Qingcheng Story: Yams

Potatoes, the scientific name is potato, and people in Hohhot like to call it yam.

As a native of Hohhot, who dares to say that he does not have a yam complex? Anyway, I dare not! This yam is really a precious pimple. During the planned economy period, there was not enough grain to eat. It could be put into porridge or fried noodles as the staple food. It could also be chopped up and put directly into naked oats noodles to make up for it. When I was a child, I loved to eat the "golden sticks and strips" made by my mother from this kind of naked oats. Nowadays, the biggest use of yams is still as vegetables, such as cold salad, vegetarian stir-fried, stewed vegetables, as well as snacks such as chips and potato chips processed from yams. It is also a good thing for adults and children to grind their teeth when they have nothing to do.

When I was a child, the economy became more and more depressed. Some people had trouble getting enough to eat. Other than a few luxurious fried beans, the children had no other snacks to see. If there are any, they are two vulgar foods that stand upright-dried pickles and dried yams. Making dried yams is also seasonal. You have to wait until the New Year has passed. Although it is still cold, there is already a spring breeze on Tumo River. Take up the frozen and soft yams in the vegetable cellar, wash them, cook them, peel them, then put them in a large iron sieve, and then put them on the cool roof. After more than a month, the processing is completed. Dry yams are sweet and dry. So, when I came home from school and was hungry, I climbed the ladder to my house, grabbed a few and put them in my pockets, and then stepped down on the ladder. I held a dried yam in each hand, knocked each other off the dust on it, and clicked it with a bite. It was so crisp that the ground was covered with dregs.

At that time, the days were hard. Whether it was the yams in the rice pot or the dried yams in your pockets, when you encountered numbness, you would at most chew a few bites of pickled vegetables to remove the numbness, and then eat it again. No one knows that the numbing feeling comes from the extremely toxic solanine, and of course no one has ever been poisoned by eating wild yam.

Sometimes some of the dried yams on the roof of my house are secretly touched by the children in my neighborhood, but they are touched. No one will take this seriously. Anyone eats a delicious local snack.

Compared with my mother who was born in the 1940s, no matter what we ate, we never went hungry in childhood. Take yams for example. During the autumn storage season every year, members are given per head in rural areas in the suburbs, and employees are given per head in enterprises and institutions in the urban area. Our family is given double share, including Qiaokuan Brigade and Hohhot City Dairy Factory where my father lives. Sacks of yams were poured into the yard, the big ones were picked out and put into the cellar for eating, the medium ones were washed and ground with yam powder, and the small ones and the ones that were shoveled were cooked and fed to the pigs. But when my mother was a child, even yam peel felt very precious. One day, a beggar probably hadn't ordered food for most of the day, and his eyes were so hungry that his eyes turned blue. When I wandered to my grandma's house by the moat outside the south gate of the new city, I leaned against the window and saw a small pile of yam skins on the pot table. He shouted to my grandma in the room,"Sister-in-law, please send me away from the yam peel on the pan..." When my grandma heard this, she quickly threw a rotten rag on the yam peel to cover it, and then said without discussion: "No, I'm still feeding the pigs!" When grandma was alive, whenever we talked about this matter, she would always laugh, and then take off her presbyopic glasses to wipe her tears.

Grandma also told me a story about yams. That was many years before I was born, when my mother was a child. It was the agricultural cooperative period. The members went to work in the fields and were hungry. While the team leader was away, they secretly ran to the yam field to dig some yams, and dug a pit in the ground. They wanted to bury the yams in and stew them when the firewood in the pit was almost cooked. Eat. Unfortunately, before the fire was lit, someone shouted "Captain is here", which scared everyone to quickly pull the yam into the pit. After a few shovels of soil, the fire was put out and the smoke was gone. When I finished work at night, my grandma was still thinking about the yams. She deliberately walked at the end of the journey. Everyone else couldn't see it. Only then did she twist her pair of golden lotus feet and go back to find the place where the yams were buried. Although the yams had long been buried in the smoked soil into raw yams that could no longer be ripe, there were still some thick things in the porridge pot at night that could be picked up with a spoon.

Nowadays, who would take yams seriously? Who would take out the yams in the cellar and break buds after spring? For young people, yams with buds are poisonous and cannot be eaten. But at that time, the yams from the previous year were broken off again and again, and their water finally lost until they became wrinkled. Soft dumplings, but we can still eat them just like that, but new yams cannot be eaten until National Day.

Second, if you want to eat yam to the extreme, you have to be Ulanqab people. Let's not talk about fresh yams. Let's talk about frozen yams that we think should be thrown away. When I was a child, I often saw my fifth sister-in-law bring back a basin of yam eggs frozen to death from the cold room, pour cold water into it with a ladle, and stir the ice outside. After the ice shell is removed, the yam eggs will be soft after a while. The fifth sister-in-law put the yam between the two chopping boards and pressed the water hard until the yam became dehydrated flat slices. Then, the fifth sister-in-law put all these flat slices into the cage, pulled up the bellows and began to steam them. During this process, I can always smell a wonderful and slightly sweet aroma. After steaming, cool it a little, add some pickles, which is very delicious. The fifth sister-in-law said that in her hometown, Ulanqab, during the famine years, the dry food brought by people who went out to herd sheep was a few such steamed yams.

