Tingzhou | The past and present of pearl balls
Damei Changting
The following article is from the North Jiangnan in his life, the author Tu Mingqian
has been in the North Jiangnan . Everything is in you and me, gentleman Why not ask for The best will always appear inadvertently.
pearl ball past lives
Tu Ming-him
fellow People often small During the gathering, I will give a little bit of the problem of converting between dialect phonetics and standard Mandarin. Some problems are not too difficult, and may be enough within a few days, and some are particularly difficult. It takes more than ten years. Lack of opportunity or method.
I have summarized some, or there are still some rules. Take the pearl balls often made by Tingzhou people as an example.
Let me introduce the pearl balls first.
Pearl Ball is a food that spreads from Tingnan to Tingbei.It is a very typical Hakka cuisine. The reason why it is typical is that its raw material is starch, which makes it tasteless and full of food. If your requirements are low, then this is the minimum requirement, the thing for survival. As long as you have a trace of aesthetic requirements for food, cooking this dish will become a hard job.
After my mother left Tinnan Town, she has been reluctant to make this dish because it is too laborious. I also miss it occasionally when I think of it, but the people in the county always feel that the taste is bad, so when I go back to my small town, tufang, I will see which relative is willing to work hard, so I just go there for a while. food. Sometimes Ci Keng’s aunt would specifically call to say that she did something, and I would also run up a dozen miles of country trails to have a meal. My aunt is very particular about all kinds of traditional foods, and is very willing to work hard on these, so my cousins and I have become regulars at my aunt's house, "June Bodhisattva", "July Dajiao", "Taste Xinhe"... …. Because my aunt is willing to do this, I also discovered that people in the countryside actually have festivals every month. In name, they are worshipping gods or celebrating a good harvest, but they are actually offering sacrifices to their own five internal organs temple. Or, this is another long-term reason for us to keep in close contact after the death of our grandmother.
If you want pearl balls to have a good taste, you must vigorously turn the starch into a paste when the starch is cooked into a paste. The amount of turning is related to the final taste. You must not be afraid of hot, but also have strength, and keep stirring vigorously. , Until the white starch paste is fully oxidized to become black. Don't get me wrong, the ink color is not dirty, the ink color is transparent, and it looks like black jade. I often joked that this ball should not be called Pearl Ball, but Heiyu Intermittent Ball, to treat the homesickness of "continuously cutting and chaotic".
The pearl balls made by my aunt are very good because of the hard work. The term used by northerners to describe pasta is called Jindao, and the term popular among southerners in recent years is called Q bomb, but Tingzhou people only have one word for "tenacity."If the beef is not cooked enough, it means that it can’t be bitten. It’s a curse to the chef; but the powder made of starch and glutinous rice is dried , kuih, dumplings, cakes, and glutinous rice. When people say “tough,” then It is praise.
Like all rice products, the first bite is the sweetness of rice or starch, but once you take a few more bites, it will be a bit greasy. So if you want it to be delicious on a CD, you have to add bashful ingredients.
The people of Tinnan have a deep taste of smelt seeds, because smelt seeds are the soul of all kinds of rice and lake products. This is the same as the custom in the hometown of Central Plains, you just have to think about it, scorched noodles do not have scorched seeds, Hu Spicy Soup does not have pepper, and beef noodles do not have beef. Well, in fact, pearl balls also has a city alias "Kao Rouwan", there is really no meat. Therefore, Tingren uses a variety of extremely flavorful spices to make the bottom plate of the scorched seeds, leek leaves, leeks, buckwheat, buckwheat sprouts, garlic leaves, garlic moss, carrot shreds, celery, nine-layer tower, and ageratum, Sometimes you can choose one of these. If your guest’s T-shirt says "Don’t eat coriander"; but if your guest’s taste is as heavy as mine, then at least two or three spices will start. With the bottom plate, naturally we have to give it a bit more "color". Generally, our family will shred the lean meat, then add soy sauce to marinate it, and then add chicken broth and boil it with the spices on the bottom plate. Add red wine or fruit wine in the middle, it depends on your liking. When the above glutinous ingredients turn into a thick soup, you can start the pot for later use. At this time, turn the turned starch paste into a size suitable for the entrance, cook in another pot, add the simmering ingredients, and use the method of braising. It does not take too long to taste.
