The sand circle of dongdu

Shen Jialu

During the Spring Festival, meet with old classmates to go to the third floor of the City God Temple Huabao Building to drink tea with the bookstore, the central square below the Rucui Building is not large, at this moment tourists around the big rooster lantern patting, it is really a piece of black pressure. At the beginning of the twilight, I went to the Ningbo Tangtuan Shop to buy some small snacks to get hungry, and raced through the trekking in the swamp, each step of which consumed a lot of energy. It was hard to squeeze into the Ningbo soup dumpling shop by the Jiuqu Bridge, asked the salesman in front of the counter, and learned that the soup dumplings were too late to wrap during the festival, and I wanted to buy pigeon egg dumplings - "No, no, no!" After saying that, the aunt rolled her eyes at me: "Hey hey, do you still know that there are pigeon balls?" ”

Isn't that a small sight? As a veteran foodie, how could I not know pigeon balls?

At the beginning, the Ningbo Tangtuan Shop was still shrunk in the old site on the east side, which was another century-old shop, the Osmanthus Hall, with a gold sign on a black background hanging high in the city, known for its pigeon egg balls. This snack is shaped like a pigeon's egg, exquisite and clear, biting open the fragrant soft skin, a cool mouth of mint water sprayed into the mouth, it is a good summer cold food for all ages. Don't look down on this little pigeon egg ball, there is a trick to do it, the key is to boil sugar oil, to boil the sugar into a paste, not too old, not too tender, see the time is almost over, and then add mint flavor after constantly stir-frying until completely cooled. This sugar oil into the filling, wrapped in water mill glutinous rice flour to make a round ball shaped like a pigeon egg, the round seed into the pot after cooking the filling becomes liquid, but the strange thing is that the round nut must be cooled with cold water immediately after the pot is out of the pot to ensure that the filling does not form a hard lump, so there will be sugar water spurting out in the mouth.

Pigeon egg dumplings were created in the 1930s by a Suzhou hawker named Wang Youfa. This Wang Youfa is a stilt foot, and his ancestors are from Suzhou, so he knows a little about sweets making. At first, he made some peanut candy, date candy, sugar hawthorn and other baskets to sell. In the winter, business can also be done, and in the summer, sugar is easy to melt in a high temperature environment. So he tried to make pigeon egg dumplings, made them at home and went out every morning to pick up baskets and sell them, and shuttled through the tea house bookstore, five copper plates and three pieces. Eating on a hot day is refreshing, a momentary rumor, and the business is very good.

After the 1980s, this famous snack was made by Ningbo Tangtuan Shop, and the pigeon-sized dumplings lay in a box, sprinkled with a few white sesame seeds, and a turquoise brown basket was laid underneath. Only make dozens of boxes a day, sell out and count. Every time I visit the City God Temple, I have to buy one or two boxes to go home and unwind. Once, when entertaining foreign friends at home, he bought pigeon egg dumplings and osmanthus cakes as desserts, and his eyes straightened when he ate them.

In addition to pigeon egg dumplings, there used to be Qiao Jiazhai's sand rounds. I saw an article on the Internet that said: "The wrestling sand circle was invented by an old woman named Lei Fei." "That's a bad thing! Even the pictures posted are bull's head is not right for the horse's mouth, and the Taiwanese mochi is used as a sand circle, indicating that Shanghai has not eaten this "circle" for too long. The founder of Huangshayuan was an Anhui native named Li Yijiang, known as "Xiaoguang Egg", who came to Shanghai to make a living during the Qing Dynasty, first picking up the burden and stringing the streets to sell Hui Gang soup dumplings, and later having a fixed stall next to the gate of the Small Lane (Baizi Lane) of The Ninghe Luqiao Family. After several years of hard work, after the business became bigger, "Xiaoguang Egg" borrowed a double entrance to the city house inside the gate and opened a Yongmaochang dim sum shop, but the citizens called Yongmaochang as QiaoJiazhai for easy expression and memory. The dumplings are the famous points here, and the soup dumplings wrapped in bean paste and sesame seeds are boiled and drained, and then boiled with a layer of cooked red bean powder and eaten hot, with a unique flavor.

When I was a child, I ate the sand balls made by my mother, and the glutinous balls were rolled with black puff pastry or soybean powder, and none of them were red bean powder, but I imagined that red bean powder should not be worse than soybean flour.

I have now walked all over the City God Temple and have not found this snack, it was originally Qiao Jiazha who moved to Zhonghua Road after the founding of the People's Republic of China and later moved to the ground floor of the Lujiabang Road Huijing Building due to the relocation of the plot, and there is no place for it in the City God Temple. In fact, smart businessmen should know that a kind of flavor snack that is worth inheriting and inexpensive can bring popularity to the store, and it is also a humanistic resource that can be excavated and developed.

The year before I went to Japan, in the crowded Tokyo Sensoji Temple to appreciate the "Edo style" stall stalls, accidentally found that someone made a fresh sale of a kind of rolled red bean flour glutinous rice dumplings, I bought a box, with bamboo skewers to pick up a taste, soft glutinous and sweet is very delicious, no filling, this is not the Shanghai City God Temple of the sand circle? Chinese food actually had to run to Japan to eat, just imagine what kind of mood I was in at that time!