◎Chen Xiaoqing
More than half a month later, I looked at the word "fennel" again, and the word under the prefix "Cao" looked like a maze that I couldn't get out of.
Not far from the studio, there is a good dumpling restaurant, and my colleague said it was ranked online Very high. Nowadays, new dumpling restaurants are freshly made and cooked, and this one is similar. The dough is made of wheat core flour , which has a strong texture. The meat filling is also processed on the spot, unlike some chain stores that deliver it. The cooked dumplings have thin skin and big fillings, like Dalian style.
However, the store also has shortcomings. If I go for lunch, I have to wait in line for about half an hour. Every time I see people waiting to be seated, I will give up.
later discovered a pattern. The restaurant is open until ten o'clock in the evening. After eight o'clock, you can sit down and order directly, so it became a place for us to work overtime to satisfy our hunger. I'm not really a dumpling lover, but my friends often come here in droves. I also like the dumplings stuffed with mackerel and three delicacies stuffings, as well as the big skin , so I'm happy to go there. However, what everyone ordered the most every time was the fennel stuffed dumplings, which made me feel a bit out of place.
I don’t eat fennel dumplings There is a history. I came to Beijing to study in the 1980s. The small blackboard in the cafeteria window of my alma mater had “fennel dumplings” written in chalk several times a week. Oops, there was a queue. Old man. I had the patience to buy it twice without knowing what it was about. Bite open the thick leather of the machine bag, and inside there is an unclear puddle of fat. If you look closely, you can see that there are some dark green, beard-like things floating around. In this way, I am insulated from fennel dumplings, and I can’t even understand why Beijingers love to eat fennel .
I also eat fennel in my hometown, but there are two basic types: one is to use it to fry goose eggs. It is said that the special smell of fennel can just neutralize the fishy smell of goose eggs. Another way to eat it is to "paste it", which is gluten soup . After washing the gluten, remove the gluten from the flour, break it into small balls, sauté the green onions and ginger, pour in the gluten-washing water, add river shrimp, kelp shreds, and Qianzhang shreds, and cook with the gluten. Stir while cooking, then add amaranth seedlings, fennel, and finally sprinkle with fried peanuts, drizzle with sesame oil and vinegar, and serve. This soup is a typical example of making staple food into soup in the Central Plains.
So, until now, watching my colleagues eating fennel dumplings with relish always brings back bad memories of my college days. But as time passed, I couldn't help but be curious. I picked one up and took a bite. The soup overflowed and the filling was actually green! Chewing carefully, the stimulating aroma of fennel between perilla leaves and parsley hits the nasal cavity directly.
Judging from common sense, this is a living fennel, and the dumplings in the cafeteria in the past should be the corpse of fennel. Since then, I fell in love with fennel and vowed to study the plant "fennel".
Who knew that after checking some information, I became more and more confused. The small world of plants could be so complicated. The first is variety. In China, fennel, as a spice, is divided into "big fennel" and "small fennel". "Anise" is the fruit of a tree, which is what we call star anise. It is always available at home. The fennel beans that Kong Yiji eats are the meaning of "anise". "Fennel" is also a spice, but it is an herb. Fennel dumplings use the stems of fennel. The seeds of "fennel" are not only used in traditional Chinese medicine, but are also involved in the production of many brine.
In addition, this kind of "fennel" is very similar to the same spice as "rest fennel" - cumin commonly used in grilled skewers. There are only slight differences in color, size and shape, and in Xinjiang, where cumin is used the most, and the areas south of the Tianshan Mountains, are all accustomed to calling cumin "fennel"! The confusion of names has caused confusion among many chefs when using ingredients. Not to mention the chefs, the two consultants of our documentary have also quoted extensively for this. English translations and Latin literary names have taken turns, but no one can convince anyone.
Of course, the confusion is not only domestic. There are also various varieties of fennel abroad. They are also Apiaceae plants. They eat more of its bulbs, which look like a white "skin" lump.In Italy, where fennel originates, people even hypocritically divide bulb fennel into male and female. However, the French and Germans, who also divide yin and yang grammatically, distinguish more by variety.
In short, it’s so messy! More than half a month later, I looked at the word "fennel" again, and the word "hui" under the cursive prefix looked like a maze that I couldn't get out of. Kong Yiji's "fennel" only has four ways of writing it, which is not as complicated as it is.
In the Chinese food dictionary, the word "taste" has a high status. We attach great importance to the role of teeth. We often regard our teeth as the hands touching food. We rely on our teeth to distinguish whether food is crispy, chewy, soft, sticky, crunchy, pulpy... and more.
Fennel is used as stuffing, and it is important to make it freshly wrapped and mixed. There is salt in the meat filling, which will dehydrate the fennel and lose its taste over time. Only by controlling time and heat can the green fennel be brought to life in the meat filling.
The most amazing fennel filling I have ever tasted was the fennel pie I had at a friend’s kitchen during the Spring Festival. The chef first removes the ends of the fennel seedlings as much as possible, leaving behind a plump, moderately thick stalk (it is said that Prometheus used a huge fennel stalk to steal the fire back from Olympia From the human world, haha), chop it into stuffing, wrap it into a cake shape, and fry it in a pan. The freshly baked pie has a thin layer of browned skin. Once your teeth penetrate it, you can't apply the brakes at all and quickly cut off the vegetable and meat filling. The moment the aroma rises, your jaw will be harvested quickly. The resonance of bones...
That sound can be imagined as a sharp sickle blade, harvesting a clump of rice. Or a heavy guillotine to chop up the forage. Or you can imagine it as a bullet, slowly piercing a row of glass wine glasses... This is a smooth and pleasant feeling, ASMR achieved in an instant. At that moment, I was thinking, why have I refused such delicious food for nearly forty years?
Many foods in this world are like this. They passed by you in the early years, and then met you with their gentle, kind and beautiful side. Fennel, known as 蹹香 in ancient times, is homophoned as "recall" or "return to hometown". Now look at the "fennel" of fennel, under the green grass, there is a lot of aftertaste.
