I am from Yingcheng, a small town in central Hubei. Not far from Wuhan, producing ointment and salt, successive mayors have been busy attracting business and building factories, but they have been lonely and nameless. Although the economy is not developed, the life of people in small towns is very comfortable, breakfast is still brine, accompanied by morning wine; supper must eat barbecue, smoke and fire, all night. Other kinds of snacks are also crammed into the streets, small shops and stalls, so it is not busy.
Marinade on wine, then a bowl of eel meal, bonito soup, breakfast is simply sumptuous
Kebabs, crispy bones, dried roasts... Incense wafts through the streets
I was still young and in elementary school. Every weekend afternoon, I feel hungry when I do my homework, but it is not yet dinner time, so I take 5 cents to the intersection stall and buy a sand bun to relieve my hunger, spicy and crispy.
Sand buns
Sand bun should be regarded as a special snack bar in my hometown, a kind of pie with filling. Why is there the word "sand" in the name? Sounds so gritty. Sand is actually rounded maragu (our dialect, it's actually a slightly larger pebble), and it's not meant to be eaten, it's meant to be heated.
The lard and meat are first pureed and filled with various peppers, spices and green onions. Knead the dough softly and vigorously, and roll it into small, egg-sized pieces. The dough is wrapped in a full meat filling and rolled flat into a cake shape. The large iron pot was full of a pot of stones, and the heat was high. Scoop up half the stone with a large spoon and spread the rest of the pot flat. Spread the dough on the stone and cover the stone evenly in the spoon. With the sound of Zlazira, the lard slowly blooms in the heat of the stones, and the aroma is fragrant.
Cover half of the stones on the dough
After five or six minutes, use a shovel to dig it out of the pile of stones, hot and steaming with oil. The buns are uneven and uneven, and they are all imprinted by stones. The thin-skinned areas of the dough are crispy, while the thick middle areas retain a soft texture, and it is hot and spicy and crispy to eat.
When I grew up, I saw that other provinces also had this practice, some called stone cakes, given that using stone to heat pasta is a very old cooking method that can even be traced back to the Tang Dynasty, we don't have to fight for the source, just inherit from the ancestors and blossom separately.
After cooking, shovel it out. Long-term heating and immersion in oil, the stones are shiny black
At that time, the stall owner who often bought sand steamed buns was a middle-aged woman in her thirties and forties. She was small, often dressed in wide, colourful clothes, and busied herself in front of the stalls. The stall is very simple, the board truck supports a board, several large barrels under the board are filled with fillings, dough, etc., next to the fixed two stoves, two large pots, and a huge umbrella, is all the belongings. In winter, I use a large umbrella to block the wind, hide by the fire and roast my reddened hands, and in the summer, I use a large umbrella to shade the sun, and I am sweating from the heat of the stove.
The landlady skillfully kneaded the dough, wrapped the filling, rolled the dough, fried the stones, added firewood... There is no time to look up at you until the time to collect money. The hot sand brushes into your hand, and she rushes to the next one. In order not to be burned, you have to quickly pull a few pages of paper from the old textbook hanging in the corner of the board, otherwise it will burn your teeth and grin. When I was a child, I always wondered why the female boss also handed it to me with her bare hands, why she was not hot, was she not practicing iron sand palms. On the way home, while eating, I read the contents of the waste paper, and the oil stains were blurred and recognized, sometimes it was a children's song, sometimes it was arithmetic problem... It was probably an old book from her children.
The stalls are all basic
Sometimes, her husband would come to help, do some work to collect firewood, and at best count as a small job. More often than not, her daughter came to help, and the whole set of work could be taken over, except that she was not as skilled as her mother, and there was nothing wrong with the work she did. The girl was about the same age as me, and I had never spoken to her, but I knew her name. Because, her mother always shouted: Li Hong, hurry, that pot is almost ripe; Li Hong, collect money; Li Hong, the dough is not enough... Oh, almost forgot that she had a younger brother, two years younger than her, always doing homework or playing on the side, never seeing him work. His only presence was to buy money to eat, and his mother would count them as she pulled a bill out of her cash box and shoved it into his hand.
Girls never look at people when they work, not even when they collect money. She always frowned, and worked extra hard, pulling the bottom of the ball to the side, and frying the stones almost to the bottom of the pot. From elementary school to junior high school, I always bought sand steamed buns at her house to eat, but I never gossiped. I am introverted, naturally I dare not chat with adults, although she is the same age as me, but this is not a good look, I do not dare to talk. Sometimes I looked at her hand kneading the dough, the joints were thicker than those of her peers, and sometimes I looked at the heat in the pot and was startled by the sound of her beating the dough.
Kneading dough is really a physical job. It's just a schematic, and I wouldn't have taken pictures at the time
Once I went to buy sand steamed buns, only husband and wife, few customers, they worked and chatted. I overheard them talking, they are all in junior high school, what else to read... Next door old Liu house to Guangzhou, you can take it... They quickly handed me sand buns, and I quickly tore off a piece of paper and wrapped it up and left. The paper I tore that day was a junior high school physics textbook, Ohm's Law.
Later, the chengguan rectified the streets, and their stalls hid in Tibet, always vigilant. And I also went to high school and college in other places, and then went to graduate school in other provinces, never saw her again, and did not say a word to her after all.