Everyone says you should eat dumplings on the winter solstice, but in my hometown of Wuxi, we don’t eat dumplings on the winter solstice. Instead, we eat soup dumplings or yulan cakes, and wontons.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship between yulan cakes and dumplings elsewhere.
In the book “Love Story”, which came out in August, there is a mention of this.
In my father’s time, after the winter solstice, 91 days, spring will begin, this is called even winter from nine. Their neighbors in the countryside, so they counted the days.
Magnolia cake is said to be a speciality of Suzhou, the spring season, the magnolia blossom, to glutinous rice wrapped magnolia petals for the cake. But the appetite is always there, but the magnolia flowers are not always there, so we there among the market, to glutinous rice flour wrapped in meat, bean paste, lard greens, sesame seeds, etc., to deep-fried.
Our hometown stores doing dumplings, most of them also do magnolia cake: into the store to eat dumplings, sit down, a large bowl of snow-white dumplings up, so that the spoon blowing air to eat, in winter, full of white store; want to eat on the street as you go, take one or two magnolia cake, left hand to the right hand, mouth breath more than, bite, crispy outside, soft and sticky inside, eat the filling, warm and soft sticky down to the belly. Pork filling, bean paste filling, sesame seed filling is common to see, but the lard dish is more strange: is chopped green vegetables into puree, add sugar and lard mix, green sweet thick, however, for foreigners do not take.
Song rules, the winter solstice is to eat wontons, probably because this chaos power combined with what the meaning of the opening of the universe.
Later, in the north, the so-called “winter solstice dumplings and summer solstice noodles”. Probably wonton and dumplings are from the same family, but accidentally split up the business.
In my hometown of Wuxi, wontons are often sold together with small dumplings, as if they were a natural match. These two are restaurant dishes, and people like to come out to eat them when they don’t do it at home. The soup dumplings in my hometown are thin-skinned, thick, and slightly large, and the filling, like all Wuxi dishes, has a sweet and sour aroma, so you bite into the soup, eat the meat, and chew the dough, all together. If you have good vinegar to dip, it is the best. The northerners say that the meat of the bun is not on the fold, but in fact, the fold of the bun is very delicious: compared with the other thin skin, the skin of the bun is always the most sinewy and tough, with soup, meat and good vinegar together, the tongue is a gorgeous lump of dates. Eat soup buns like the pig’s eight quit eating ginseng fruit, eat still want to eat, and not sure of the taste. Because eating soup buns is hot and stinging, so you have to suck the soup and swallow the filling with your belly in a lightning flash, which is totally a technical job. The old palm says that Beijingers love to eat Yuhuatai’s Huai Cheng soup dumplings, up a plate is two layers of skin, which can be seen in the thin skin of the soup thick soup dumplings delicate, think this kind of soup dumplings to eat is less than chew. Eat the soup dumplings, will feel a little greasy mouth, it is necessary to rely on the wontons.
Jiangnan elderly among the wontons, not as diverse as the northern dumplings filling: pork and cabbage, fresh shrimp and leeks, rotten egg, fennel fritters, can be wrapped; not like Guangdong wonton, there must be a shrimp ball; filling mostly can not escape the combination of pork, squash, river shrimp (no river shrimp, dried shrimp instead), vegetables, green onions and ginger these kinds of arrangements. The pork is creamy, the shrimp is smooth, and the vegetables and diced squash have a fine texture with some wisps of particles, and when cooked, they come out through the translucent skin, and what you want is a mouth that is mellow and firm.
Around every neighborhood, there must be a wonton store, and the good ones use chicken soup, bone broth, and sous vide and so on, plus shredded egg skin and dried silk. The soup is used to make the skin, so that the noodles do not lose their original color. Good soup cooked skin fresh, a bite down, the filling fresh skin moist soup thick interplay, each in its own way. Therefore, the skin and the filling of Jiangzhe wontons are separated from each other, and they are more like a staple food sitting in the middle. At lunchtime in winter, when you wait for a big bowl of wontons to come up, you can bite into a plump one, and the fresh soup is poured over the shrimp and meat filling, a hot line straight to your belly.
