"I'd rather eat something without meat than live without bamboo. No meat makes people thin, and no bamboo makes people vulgar. " These are the words of the great writer Su Dongpo. But for the villagers who grew up in the hinterland of the Central Plains, it is possible not to eat meat, but absolutely not without noodles. Meat-free food may not taste very fragrant, but food without noodles will make people uncomfortable. People often say that "a clever woman can't cook without rice", which means that she should be a clever woman in the south. For the villagers, rice is not necessary, but if there is no noodles at home, it is absolutely impossible.
Southern women are good at cooking rice and northern women are good at cooking noodles. This is the result of different eating habits caused by the influence of geography and climate. It is not intentional, but it is naturally formed according to local conditions over time, which is what people often say, "one side of the soil and water will nourish one side."
Although the Central Plains is located in China, it belongs to the typical north in terms of living habits and physical geography. Because food crops are basically wheat and corn, people's staple food is naturally dominant. In this noodle-dominated place, it is natural to bring the skill of making noodles to the extreme, otherwise how can we cope with three meals a day for a family? Even if you can manage three meals, how can you ensure that you can eat them 365 days a year? Therefore, this woman in the Central Plains must have the extraordinary ability to make a face.
Confucius said in The Analects of Confucius Wei Linggong: "If a worker wants to do a good job, he must first sharpen his tools." The "sharp weapon" of Central Plains women's dough mixing is two ugly rolling pins. These two rolling pins are one big and one small. If the big shape is a bachelor and the length is more than one meter, it is called a big rolling pin; A stone as small as a jujube pit, with two pointed bellies slightly round and a foot and a half long, is called a small rolling pin. Although they are all rolling pins, the division of labor is different because of their different shapes. The large rolling pin is mainly used for rolling and pounding noodles, while the small rolling pin is responsible for making cakes, steamed buns and dumpling skins. They are like couples who used to work. While performing their respective duties, they are also interdependent in happiness.
Before the 1990s, the life of China people was basically in the stage of "the man is the master outside and the woman is the master inside". Men are responsible for farming to make money, while women take care of their husbands and teach their children, sewing and washing clothes, and cooking by fire are also their main life contents. Turning the most common ingredients into delicious meals is a woman's most conspicuous capital. Watching my man and a group of children eat contentedly, let the years and fireworks stain the original handsome face, and feel that it is worthwhile to pay more.
At that time, materials were always scarce. How to dance rolling pins, big and small, with your own skillful hands to make the original monotonous food into patterns is a test of women's housekeeping skills.
The villagers' diet is relatively simple, with noodles at noon and soup in the morning and evening. At that time, the noodles we ate were basically handmade noodles, but whether it was noodle soup, garlic noodles or fried noodles, the emphasis was on gluten and good taste, and this rolling link was the key to everything. The temperament of a woman in a small town is both restrained by the Central Plains people and rugged by the northerners. They can hold embroidery needles, or they can control a rolling pin more than one meter long in their hands like running water, and roll hard dough into coarse books.
Rolling with a large rolling pin is very impressive. At that time, people had to eat three meals a day by themselves, which was time-consuming and laborious. In order to cook for her family, her mother who went into the kitchen was busy and nervous. First, mix the dough and wake up. In this waiting process, you have to choose vegetables, wash vegetables and cut vegetables. All these preparations are ready, and the face is basically awake. Next comes the most important scrolling. Don't underestimate this rolling surface, it needs both strength and skill.
First, roll out the dough a little bit with a big rolling pin to form a nearly round shape, and then roll it out again and again. At this time, the basic thing is strength. When the dough is rolled out and spread to a thickness of about half a centimeter, it basically becomes a thick cake. At this time, it is necessary to spread some dry flour evenly on both sides of the cake, and then wrap the cake layer by layer in the middle of a large rolling pin. At this time, the bread and the rolling pin are integrated. Just press the bread on the rolling pin with both hands and skillfully rotate and push the rolling pin on the chopping board. The rhythm of this rolling is "two pushes, one meal, then pull back, then push." When you feel that the flour used in the middle is almost the same, you need to spread the bread out and spread the cloth again, then roll it up from the other direction and wrap it on a rolling pin, and push it repeatedly according to the previous section. After this vigorous and skillful rolling over and over again, the original thick cake will become bigger and thinner bit by bit until it reaches the thickness you need.
If the rolling pin is loosened from the rolling pin layer by layer and laid flat, the whole chopping board will not stand. Women will swing the rolled noodles back and forth and let them fall slowly, just like playing with cloth spun by a machine, and fold them into a shape about 13-4 cm wide and 13-4 cm narrow. The middle overlapping part is also sprinkled with cloth to prevent mutual adhesion. This is green noodles. As for whether you want to eat noodles or noodles next, whether the noodles are thick or thin depends on the kitchen knife. This section can test women's fencing. If the knife is good, the noodles will be cut into various widths, which can be as wide as leek leaves or as thin as vermicelli, depending on personal preference; If the knife skill is poor, the width of the cut noodles will be uneven, and the cooked noodles will naturally be ugly.