Because I love to eat,Therefore, obesity leads to high blood pressure. It is estimated that the three are high, so I have been quitting carbohydrates for a long time. But there are pearl balls on the table to participate in the "meeting", I still want to "communication" with it. After a meal of pearl balls, you have to be sincerely fast and repent for a week, but there is no way to ignore it. It is very impolite.
After introducing the pearl balls, I am a little hungry, so let’s talk about the problems that my fellow villagers gave me. In Tinnan, this dish is called "jie lan", which means a very viscous semi-liquid food. In the county town of Tingbei, people also gave a new name simply because they encountered translation problems, and the original name was a bit inelegant.
Why is the original name indecent? That's because the sound "lan" is similar to lazy, and there are two other nouns related to "lan". One is "throat lan" which refers to the saliva secreted by the mouth and other sticky things. This term is still used in many places in Tingzhou, and the other is "lan 蜞", which refers to a kind of sticky ditch. Insect, scientific name slug, flower name slug. Both "throat lan" and "lan蜞" are things that have been circulated for a long time, and the probability of mutation in modern times is not high, so I guess that "lan" should be an ancient word. The dialect of Hakka often contains some ancient characters for thousands of years, so don’t be surprised.
So I started looking for this indecent word. There is no distinction between "lan" and "lang" in the Hakka people, so I searched all the words in the dictionary with these two sounds in the scope of my search, and I really found something.
The first word is "糷".
糷 [Guang Yun] [Ji Yun] [Rhyme Club] Yin 旰切 [正韵] 烞 suffer from cut,Sound bad. Mixiang chopsticks also. [Erya·Explanation] Fighters are called 糷. [Note] The meal is ready. [Sparse] Nao, Fan Nao Mi is also related to each other. Also [Jiyun] Lu Hanqie, the sound is lazy. Then cut dry, sound spine. The same meaning. Or save it.
" erya" is almost the oldest dictionary. It says that the thing that can be kneaded together is "糷", and the explanation is more detailed, directly talking about rice and mud. Puggy can stick to each other and is called "Naki". It is basically certain that this word is the one we are looking for.
But there is another word, "lang".
Why should we discuss this word? Because "lan" is the place where slugs love to crawl in the sewers where there is no water, and Tingzhou people call these "ditch lan" or "zhen lan", then besides sticky, whether this "lan" will have What else means? possible. So I found the word "lang".
"Guanzi·Dudi": "Outside the city is the Guo, outside the Guo is the land." "Zhuangzi·Outer Object": "The cell has a heavy Lang." Later generations commented: "Lang" It is called Huang, and it is Lang.” In other words, the word "lang" refers to the Huang outside the city, that is, the city without water. This fits well with the "lan worm" of the Ting people. The Ting people say that "lan 蜞" refers to a soft sticky bug that grows in a ditch. Therefore, "lan蜞" should be written as "lang". Words with the same root have some inevitable connections, and words with the same pronunciation are also somewhat related.
Although it helps to lose weight)
Pearl balls are called "knot" or "sticky" in Tinnan. Of course, "sticky" cannot be used, because there will be bad associations. Of course, the name will not be too long, because sweet potatoes and sweet potato plants that can produce large amounts of starch were introduced to China by in the Ming Dynasty, so the name "Jieji" will not be more than five hundred years old. But this form of food obviously has a long source, because the word "糷" is long enough.
Although it has a new Chengguan account in Tingbei, the new name is pretty good. But don't forget the rustic name "Jieji" in the countryside. This name can awaken the migration history of thousands of miles and nearly two thousand years from the Central Plains in the Yellow River Basin to Tingzhou in the Tingjiang River Basin.
generally traces its origins like this. If you have different opinions, you can invite me to try it. Maybe we can still draw new conclusions. The other thing is, don’t ask me to eat such "homesickness" too often, because it’s really delicious and it’s really fat.
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