Shangzhou people’s love for cakes/Tian Jiasheng Most places in Shangzhou produce wheat, which can be ground into flour to make cakes. Shangzhou people are fond of cakes and cannot live without them for a day. It is no exaggeration to say that bread has raised hundreds of thousand

Shangzhou people’s love for cakes

Text/Tian Jiasheng

Most places in Shangzhou produce wheat , which can be ground into flour to make cakes.

People in Shangzhou are fond of cakes and cannot live without them. It is no exaggeration to say that bread has raised hundreds of thousands of Shangzhou children.

There are many types of cakes in Shangzhou. There are chopped green onion cake, sugar cake, shortbread cake, thousand-layer cake, pot helmet, rising dough cake, dead dough cake... The clever women in Shangzhou are good at making cakes, one cake and one shape. The taste is different. When I was young, I loved to eat egg pancakes made by my mother: Beat the fresh eggs into a thin white porcelain bowl, stir repeatedly with chopsticks, add salt, seasoned noodles and chopped green onions, pour a little clear oil into a flat iron pot, and put the wheat grass on the fire. When the pot is 70% hot, immediately pour in the egg liquid and use a spatula to pull the egg liquid around in a radial pattern until the egg liquid is as thin as sheepskin. Turn over and it will be cooked. One look at the yellow and oily egg pancakes, and my appetite suddenly increased. I ate three or five of them in one go and still wasn't satisfied.

We also eat cakes in "difficult" years, but what kind of quality cakes are they? Say it to make people laugh. Black flour cakes, corn flour cakes , bran cakes, potato flour cakes, buckwheat flour cakes, bean flour cakes, sorghum flour cakes, bran vegetable cakes... In short, there was an extreme lack of food in those days, and smart people in the hometown wanted to fill their stomachs. , To make a living, they had to do everything possible to invent and make all kinds of cakes to satisfy their hunger. I remember that I had eaten the "gold and silver cake" made by my mother at that time, which was made with a little white flour as the skin and golden cornmeal wrapped inside. Although it is not as delicious as the pure white flour cake, it is quite a blessing to be able to eat this cake in that special year!

Previously, there was a custom in my hometown and rural areas: once a married woman gave birth to a child, the mother-in-law immediately went to the kitchen to bake a doughy pancake, boil a bowl of brown sugar and soak it in boiling water. Let the mother eat it. From then on, brown sugar and boiled water instant noodle cakes were eaten every day (rich people would have fermented glutinous rice and egg instant noodle cakes). Three days later, the mother's mother would visit her confinement daughter. In addition to carrying a basket of red eggs, she would also bring two large cakes to reward her daughter.

A relative of mine who lives in Sichuan especially likes to eat pot helmets from his hometown. That year we went to Sichuan to visit him who was sick and hospitalized. We carried two big pot helmets for him all the way. When he saw it at a glance, he was so happy that he sat up from the hospital bed and held the pot helmets on his elbow like a child. Holding one in his arms, sniffing this and that from time to time, it was like kissing a long-lost lover, which made us laugh. His illness was mostly cured immediately.

This is my Shangzhou people's love for cakes. I will record it with my pen and share it with all my friends. Wouldn't it be nice?

About the author:

Tian Jiasheng, male, a member of the Provincial Writers Association, retired. He is good at prose writing and has been writing for more than 30 years. He has published nearly a thousand articles in more than 70 newspapers and magazines across the country, totaling more than 100,000 words, and has published 4 volumes of prose collections. Won various literary awards more than 20 times. Although he is old, he still keeps writing, for no other reason than to enrich his life.