I believe that there is a soul in all the food we eat. When we digest these foods that have been given souls by God, they become integrated into our lives and become part of our destiny.
Snacks in the city
When a person lives in a city, what is his most vivid memory of the city? I would say, it's the stomach. And our stomach’s memory of a city comes from snacks. The image of a city that has settled in the heart is like an old woman's old stove, which is slowly emitting the smell in the slow fire, and slowly emerges in the aroma of snacks.
As I reach middle age, snacks increasingly guide my judgment of my hometown. Because when I met those snacks, I integrated myself into the fragrance of those snacks, like a farmer showing a steady smile in the waves of wheat.
Lao Zhou, who is upstairs in my house, is over 50 years old. He suffers from emphysema and is always breathless when walking. Lao Ma is the person I am closest to upstairs. Like me, he likes to listen to some music at home. After taking a nap, he likes to wander around the city, read the newspaper under a tree, and then go to the small stalls. Eat a bowl of hot and sour noodles, beef rice noodles and other snacks. Many people can't tolerate Lao Zhou's loud coughing on the balcony when he wakes up early in the morning, but I can tolerate this problem of his - we are both snack lovers. I am the same way. Sometimes I feel that the day has been wasted, so I go to a snack bar and eat a bowl of beef rice noodles, sesame glutinous rice balls, and bone and pea soup. After eating a bowl of snacks, like a comforting warm current, soothing my stomach, my hanging heart fell to the ground.
Throughout the year, I always have to travel outside for some days. Actually, I did it on purpose. I wanted to test whether I could remember anything about the city where I live all year round when I went outside. When I feel homesick while walking in other places, my nose will twitch, and the aroma of those snacks and the smell of my dearest people will arrive from thousands of miles away. What makes me nostalgic are the snacks lying in inconspicuous places in the city. They are people who don't talk much but can communicate with just one look.
When I travel abroad, I like to go to county towns and roam in remote corners of small towns. Besides, folk snacks are often found in small towns surrounded by mountains and beside rivers. The four beauties of ancient times were born next to Jishengmaodian, because there are mountain springs, green trees, white clouds and birdsong. Do you know how I judge whether people in a place live a calm and stable life? My standard for judging people is whether they are as gentle as a deer, their eyebrows are smooth instead of messy and tangled together, and the nose hairs in their nostrils are not exposed in a vulgar way. . And the snacks of a place are part of its most authentic atmosphere.
Those snack bars are sometimes as unkempt as a man who has experienced the world. You can just walk in casually and feel it with your eyes and breath. In a small town in the northeast, the tallest building in that town only had eight floors. I ate blood sausage rice noodles, which are blood sausages filled with pig intestines and added with Chinese cabbage in a jar. It was soft, fragrant, and chewy. I ate it. After one bowl, I ordered another bowl. In the autumn in the Northeast, the wind was a little cooler, which made my face tense. After eating two bowls of blood sausage rice noodles, it seemed to regulate and unblock my meridians, and I felt much more comfortable. In a small county in Yunnan, I ate a kind of porridge cooked with wild vegetables. Eating that porridge, I felt that the earth energy from the mountains and fields was gathering and rising in my body. A person once said to me that all food comes from plants and animals who have sacrificed their lives. Can you not be grateful for snacks?
If you eat there for a long time, you will often feel like family members in their gestures and gestures if you eat there for a long time. In ancient times, they were classified as those who lead cars and sell pulp in the market. A food stall is usually all a family relies on to make a living. Some people who sell snacks also have secret recipes passed down from their ancestors. That year, when old man Hu in the small town was frustrated, he tremblingly handed a sign selling cold noodles to his son. The son passed it down, but the grandson settled in a big city. He is engaged in real estate development business.
A group of people looked at the dusty city. Excavators and bulldozers were roaring. The old city was being demolished. A frog in the field jumped in panic. It had lost its home. My last hometown is those snacks lying in the corners of the city, their scent rising like invisible smoke.
I am fortunate that I have collected the stomachs of cities, and it is they who have allowed me to claim one city after another.
Country delicacies
Just as masters often hide among the people, many delicacies also have a subtle fragrance floating in the countryside. These simple foods are steaming with the breath given by the earth, and of course embody the wisdom of those folk chefs.
Once you fall in love with these country delicacies, you may be committed to them for life.
