Winter is the season of storage. You look at the yellow corn hanging under the eaves of the farmhouse, the bunches of red peppers, the persimmon persimmons that look like hills, the turnips in the courtyard, the cabbage in the porcelain quartin, the clusters of unsealed soybean pods with vines hanging on the branches of the trees and the courtyard wall, and the white snow-like potato chips that have not yet dried through on the roof of the house, all of which are the great display and storage of the fruits of the farmers' autumn harvest. This is also a great reward from nature for my industrious and kind fathers and countrymen for a year's hard work of "planting melons to get melons, planting beans to get beans".
I think of the winter vegetables of the past. It was the poor years of half a year of grain shortage and half a year of grain. Storing winter vegetables every winter is an indispensable event for every household in the farmer's family. The frosted radish tassels (or cranberries) are retrieved to remove the yellow leaves and dried leaves, rinsed with clean water, cut into short knots of square inches, pressed into an iron pot and boiled, half-cooked, and basketed to the canal outside the village. The large bamboo sieve (also known as bamboo shallow seeds) is simmered in the walking water, the vegetables are poured into it, and the rake is stirred back and forth with the rake until the turbid water becomes clear. A fence was set up to fish out the vegetables, put them in the basket, picked a clean slab of stone in the weir, laid it flat on the basket, and made push-ups on it with both arms, squeezing and squeezing hard until there was no dripping water at the bottom of the basket on the back of the sweaty ridge. Shouldering the burden of squeaking soft and sneaking home, laying layers of vegetables sprinkled with radish silk into the eight bucket urns behind the entrance, holding the mallet pestle to be solid, pressing a blue heavy stone, and then burning half a pot of clear soup noodle water, covering for ten days and eight days to sour. The name of the dish is "sauerkraut". Once upon a time, in the shangluo countryside, everyone would store a large jar or several jars of sauerkraut in their house for the whole family to eat regularly throughout the year. That dish is soaked in the thick sour pulp, long storage is not bad, eat with fishing, on the potato paste soup to eat, wrapped in sauerkraut dumplings to eat, made a slurry noodles to eat, stirred in cornmeal round into the "old bird egg" to eat, burned sauerkraut steamed steamed bread, fried sour syrup water and mixed dough to eat, I eat it conveniently, the taste has its own advantages, some foods have become the food of the hometown. It is no wonder that Mr. Shi Shu, a Shangzhou native who lived in The Capital during the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, sang in his book "Shangzhou Mountain Song": "Sauerkraut ying tank does not take money." "
Sauerkraut was called sauerkraut in ancient times. The Zhou Li has its big name, and the Northern Wei's "Qi Min Zhi Shu" details the various ways our ancestors used cabbage (ancient named jing) and other raw materials to pickle sauerkraut. There is a description in the Book of Poetry that "Nakata has a lu, the frontier has a melon, it is a sword or a dragon, and the emperor is dedicated to the ancestor". According to the Eastern Han Dynasty Xu Shen's "Explanation of Words", "The spinach pickler, the sauerkraut also." "It's similar to today's sauerkraut. It can be seen that sauerkraut has a long history in China.
Sauerkraut can cure diseases. Chinese medicine believes that it has a cooling and detoxifying effect. When rural people have a headache in the summer, they scoop up a bowl of sour pulp and drink it all, and they will immediately feel refreshed. Sauerkraut is rich in amino acids, protein, dietary fiber and other nutrients, and is a green natural health food. Dietary fiber can improve the digestion of the human gastrointestinal tract. A large number of vitamin C and phytoacids preserved by it are easily absorbed and utilized by the human body, and may be reduced to nitrite, which has an anti-cancer effect.
Many years ago, several medical experts from the provincial city carried out tumor investigation in Shangluo, checked the soil, checked the plants, and finally took the sauerkraut in the farmer's jar to study, saying that sauerkraut is the predecessor of nitrosamines and nitrosamines, nitrite and nitrate content is higher than fresh vegetables and vegetables, and nitrosamines are a carcinogen, therefore, often eat sauerkraut is easy to get esophageal cancer. My hometown people are half suspicious, saying that people eat grains and have a lot of diseases, and where they don't eat sauerkraut, there is not necessarily no one with esophageal cancer? Having said that, with the great improvement of people's material and cultural living standards and the popularization of scientific knowledge in recent years, hometown people still pay attention to changing the irrational dietary structure, especially gradually replacing the old sauerkraut in the tank with fresh vegetables. But after all, sauerkraut is a traditional dish of the people in the hometown for generations, and it is difficult to do it without eating it for a while, but just change the huge vat of sauerkraut to a small altar for storage.
About author:Tian Jiasheng, male, member of the Provincial Writers Association, retired. Good at prose creation, more than 30 years of writing, published nearly 1,000 articles in more than 70 newspapers and magazines across the country, totaling more than 10,000 words, has published 4 volumes of prose collections. He has won more than 20 literary awards of various kinds. Although he is dying of old age, he still works tirelessly, not for anything else, but only for a full life.