owned his first car, an American car. Later, Hannah Loho and Viena met and fell in love, Wiena was a worker in the steel mill, and Hannah Loho mainly took care of her two sons at home. The children's childhood has no hunger, no sorrow. When eating meat became the norm, health and moderation became the new theme, and the amount of meat on the plate became less and less. However, after the sons moved out of their parents' homes, the tradition of eating large meat at Sunday meals was intermittently preserved, just to gather, not just eat. Hannah Loho sometimes makes a dish of her granddaughter Lina's favorite bacon bean (Speckbohnen). Three or five half finger-long beans are wrapped with fat and lean bacon flakes, stir in butter in a hot pan, put onions, wait until they become transparent, put down the bacon beans, fry until golden brown, you can get out of the pot. The lightness of the beans, the fat of the bacon, the lightness of the carobs, the thickness of the bacon, Lina will always make a "hmmm~hmmm" contented sound. It's not just material things that are changing, but also human ideas. For more than a decade, the favorite person to eat bacon beans was the little girl named Lina. Last year, Lina announced to everyone on her thirteenth birthday that she had decided to become a boy and changed her name to Tom. Catholic grandmothers could hardly imagine and understand how a granddaughter could suddenly become a grandson. She was vaguely worried that Tom would be ostracized, but she respected his decision. For more than a year, Hannah Loho still misdirected her grandson for "Lina." What remains unchanged is that the bacon beans made by the grandmother are still the favorite of the grandchildren. For more than thirty years, Hannah Loho has retained a tradition of eating onion cake (Zwiebelkuchen) and drinking Federweißer in autumn. Autumn is the season for harvesting onions, but it is also the season when the grapes are ripe. In the process of wine making, there is a process: junger Wein (new wine), that is, wine that is not fully fermented, between wine and grape juice. Because of the fermentation, the slurry is not clear, so it has a romantic name: feather white. The taste of feather white may be closer to grape juice or closer to wine, depending on the fermentation stage of the new wine. In Hannah Lohe's view, the perfect feather white should be a balance of sweetness, wine and fruit, and they feel sorry for each other. Nowadays, onions are available all year round, wine is everywhere, feathers are white, it only appears in a short period of autumn, and one taste a day, fleeting, like time.