My nostalgia for rural food has made me fall in love with hiking over the years. Where I walked, I couldn't see the dim lights of the city, and I couldn't hear the sound of traffic rolling in the city all day long.
It is a small town restaurant in the mountains and jungles. I want to hike there and enjoy a meal of braised pork trotters and flowers with yam, steamed old pumpkin, braised pig intestines, and mutton clay bowl... There is also such an indulgent sip of old wine in an earthen bowl.
When setting out from the city, if I see crawling cumulonimbus clouds in the sky, I will carry the bamboo hat hanging on the wall behind my shoulders. The bamboo hat was collected when I was collecting farm tools in the countryside that year.
When hiking along the way, there are mostly tall trees and gurgling streams. The roads between the mountains and ridges are like knotted hemp ropes, knotted and knotted in the valleys. I like to walk on such a road with a leisurely pace. I often stop by a tree halfway and lean under the tree for a while. Sometimes, I even sleep next to a stone with a clear spring flowing before setting off. I slept in the mountains, and the rolling oxygen from the big trees soaked my lungs green.
Once when I was on my way to a small town, I met Mr. Wang driving a tractor on the road. He was transporting production and living materials such as fertilizers, seeds, oil, salt, sauce, and vinegar to the mountain people. That was The last tractor still running in that town. Sometimes the tractor puffs out a puff of black smoke, like a rolling bug crawling in the woods in the countryside. Boss Wang stepped on the brakes and shouted to me: "Come on, follow me, I'll take you to the restaurant." I shook my head, waved my hand and said, "I'll walk by myself." Boss Wang laughed and drove away on the tractor. I suddenly started running fiercely, wanting to race the tractor. I realized that this was really not giving Boss Wang face, so I stopped, leaned against a pine tree on the edge of the cliff, and giggled. How could I really compete with myself?
I was on the mountain ridge and saw Cheng Lao Er’s restaurant in the small town. The name of that restaurant was Lao Er Restaurant. The small towns are lined up at the foot of the mountain, with a single street linking the towns like an old vine. In the early years, such restaurants in small towns still burned coal, and there was a chimney on the roof. The smoke from the chimney filled the town with fragrance, and made the town look like a hazy poetic painting. Poetically embedded in the embrace of mountains and wilderness. Over the years, gas has been used in the town and the chimneys have disappeared. Wandering around the town, I sometimes still miss those chimneys, and I recall the scene of a man selling coal in the town climbing up to the roof chimney to drink and sing folk songs.
I was in a restaurant in a small town called Mopanzhai, and I yelled at the owner of the restaurant in a long voice like the ancients: "Second brother, bring a plate of peanuts, two clay bowls, and a plate of pig heads. Roast meat and make half a catty of soju!" Cheng Laoer happily served the dish. He put a gray-white handkerchief on his shoulder and used it to dust off the tables and chairs as a habit. The old wine brewed by the second brother in the wine jar contains more than ten kinds of medicinal materials. He said that drinking that wine can strengthen the kidneys of men. I believe this. I drank that wine once and ran several kilometers when I went back.
Lao Er is good at cooking local dishes, which are all ingredients from the local countryside. The meat is also raised from local pigs, local sheep, local chickens and ducks. Eating the meat will make your mouth sticky with the aroma. The second child has a dish called sorghum pan-fried earthen bacon, which is really my favorite. In the quiet countryside, the villagers who grow sorghum are almost extinct, but the second child planted a patch of red sorghum on the mountain ridge.
In autumn, before the frost came, the plump red sorghum was swaying like *** in the wind. I went to wander around the sorghum field, as excited as a drunken man.
In an old restaurant on stilts facing the river, there is a towering plane tree next to it. I became close friends with some villagers who came to the restaurant to have a drink before going home. In front of them, I sometimes gossiped about anecdotes from the city, and listened to them talk about things in the mountains and fields. Once, a countryman suddenly asked me about the details of an aircraft carrier. I hesitated and did not answer.
In those small town restaurants with tacky names and shabby attire, country delicacies feed my body and seem to feed my soul.
Li Xiao, male, from Wanzhou, Chongqing, was born in August 1969. Currently working in an administrative unit in Wanzhou. Since he started writing in 1989, he has published more than 4 million words of essays, essays, documentary and other literary articles in newspapers and periodicals across the country, and won more than 70 literary awards of various types. Published 2 collections of essays. Member of China Prose Association.