Pan Aijuan
It is the annual sugar pressing season again, Jinhua Science Writers Association organized some members to go to Yiwu Mingyue Brown Sugar Factory located in Yangcun, a street west of the city, this activity, let us closely observe the whole process of Yiwu brown sugar production.
Yang Xianchun, head of Yiwu Mingyue Brown Sugar Factory, is an authentic peasant entrepreneur who works personally from the field to the production, supply and marketing of the enterprise, and his pure smile is revealed on his black face. For more than a decade, he used bagasse as fuel, heating sugar cane juice in the traditional way, and boiling brown sugar without any additives. "The face is black, the heart is red", this is the most pertinent evaluation of him by his friends. When Xie Gaohua, the old secretary of Yiwu, was alive, he would visit his factory once a year. "You are the representative of the farmers in Yiwu, and I come to see you every year." Secretary Xie said. Yang Xianchun is a modern farmer and a "sweet" farmer. The "Mingyue" brand, which he named after his daughter, not only has a certain reputation in Yiwu, but also attracts a large number of foreign merchants to come here. Today, Yang Xianchun planted sugar stems in an area of 40 to 50 mu, which can produce more than 500 quintals of brown sugar every year. Over the years, Yang Xianchun has developed a series of products from the perspective of health care on the basis of traditional brown sugar, such as ginger brown sugar, maternal brown sugar, rose brown sugar, etc., and he has also used brown sugar as raw material to produce "Ming Yue" brand derivative products, which has won the appreciation of consumers.
Yiwu is a veritable home of brown sugar. According to research, Qing Kangxi's "Yiwu County Chronicle" and Yongzheng's "Yiwu County Chronicle" have records of "sugar: ink people have recently learned to boil". Qing Yongzheng's "Zhejiang Tongzhi" 106 volumes ,"The Sixth of The Property" contains: "Cane, to the absence of this kind." During the Shunzhi period, the seeds were planted from Fujian, but they were planted in competition, and the benefits were quite small, and their production was sugar, and they did not know how to falsify, and those who obtained the Law were really enough, called sugar ears. Xu Ke, a literary scholar during the Guangxu dynasty of the Qing Dynasty, wrote under the category of "Craftsmanship and Sugar Making" in the "Qing Barnyard Banknotes": "Out of Yiwu City to the west, to fotang town, thirty miles away, all the sugar stems are also." "Reflects that Yiwu sugar cane was widely planted at that time. According to legend, in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, Jia Weicheng of Fotang Yanli Village introduced the technology of planting sugar stems from Fujian, which gradually developed to the areas of Yinan and Yixi. At its peak, brown sugar accounted for one-third of Yiwu's total agricultural output value. Yiwu brown sugar color golden slightly cyan, sweet mellow, sugary soft, known as "Yiwu qing" Yiwu brown sugar is the best in brown sugar, marketed throughout the country, well-known inside and outside the province. The local sugar cane is juiced and then made by frying in an iron pot, which retains almost all the ingredients in the cane juice and has a high nutritional value. It contains a variety of essential amino acids and trace elements, such as aspartic acid, glutamic acid, alanine, citric acid, etc., which are indispensable basic substances for the synthesis of human proteins and metabolism.
"Sugar without sugar, lidong grinding sugar", this is Yiwu's agricultural proverb, after the winter, the cane farmers began to get busy, they tied the sugar stems in the field with straw ropes one by one, and transported them to the sugar press. Although it has changed from an ancient car cow power grinding sugar machine to a modern sugar press, the boiling sugar is still judged by manual operation and experience. The sugar factory has nine connected iron pots, arranged from large to small "one" shape, and each pot is a process of boiling sugar. The syrup is gradually transferred from one pot to another, the master grasps the temperature under the stove according to the old tenderness of the syrup, and the syrup in the last pot is scooped into the sugar tank, cooled and then mixed with a spatula and a wooden pestle, and then pushed back and forth along the sugar tank with a T-shaped wooden shovel to crush into powder. Boiling sugar is a technical work, when scooping sugar water, to be accurate, but also need a wealth of experience, but also to burn the cooperation of the fireman, the heat should be appropriate, otherwise it will boil out of the hard as the iron plate of "axe sectioning", which means that this sugar must be broken with an axe, this sugar is not delicious, and it cannot be sold at a high price. If the sugar master is skilled, the brown sugar made is bound to be shiny and delicate. Good brown sugar is "stacked on the table will climb, put in the mouth will melt, its taste is both fragrant and sweet, storage for three years is not rotten", will "crawl" brown sugar is a good product.
Brown sugar is the strongest sweet taste I have ever remembered as a child. I remember when I was a child, there were also sugar stems in our village, but the planting area was not large, the varieties were not very good, it was a fine white skin sugar stem, when the sugar stem was ripe, the team could get one or two sugar stems according to the first person, and the remaining sugar stems were pulled to the nearby villages to squeeze sugar, and after squeezing brown sugar, they were distributed to farmers. But the brown sugar in our house is to be kept for cutting hemp candy. After graduating from high school, I went to a township school in Donghe as a substitute teacher, the area of sugar stems in Donghe was larger than in my hometown, and during the season when the sugar stems were ripe, my dormitory was full of sugar stems that students brought from their homes, these sugar stems were thick and sweet, and they were not the same variety as my hometown, and that winter, I ate more sugar stems than the sum of the food I had eaten from childhood to adulthood. What excites me even more is that the village sugar factory is on the side of the school playground, and on the day of sugar squeezing, you can open the window and smell a refreshing sweetness. Xiyu, where I am located, is a large village, and the sugar is squeezed for more than a month every year, and when the sugar is squeezed, the whole village is filled with a strong aroma of brown sugar, and during that time, even the air around our school is sweet.
Brown sugar is not only a delicious food, but also a medicine commonly used by people. Traditional Chinese medicine nutrition believes that brown sugar tastes sweet and warm, has the effect of nourishing qi and replenishing blood, strengthening the spleen and warming the stomach, expelling cold and dispelling dampness, soothing and activating blood, detoxifying and nourishing the face, etc., and can play a tonic role by "warm and replenishing, warm and passing, warm and dispersing". The caramel component in brown sugar has the function of promoting appetite and helping digestion, especially for pregnant women, brown sugar can help restore vitality and enrich milk.
In order to promote the brown sugar culture, since 2005, the Yiwu Municipal Government has held more than ten brown sugar festivals in Yiting Town, and the annual brown sugar festival has become a good day for Yiwu people to look forward to. The main venue of the Brown Sugar Festival is located in Xilou Village, and there are sub-venues in Xiantian Village, Xitian Village, Wang Yansan Village, Baozhai Village, Zhaoxitang Village, and WangShan peak village in Yiting Town. In recent years, Yiwu brown sugar has been made into derivative products such as brown sugar twist, walnut sugar, peanut sugar, sesame sugar, corn candy, onion tube sugar, brown candy, broken skin sugar, ginger sugar and other derivative products through various processing methods, and has gone to the market with its rich nutrition and pure taste. Yiwu sugar farmers are not afraid to plant hard, and the Yiwu government spares no effort to publicize, so that the influence of Yiwu brown sugar is getting bigger and bigger, and the reputation is getting higher and higher. Let more people be able to eat delicious Yiwu brown sugar, let the sweetness of brown sugar float in the land of China and even the world is the wish of many sugar farmers in Yiwu.