Every year in the two or three weeks before the heating in November, a plant spreads all the way south along the Harbin Railway line to occupy the three eastern provinces before the heavy snowfall, which is the Chinese cabbage.
It is often stacked with piles of potatoes and green onions in various residential neighborhoods in a man-made spectacle, and then briefly appears on the Internet timeline of the kannai people as an "internet celebrity", and then as snowflakes cover the land, no one asks about their whereabouts.
Famous scenes
But the cabbages will obviously not be buried in the snow and ice, and after enjoying a few days of sunbathing in late autumn, they will eventually disappear into the vat of the people of the northeast, and two months later they will be stewed into the cauldron of the people of the northeast as sauerkraut.
And this is also the most northeastern food symbol.
Food often perfectly differentiates between different groups of people, sometimes because of price, sometimes because of climate.
Sauerkraut is because of the latter.
The history of pickling and fermenting food may be as long as the history of human diet, in the process, different regions have "evolved" their own "flavors" with local characteristics.
In the warm and humid south, vegetables are easy to obtain and valuable protein is difficult to preserve, and before winter, various wax flavors often hang on the balconies of each family, and can even become a symbol of wealth in years when meat prices are high.
In the past, in the long winter days in the northeast, although the interior was heated or hot, the meat could be directly frozen outdoors, open the door, and eat like a refrigerator.
But this "refrigerator" can freeze the frozen meat of pears, but it cannot save green leafy vegetables.
And the advent of the cellar still doesn't save the Northeasterners from the monotonous winter recipes: cabbage and potatoes, stewed soup or stir-fried, stir-fried or stewed soup.
As a result, lactic fermented vegetables have become the common "non-freezing production" of people in high latitude areas in winter.
In this regard, as the two heirs of the Holy Roman Empire, the Northeast and Germany both made very similar choices.
Even the meat served was almost identical, the only difference being that one used cabbage and the other used cabbage.
Just as no one knows who was the first to make the feat of breaking into the Kanto, no one knows how this ancient crop and the way it was handled took root in this vast snowy field that has long been controlled by the nomadic peoples of the north.
But what is certain is that sauerkraut conquered the taste buds of this new group of Northeasterners before the peppers, and helped them survive one harsh winter after another.
When a steaming pot of sauerkraut with pork belly, blood sausages and vermicelli is served to the table of the Northeasterners, it is no less meaningful than the turkey in the Thanksgiving feast of the North American Puritans.
How does a group of people become a kind of person? One answer is to have them eat the same food.
Behind the same eating habits often means the same collective memory.
For example, the rich Zhejiang has a lot of dry, salty and smelly food, Shaoxing has moldy dried vegetables, Shangyu has a thousand pieces of mold, and Ningbo also has a stinky winter melon, so that Lu Xun often doubts whether the ancestors of Zhejiang people have suffered any major disasters and famines in order to accept such a heavy taste of food.
Ningbo three stinks, smells stinky, eats up...·
This memory is particularly evident in Northeastern sauerkraut, starting with the smell tied to time.
The unique scent of cabbage that is slightly dehydrated in the sunlight is a sign for Northeasterners that the end of late autumn is coming, and the smell of sauerkraut fermenting in brine in the tank often means that the year is coming.
In the era when the planned economy has not yet disintegrated, for the northeasterners who are all linked to planning and the system, only the "accumulation of sauerkraut" is the "invisible hand", from hoarding vegetables to pickled vegetables, which is a rare unofficial collective action of the people of northeast China in a year.
But just like European cheese, red wine and ham, any slight difference is enough to make each jar of sauerkraut ferment a different flavor. Once the uniform cabbage enters the vat of each family, it will immediately deduce a hundred flavors. If the Sauerkraut in the Northeast is certified as a legal production area, several sauerkraut AOCs (Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée) can appear in each residential building.
Each home has ancestral stones, sauerkraut jars and craftsmanship
At the same time, the way sauerkraut is made often varies depending on the family structure.
Northeasterners also don't pickle sauerkraut every home.
In a large family with a tight structure, the work of pickling sauerkraut is often undertaken by your grandfather, your grandmother, and your third uncle and second uncle, and hundreds of pounds of cabbage accumulate a jar, and when you want to eat, it is a matter of course to catch two trees.