I thought that the people of Ulanqab thought of a way to eat the frozen yams because they were afraid of waste. Later, a new couple of Ulanqab came to the doorman of the community. When I went to pick up newspapers and letters in winter, I found that they steamed the frozen yams every few days. After careful questioning, I realized that although they had left their hometown for many years, they could never forget this way of eating, so they specially froze some to satisfy their cravings, or to miss their hometown. Later, they also told me that in my hometown, when the weather became freezing, people would pour baskets of yams into the yard to freeze them. When frozen, soak it first, then press it, and then steam it to be used as both dry food and rice. The most unbelievable thing is that the yams were left in the ground when they were frozen for a whole winter. Although they were already completely unrecognizable, they were still a hot commodity when they were scraped out the next spring. Even if they were scraped out without picking them up and dried, it was okay. Take it home, wash it, dry it, and grind it into a flour. The food made by that guy is very strong and delicious. What's even more amazing is that now that the conditions are good, they actually cut the steamed frozen yam into slices and stir-fry it with meat and vegetables. It is said that the taste and taste are quite good. Writing here, a question suddenly popped into my mind. Is this last eating method considered elegant or vulgar?

Regarding the way to eat yams, looking at the dining table, it is truly elegant and elegant, and vulgar to vulgar. However, whether elegant or vulgar, delicious is the last word. If you don't believe me, look. A plate of white, clean, crisp and spicy shredded yams dotted with shredded green and red peppers is placed on the rotating table of a star-rated hotel. It is considered elegant to eat; make a plate of shredded yams with enough soy sauce and enough seasonings and stir-fried, and serve it on your own dining table. It is considered vulgar to eat. It is an elegant taste to make a pot of rosy and delicious dried pot of yam shrimp, but stewing a pot of pork ribs, yam and pickled cabbage powder is definitely a vulgar taste. Frying an exquisite Spanish yam egg cake is elegant, and steaming a basket of fist-sized yam buns is vulgar. In a big hotel, ordering a shallot and yam paste placed in the center of a fine white porcelain plate is elegant, but a bowl of yam paste used to mix naked oats must be vulgar. Wuchuan's senior chefs carefully cook yam eggs to make a vegetarian abalone with complete color, aroma, shape and taste. It is definitely elegant to eat. Although Lin Lin mutton stewed yam has meat, considering the frequency it appears on the table, it is still vulgar. Wrap the roasted yams in tin foil paper in the oven. When eating them, raise your orchid fingers and dip them with some specially prepared seasonings. It is elegant to eat, but dig out a roasted yams in the pit, pat the ashes and then order some pickles. It is a vulgar food that cannot be more vulgar.

There is a yam called "Feurite" in the main producing area of Sanhou Mountain. Because of its high requirements on land, temperature and low yield, it is difficult to see in the Hohhot market. It can be called the best among yams and is so delicious. I can't say it. This variety is also a foreign thing. It comes from the Netherlands and has a high starch content. In the Hohhot dialect, it tastes like "real sand". In fact,"sand" means quick ripening, so in Siziwang Banner, people still like to use yam to mix dumpling stuffing, which is really unbelievable to Tumochuan people. Of course, there is a more important point. When cooking with "Feuret", when it is hot and eaten the next day, it will definitely not have the indescribable residual medicinal taste of other yams.

In addition, Wu Lanhua's friend invited me to eat on the "street", which was like a meal every time. In the morning, there are yams in the mutton entrails, and in the mutton blood buns. At noon, there are yams in the mutton stew and chicken stew. At night, I simply eat some noodles, and the yams are still cooked in the mutton.

Because I love eating yams, in recent years, I have been taking a bus from Hohhot City to the Houshan area. Watch people grow yams in spring, watch people weed yam seedlings in summer, and watch yams bloom. After returning to the city, I heard that the hail had beaten the yam seedlings badly. Not only was I anxious to get angry, but I also had trouble sleeping and eating, for fear that it would affect the harvest after autumn. Of course, I am not idle in autumn. As promised in spring, I went to help a family prepare yams voluntarily for a day.

I have never done the business of raising yams before, and I dare not step on a shovel in the soil with my feet for fear of shoveling the yams into pieces. Later, I simply put down the shovel, took two baskets, and focused on picking up yams.

It is the season to harvest yams every year, and it is also the busiest season for Houshan Starch Factory. The factory must concentrate human and financial resources to purchase the small yams selected by farmers in one go, process them into starch to the best of their use, and sell them to food factories as raw materials or additives. Of course, ordinary people will also buy more than ten kilograms to make jelly and vermicelli in summer, and press vermicelli and boil vermicelli in winter. Anyway, whether directly or indirectly, people can't live without every meal. It seems to be just a yam.

Speaking of starch, I couldn't help but think of grinding yam powder at home when I was a child. The tool is a worm full of nail holes. A person sits on a kang or a small bench with a large basin in front of him. His left hand holds the rice seeds on the edge of the basin, and his right hand holds the washed yam. He wipes back and forth on the rice seeds leisurely and slowly, and the bits that are scraped out flow into the big basin along the rice seeds and nail holes. You can't rush to grind yam powder. If you are anxious, you must wipe your hands, and you will wipe a few fingers at a time. That's no joke.

Whether the final yam powder is white or not depends on the most critical "passing" and "clearing" in the whole process. "Pass" is filtering residue, and "clear" is cleaning. Only when these two tasks are done in place can the yam powder hung on the kang be as white as snow.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were many bungalows in Hohhot, and they ate foreign well water. Therefore, like in rural areas, in order to "clarify" the flour to be whiter, every household had to put in good labor during the milling period. Carry clear water and pour muddy water out. In short, grinding yam powder is a tiring and time-consuming task. Only after killing the New Year pig, pressing the vermicelli strips, stewing the cooked vegetables, and eating it will you realize that the tiredness is still worth it.

In Hohhot and even the entire Inner Mongolia, yams are born as a treasure and people's material and spiritual sustenance. If I run a restaurant and live without yams, then chefs and housewives will definitely be at a loss; specifically for myself, there are 365 days a year when I can't hold yams on my chopsticks. I really can't find a few days. Written by/Gao Yanping