Cut the surface here, and the water in the pot over there is basically boiled. Grab a handful of noodles and throw them into the pot at will. When the pot boils, put down the chopsticks and gently stir them so that the noodles will spread without touching. As for what to do with this pot noodles, it depends on the conditions at home, whether it can be rich or frugal. When it is abundant, it is a bowl of minced meat noodles, and when it is frugal, it is a bowl of ordinary noodle soup or garlic noodles.
If you plan to eat garlic noodles, you need to pound garlic juice when cooking noodles. At this time, you can play the second role of the big rolling pin-smashing garlic. Every villager has a garlic mortar, but not every family has a garlic mallet to pound garlic. Therefore, this big rolling pin will continue to play the role of "revolutionary waste heat" and take on the heavy responsibility of smashing garlic.
Children like such interesting little things as mashing garlic very much and are willing to do them for adults. As long as the adults have prepared the ingredients and the mother over there is looking at the noodles, the children here have been beating with a big rolling pin that is not commensurate with their body proportions. The big rolling pin is long and the pin is short. When waving a rolling pin, the strength cannot be properly controlled, and it is difficult to ensure that it fluctuates as straight up and down. Seeing that the rolling pins are staggered, it is inevitable that they will knock on the edge or mouth of the garlic mortar and make a discordant "jingle" sound. This sound echoed in the kitchen, interwoven with the "click" sound of firewood burning in the stove chamber and the subtle "glug" sound of the strips rolling inside the pot, and became the most common and beautiful "Cookware Concerto" in rural areas.
After eating noodles at noon, you will naturally be thirsty for soup sooner or later. This soup can be a knot in one's heart, corncob or thin rice porridge. The thickness depends on the amount of rice and flour in the jar and the richness of food in each family. But it is not enough to drink soup in the morning or at night. Soup with little water is not hungry. Even if there is no food to accompany the meal, at least there must be steamed bread to support the scene. The villagers call cooking breakfast and dinner soup, and when cooking soup, a small rolling pin will inevitably invite BLACKPINK to appear at this time.
This small rolling pin is not like the smaller version of the big rolling pin in other places, but it is a local school: it is convex in the middle, with two pointed ends, shaped like a shuttle of spinning thread, and a bit like a jujube pit. Our small rolling pin adopts this shape, in order to make the cake rotate with the rolling pin by using the radian difference between the middle and the edge of the rolling pin. This design not only improves the labor efficiency in the use process, but also keeps the thickness of the burrito basically the same. It is a summary of villagers' experience in using rolling pins for thousands of years and a perfect sublimation of food production tools. I have seen a small rolling pin in many places, so it is both aesthetic and technical, and it is not a small rolling pin of villagers.
Villagers like to eat steamed buns, just like some locals in Shandong and Jiangsu like to eat pancakes, which can be described as a food culture with regional characteristics. At the beginning of its establishment, it is convenient for long-term preservation, which is the primary factor it considers. Later, it won the villagers' love because of its delicious taste and convenient production. In the long-term eating process, the villagers also found that it can be eaten with almost all home-cooked dishes. It can not only be rolled up to wrap dishes, but also be matched with dishes with various tastes, forming an extremely rare compound taste in the mouth, saving the time of eating steamed stuffed buns, holding vegetables and chewing, and making the food taste better. So, Puji spread and lasted for a long time.
Villagers can bake buns with hammers, chopping boards, small rolling pins and mussels, and that small rolling pin is the protagonist. Women in the village can't bake buns, just as women in the old society can't embroider needlework, so they should be looked down upon, at least for their husbands to marry. As a result, this kind of "cooking steamed bread" has almost become the basic skill of villagers and women.
It is said that flipping steamed bread, literally, seems to be its basic essence, but in the actual production process, "rolling" is its fundamental core. Branding is just a mature production method, and the key to the problem is to roll it into a thin and symmetrical cake. The special tool for rolling steamed buns is a small rolling pin with two pointed ends, and it is about to make a grand debut now.
A country woman is holding a small rolling pin, which is a pancake copying machine. The noodles used for steamed stuffed buns can be cold water or boiled water. The steamed buns baked from dead noodles are tight, and the cakes baked from hot noodles are loose and easy to bite, depending on the preferences of each family.
After mixing the dough, let it stand for 20 minutes, in order to fuse the internal structure of the dough and make it more malleable in the making process. When I woke up, I pulled it into a noodle the size of a child's fist. This noodle is roughly rolled into a circle by hand and then rolled with a small rolling pin. The speed and quality of rolling depends on the level of women using small rolling pins.
The woman brought the batter, sprinkled some flour on the chopping board to make the flour cloth, then pressed the batter on the flour cloth, squeezed some flour from the flour spoon and sprinkled it on the batter, and then took a small rolling pin to the stage. It can be said that this is the moment to witness the miracle: I saw women gently press their hands on the small rolling pin, consciously push and pull at a certain inclination angle, and the dough rotates itself with the rhythm of rolling. In the process of turning over, the thick part of the cake is automatically pushed and pulled by the rolling pin and accepts regular rolling. In this rolling process, you basically don't need to turn the cake by hand, just sprinkle some cloth when you feel that the cake and the rolling pin will stick together. Ten seconds to roll a cake, absolutely flat, as thin as toilet paper.