Members of the "separate portal" separated from the extended family, if they are unwilling or inconvenient to eat, can only choose between "do it themselves" and "don't eat".
Because buying "takeout" sauerkraut wasn't a wise choice for quite some time, at least not from a health perspective, you don't know which sauerkraut was pickled in an open pit lined with plastic sheeting.
Although the sour and appetizing sauerkraut can be paired with a variety of ingredients, in the era of lack of modern logistics and preservation technology, it is still impossible to change the lack of table in the northeast.
Simple stewing and stuffing can only make a limited permutation and combination, just like the story of the two people turning to the bare stick and the little widow, listening to more and more sooner or later will be bored.
Therefore, the sauerkraut in the northeast has not stopped on the road of self-evolution.
In addition to stewing, sauerkraut stir-fry powder is a breakthrough change in the way of cooking.
Vinegar is an outlier
Tin foil grilled sauerkraut is one of the criteria for judging whether a Northeast barbecue restaurant is enough to be "Northeast".
Sauerkraut hot pot looks like an outlier, but in fact it directly ends the human controversy on oil sauce and sesame sauce, and it proves with strength that the simple soup base itself is the best dipping sauce.
Despite its continuous evolution, northeast sauerkraut has never changed the quality of "coming from the masses and going to the masses", if there is any food in the world that cannot be used to distinguish classes, it must be sauerkraut, which is a food that belongs to all the people of northeast China, regardless of whether it is high or low.
As soon as the steaming sauerkraut is on the table, whether it is your third uncle who is the director as a driver, or your second aunt who is a self-employed small boss, during this meal, everyone has to briefly make a trip to the northeast family.
And all the dualistic differentiation within and outside the system will also come to an end in this pot.
The way workers eat is often closely tied to the process of industrialization, and when the face of social production changes, diet is reshaped.
Northeast China was once the region with the highest level of industrialization in the country, and sauerkraut, which occupies the winter table of Northeasterners all year round, has not only maintained the status of "unplanned" food, as a popular food, it has not even achieved industrial production for a long time, and naturally it will not be exported to the whole country like Fuling squeezed vegetables.
It is too ordinary, but every year around the "first of October" by the peasants' donkey cart or three trampolines into the city, pickled into the tank, and finally served to the table.
Sauerkraut, which has not enjoyed the glory brought by planning and system, does not seem to be cursed by planning and system, and is not "northeast" at this point.
It accompanied the immigrants from the Shandong Peninsula and the North China Plain to the land further north, fermented quietly in the tank, turned from turquoise to golden, and then boiled quietly in the iron pot of the people of the northeast, while also looking at this vast land that was boiling endlessly.
Breaking into the Guandong, Zhang family father and son, pseudo-Manchukuo, the eldest son of the Republic, zhiqing construction of the northern wilderness, the layoff of workers, the revitalization of the northeast, sauerkraut than kebabs and Internet celebrities have witnessed more changes.
The taste of sauerkraut has never changed, but times are changing rapidly.
Industrially produced sauerkraut came out, clean and hygienic, and traditional crafts were gradually lost among young people.
Even the lyrics that brainwashed the people of the whole country that year, "Jade flowers, sauerkraut", have passed for 20 years.
Groups of young people in the northeast who grew up eating sauerkraut have once again embarked on the path that their ancestors had taken, and this time, they were taking the opposite direction.
Far away from their homeland, they may not have to worry about not being able to eat the dishes of their hometown, needless to say that in Hainan, even in distant Taipei, you can eat the Northeast sauerkraut white meat pot on Jilin Road.
The network and the courier brother can make a sauerkraut tree in Heilongjiang come to the end, although the price of a vegetable can buy a jar of vegetables in the northeast.
Behind a sauerkraut tree may be 8,000+ Northeasterners
But where is the new "Kanto"?
Its geographical boundaries have long been blurred, the psychological space of people is far from formed, and the young people with northeastern taste buds are doomed to not be able to carry the big vat of their hometown.
Sauerkraut is still there, I don't know where the green flower is now?
Editor: Liao Chunyu
Source: Dr. X