Unforgettable "Henan Film" (Zhou Fenfang)

Text/Zhou Fenfang

Over the years, a small pink porcelain bowl has often flashed in my mind. There are vegetables and chopped green onion floating in the bowl, mixed with yellow and black sweet potato noodles, steaming, and my mother dripped sesame oil in it, which is slightly sweet ... it is the "Henan slice" that I often ate when I was a child.

It is a special product of the planned economy period. At that time, there was not enough food to eat. Thanks to it, the people in my hometown survived the spring drought. This pure sweet potato product has never appeared again after decades. Although it is not delicious, not delicious, or even different from the food on the table of ordinary people, I still often miss it. I only remember that I haven't eaten land since the land was contracted to households. I often think, who else remembers? Is there anyone else who can do it?

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Our generation, as long as they live in the rural areas of Qinba Mountain, always have a different feeling for sweet potatoes: planned economy was implemented as a child, natural and man-made disasters occurred year after year, materials were scarce, and there was not enough to eat. Fortunately, the sweet potato survived; When I was a teenager, the land was contracted to various households. Although sweet potato is no longer the protagonist of every meal, as a high-yield crop, especially for people and animals, farmers who get rid of hunger still have high enthusiasm for planting. Teenagers should plant sweet potato seedlings, turn over sweet potato vines, dig sweet potatoes, cellar sweet potatoes, sun sweet potatoes and grind sweet potato powder with adults. Especially in winter, they wash sweet potatoes in the river every day, and get up before dawn to steam sweet potatoes for pigs. ...

The stars are changing with each passing day, and forty or fifty years are like a blink of an eye. At today's dinner table, there are only unexpected things that fly in the sky, swim in the water and run on the ground, and there are very few things that can't be eaten. Occasionally, there will be a few sweet and soft small potatoes with red hearts or purple hearts in the restaurant, lined with white cotton paper with hollow patterns, lying on beautifully woven wisteria plates, which are very eye-catching.

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Gone are the days when sweet potatoes were the staple food. Nowadays, sweet potatoes are mostly used for raising livestock and fine processing, especially for processing into sweet potato vermicelli, which is a local characteristic industry. No, the Shiyan local food "Yunyang Sanhe Soup", which was listed on CCTV, is boiled sweet potato vermicelli with beef bone soup, supplemented by braised beef slices and steamed dumplings with monkey head. Occasionally, I think that if the sweet potato residue in Changling potato industry is dried and ground into powder, it may be a very popular local food.

A few days before the Spring Festival, my friend came back from his hometown in the countryside to worship his ancestors and gave me a bag of sweet potatoes. She said that this sweet potato is very sweet and soft when cooked, and it is especially delicious. I specially asked my relatives to come and send it to me, so I can have a strange meal during the New Year. The care and love from others is always touching.

After the rain, the weather became warmer and warmer. Before my friend finished eating sweet potatoes, they began to rot. It's a pity that I suddenly remembered Henan Film.

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As far as I can remember, the countryside is still a big collective economy. Many sweet potato pits were dug in the mountains and ridges of my hometown to preserve seed potatoes. At that time, the chances of preservation depended entirely on the location of the potato pit, leaving it to fate. We started to raise seedlings before the wheat harvest, and the sweet potatoes coming out of the cellar rotted a lot, piled up in piles and the number was amazing. These are our hard work and hope for the coming year! After collective selection of complete seed potatoes, rotten sweet potatoes are reluctant to throw away all of them, so that members can cut off the rotten scars a little better (they will turn black if not cleaned, which is particularly bitter when cooked), and those fermented sweet potatoes (soft and white inside, wrapped in a complete thin sweet potato skin, without bitterness) will be selected and distributed to every household. Yes, no one thought, "Can I eat? Will it be toxic? " Because I tighten my belt to work every day, there are sallow and emaciated old people in the world and a group of starving children in the world, for fear of getting less points at home.