In addition to branding the rolled bread on the hammer, other rolled cakes will be scattered on one side of the chopping board, and then branded in turn when the bread on the hammer is cooked. At this time, the small rolling pin becomes a tool for picking bread: gently lift a thin cake blank by hand, put it on the small rolling pin, then quickly transfer it to the hot hammer, put it aside, and then roll the small rolling pin, so that the cake just fits on the hammer, so that the small rolling pin can exit perfectly.
Next, you just need to give this cake to a hammer and time, and with the timely turning of clams, a steamed bread can be cooked in 30 or 40 seconds. In this way, the rolling pin dances and the steamed bread dances. A mass of dough is in a woman's skillful hands, made of flour and steamed bread. After a while, they will be served on the table and become delicious food for the whole family.
This little rolling pin makes the steamed stuffed bun look lively, and the speed of rolling the dumpling skin is unambiguous. The radian of itself is a magic weapon to quickly wrap jiaozi. Because the dough in jiaozi is relatively small, it can be rolled out after three or five times. For a woman with good skills, one person can roll up the skin and wrap it up, and two people can eat it together. You haven't finished the jiaozi side of your bowl, and the jiaozi in that bowl has been wrapped and put into the pot. When you finish eating the bowl, the pot will be cooked, and you can continue fishing in your bowl. My mother is a master of Bao jiaozi. Not only does she curl the skin fast, but also the speed of wrapping jiaozi. Hands together is jiaozi, with big belly, small ears and little stuffing. She often rolls and wraps herself. My dad only cooks jiaozi, and the three of us just eat with bowls and fish after dinner.
Looking back now, I still think that watching my mother busy rolling bread jiaozi and watching my father cooking jiaozi with a rice bowl was the most unforgettable time in my childhood. This is a simple happiness, a satisfaction of finding happiness from food. And family, spoiled child and parents constitute the three elements of this simple happiness.
Of course, this small rolling pin also has some other auxiliary functions, such as treating stiff neck during sleep and knocking on the chopping board to "shock" naughty children.
According to adults, if you have a stiff neck at night, you can roll it with a small rolling pin in the morning. But I don't know how to do it. Presumably, you also need to have certain skills and skills. Doesn't mean you can cure anyone by throwing caution to the wind. Anyway, I didn't have a stiff neck at that time, and I didn't have to taste whether the small rolling pin really had such a magical effect.
However, the "shocking" effect produced by a small rolling pin is very common. When a woman sees one of her children making trouble or doing bad things while making steamed buns and rolling dough, she will hate iron and smash the small rolling pin on the chopping board angrily, cursing her children while knocking. It is inevitable that the sharp corner at one end of a small rolling pin will break because of some kind of excessive force. Since then, the small rolling pin at home has become a one-horned one. A small rolling pin with a sharp corner is missing, which does not affect the use, but it does not look good.
But it is such a small rolling pin that lacks a sharp corner, which is very common in villagers' homes. If you look in the kitchens of three or five families, you are sure to meet a broken corner. It can be said that this is a normal phenomenon, not that the rolling pin in this family is broken, but that the women in this family are rude, or that the small rolling pins in other families are stronger. Imagine, in an age with many children, who doesn't have three or five children and whose children won't be naughty? No matter how good your temper and patience are, when you meet a group of naughty Xiong Haizi, it is inevitable that when you make steamed bread and roll dough, the bad things they do will make your hair stand on end, make you angry and make you want to hit people and swear. As a result, the small rolling pin has become a scepter of deterrence, knocking loudly on the chopping board, and it will inevitably break a sharp corner when it is hard.
When I went back to my hometown last year, I saw my mother cooking steamed buns. I was still using a small rolling pin that shocked us many times when I was a child. My mother knocked out a sharp corner. Now that I think about it, it should be thirty years. That little rolling pin is the same as when it was broken thirty years ago, but how can parents suddenly become so old!
People are very busy now, and the pace of life is accelerating. Those big rolling pins and small rolling pins are used less and less, and many young girls don't even go to the kitchen. Naturally, I lost the skill of rolling noodles, steamed stuffed buns and rolling noodles to wrap jiaozi. What do you want to eat? Modern supermarkets and shopping malls have everything. Just buy ready-made ones. Few women would like to go into the kitchen again, learn to cook and "enjoy" the smell of smoke.
Nowadays, many people often buy all kinds of finished or semi-finished products from the supermarket to go home, but after eating them, they always feel that there is always the smell of additives. Some people even eat from one restaurant to another in the street to save trouble, but when they eat, they feel that no matter which restaurant makes it, it tastes the same. Only occasionally do your parents come, or you go back to your parents' house, and they cook home-cooked meals for you themselves. I was particularly satisfied after eating it, and I couldn't help feeling that the food at home was delicious!
It turns out that what we have lost, what we have been longing for, still belongs to the taste of parents and home! In that smell, there is affection and fireworks!