If you eat it at home, it’s customary to have a large wonton with cabbage and meat, cooked in clear soup. I don’t know why, but in Wuxi, there is a clear distinction between shrimp wontons in soup and vegetable wontons at home. There are stores that sell vegetable wontons, but few families pack shrimp wontons, probably because they think it is too convenient to go to a store and not to make them at home.
The winter solstice wontons should be stuffed with meat and vegetables. This is very rustic and reassuring to eat. Shrimp stuffed with meat is too gorgeous to eat on the winter solstice, it’s not homely!
My family used to go to the road to the vegetable market, there is a piece of flower garden, left hardware store right newsstand, facing the police station, planted four banana fall shadow long, cool in summer. There was often an old lady who would come out in the afternoon and sit in the shadow of the plantain until dinner time, selling raw wontons she had wrapped, with a basin (for the filling and a wooden spoon for mixing the filling) and a plaque (for the skin and the wrapped wontons), listening to a semiconductor radio while selling and wrapping. The old lady sells her own vegetable and meat wontons, which are well mixed with garlic, ginger and egg, and the skin is well mixed and folded, with nice corners and edges. The raw wontons are so smooth, soft and fragrant that those who like to dip them in vinegar can also get the taste of crab. Any aunt who is bothered by her family and doesn’t know what to eat today, comes here to buy three taels of wontons, and the next two taels can cover a meal. The rest of the wontons are fried in oil the next morning, and they are golden and crispy, so you can eat them with rice. The old lady was so kind that some aunts and uncles thought the children were too rowdy and told them to “stand here and play with Grandma! When she went to the market, she took over with a smile; when the children played with the ravioli skin and took the wooden spoon to pull the filling, she also smiled. It was such a big hit that business was booming. They often came out at two or three o’clock and were sold out by four thirty. In our area, even if the children didn’t know how to do housework, they knew how to take a few yuan, pick up a basin, and be told by their parents, “Go, go buy the granny ravioli! “
Even the owners of other wonton stores sometimes came out with a pot to buy her wontons – as mentioned before, the vegetable wontons and the meat filled wontons + soup buns were each a family, not a rival line, and the owners, with the tone of insiders, appreciated the fine ingredients of her wontons and the care she put into them. The old woman’s son and daughter-in-law are good, but they are busy at work. At home, the old man listens to the tape recorder while making ravioli, and comes out to sell them, to get some sun and see the children to relieve loneliness. Later on, it was not only selling ravioli, but also watching the children. The old man loved children, and was very happy to see them around her. It is said that an aunt left her child with the granny and made a verbal agreement, “Leave half a catty of ravioli! “She went to the market; she came back and found that the money was all used up, embarrassed, the granny persuaded her, saying that there was no harm, she gave her half a catty of wontons, “just give me the money tomorrow. . The aunt was very sorry, and looked at her own children, climbing on the grandmother’s neck, like the Monkey King, simply blushed and could not behave; a change of heart, first drink the child down, said all the time to give grandmother trouble, this is not good; grandmother does not mind the child noise, come, give grandmother kneel a Call her “Grandma”!
–From then on, everyone knew about it, so they let the child worship under the door; every time they deposited the child with the grandmother, they chased her with the words.
“Hey, don’t make grandma angry, okay? “
My family later moved, see this grandmother see less; but my father mahjong hitch are still in place, occasionally go back to play cards, on the card table to hear this: the original hardware store owner at one time, the owner of the hardware store.
The original hardware store owner had a period of time, business is not good, see what is not good, think the sky birds on the ground dogs are provoking him. Always suspicious of children around the granny wonton store, in his door clusters, impatient. So one day during lunch break, I put down the counter business and slipped to the police station opposite the hardware store to report the incident. At the door, there were four police officers on duty sitting at the table; the boss went in, pointing to the sky and sputtering, saying that granny wonton had no sign, no store, no license, and was operating on an area that was purely illegal, and that she should be regulated, or at least moved to a different place: it was so unbecoming to sell wontons without a license in front of the police station …… when she was talking so hard. Suddenly found four police officers with strange eyes, looking straight at him; and then stare, a dish of sesame oil and a dish of vinegar on the table; dumbfounded four police officers, a hand enamel basin a porcelain spoon, three of the four spoons, and held by their bite, green vegetables and meat fragrant granny wontons.
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