Old houses are all green slate roofs and loess walls. The slate is big and strong, with dried sweet potato, fermented sweet potato and sweet potato residue (residue after filtering sweet potato starch) on it, which is clean and beneficial to water. It can also prevent chickens from pecking at dogs and stealing food. They don't need to be collected at night. After drying, they can be mashed into noodles and then stored.

Fermented sweet potatoes and sweet potato residues are different from dried sweet potatoes, so they can be directly boiled and must be reprocessed. On the left side of the rice field in front of my house, there is a big stone mill with a diameter of more than two feet and a height of more than one foot. Neighborhood families and mothers often use a stone mill to mix dried potato chips, potato residues and fermented sweet potatoes into powder (dry sweet potatoes are added to increase nutrition and change the taste). When eating, knead it into dough with hot water and press it into cakes the thickness of fingers and the width of more than two inches. When the water boils, put the chopping board on the edge of the cooker, slice it directly, fly it to a boiling pot, and add onion, ginger, oil, salt and cauliflower. This is the most conventional way to eat "Henan slices".

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Is "Henan Film" from Henan? I don't know. I vaguely remember hearing adults say that this practice came from neighboring Henan when I was a child. In those years, Henan also suffered serious natural disasters year after year, and rice and wheat were completely harvested. Only sweet potato is drought-tolerant and moisture-tolerant, and can be planted in plains and mountainous areas with high sugar content. The whole plant is not wasted at all, and the most important thing is high yield. But the biggest drawback is that it is not easy to preserve and is easy to rot. Subsequently, the "Henan Film" was born, and only it can play the role of sweet potato in saving lives to the extreme at a critical time. The survival wisdom of the working people is really amazing. It doesn't matter whether "Henan film" has anything to do with Henan.

At that time, during the slack season in winter and spring, several production teams would join hands with Qi Xin to wage a large-scale war on capital construction of irrigation and water conservancy, and built terraces and ditches around the clock. My father works in other places, and my mother and sisters work at night. I like to sit by the rice fields and look at the brightly lit construction sites on the distant hillside. The big searchlight there shines half the mountain as bright as day, and the light and shadow in the dark is magical and brilliant. It is full of people and enthusiasm, which is what I care about.

Sometimes during the day, I also follow my mother and sister to the construction site. I like watching my brothers and sisters pull "dry boats" on the construction site. A dry boat is not a boat, but a tool for building terraces and transporting stones. A thick wooden board with thick and wet hemp rope tied at its four corners. People dug many trenches two or three feet wide from the high part of the slope to the low part, filled in a proper amount of loess and poured water to form a slippery yellow mud surface. Young girls and boys, pulling dry boats full of big stones, ran down the hill quickly along the Huangnigou, almost letting go of the ground. There was a loud bang and the dry boat stopped. In the air, the dust is flying, and the scene is so thrilling.

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Well, at that time, a group of women about the same age as my second sister, only 17 to 20 years old, were so brave to pull up the "dry boat" that they were no less than men. The construction site is far from home. During the break, one person in each family goes back to cook and feed the livestock. The meals sent by each family are similar, mostly "Henan films". My mother was too busy to be alone, so she asked me to send a meal to my sister who was working on the construction site. A bowl of rice, staple food, oil, salt, vegetables and soup are all available. When I went out, my mother told me to stop playing and watch the road. Don't spill it. How did she know that when I put the rice into my sister's hand, there was basically not much soup left.

When I was a child, I especially liked to stick to my second sister and be with her. If I don't want to leave, she will carry me behind her back and leave me alone. When eating, I also huddled next to her stool. I can't bear to eat what I like at once. Whenever I put the "Henan film" aside, my second sister will tease me. If you don't like it, give it to me and take it away with chopsticks. When I cried and kicked my foot, I gave it back to me immediately.

I miss my second sister very much when I think of "Henan Film". Unfortunately, my second sister died unexpectedly in 1983 because of some people's backward ideas and ignorance, and never even had a comfortable life. Now, in this prosperous era, if only she were still alive. ...

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About the author: Zhou Fenfang? Member of Yunyang Writers Association, Shiyan City, like literature and writing. His works are mainly essays, novels and poems. Love life and record life.