Chapter 59 From maltose to chocolate

My childhood, or the childhood of a large number of our children, coincided with the most impoverished years in this country.Therefore, the joy of our childhood is also an extremely flat and limited joy today.But at that time, we didn’t feel the lack of rain or sufficient light. We were like today’s children, wandering around the world, with eyes like glass marbles, dirty little hands stretched out, and even childish gestures with saliva hanging from the corners of our mouths. , greedily looking for, asking for, and possessing even a small stimulus in a poor life.As a kind supplement, let me recall my childhood in my affluent time, the taste of childhood-start with childhood snacks.

At that time, what I looked forward to the most was the Chinese New Year.Chinese New Year means harvest: In the pocket of the new padded jacket, there will be a paper wallet folded from a discarded calendar, filled with scratchy new corner tickets and shiny coins.New Year's money makes us a little rich overnight.I secretly made an appointment with Tang and Zhang, who are both neighbors and first-grade classmates in elementary school, to walk four stops (to save money on the bus fare) to Sanshan Street to eat Liu Changxing steamed buns.The Xiaolongtangbao made by this time-honored restaurant has a skin so thin that it is almost transparent. When you hold it in the air with chopsticks, you can get the crumbling feel of the gravy sloshing inside.The expert way of eating is to bite the opening shallowly, then sip it sharply, and drink up the hot and delicious soup in one gulp, which is really refreshing and refreshing.After some difficulty, he regained his composure, and slowly dealt with the skin and minced meat in the vinegar dish—they squatted limply, as if they had just lost their souls.There were twelve of them in one drawer, and the three little friends chipped in to order one drawer. They were still unsatisfied, discussed with each other's eyes, and gave up the plan to buy another drawer.Meat was too expensive in those days, so it was enough to try something new and satisfy your cravings.So I buried my head and drank the Zhenjiang rice vinegar that was dipped in gravy on the plate, and smacked my lips reluctantly and filed out of the bun shop.Many years have passed, and their figures float before my eyes.If I met such three little boys today, I would like to treat them to eat until they are bored, to comfort and satisfy their desire to restrain themselves completely by will.

Even with such restraint, it is rare for Liu Changxing to eat steamed buns.Half a month later, we moved to the state-owned Lantern Festival restaurant in Qinhuai District near Zhonghuamen Castle to eat Red Bean Lantern Festival and Jiuniang Lantern Festival - the former uses red bean paste, the latter uses distiller's grains as soup, and a pot of pocket soup that is slightly smaller than traditional Chinese medicine pills Yuan, because white sugar needs to be supplied by ticket, most of the Lantern Festival puts saccharin, the juice is sticky and extremely sweet (it seems that people's sense of taste is easily deceived).After half a month, it will be very refreshing and noble to be able to eat a bowl of Yangchun noodles with a few stars of spring onion floating on the surface of the soy sauce soup in the vegetarian restaurant.We patronize more private wonton pickers on the street—one end is a small coal stove and a steel pot boiling fossil-like stubborn bone broth, and the other end is on the table where the stall owner is gesturing quickly to wrap wontons.Due to the limited supply of pork in the market, most of the meat stuffing is replaced by minced old fried dough sticks and a little streaky fat. Even with this kind of stuffing, the stall owner takes great care to dip a little bit of it with the tip of chopsticks and wrap it in the dough. One pinch and it's done, mechanically reproduced like glued envelopes at the post office.On the night of the cold winter and the twelfth lunar month, I served a bowl of folk wontons sprinkled with a layer of red pepper noodles. I stood under the eaves and ate while blowing. I was sweating profusely, as if I had just climbed a mountain.Oh, the mountains on the tingling tongue.

After the end of the winter vacation and the start of school, there are vendors selling snacks gathered at the gates of all elementary schools in Nanjing City, specifically to lure elementary school students who are commuting to and from classes or taking breaks between classes.In my Hongmeixiang Primary School, the vendors along the street in twos and threes are mainly retired old men and women. They pick up a red brick from the construction site as a stool, and put a large bamboo basket with a cover commonly known as "cat sighing" between their knees. There are many spaces, and they are filled with fried sunflower seeds, spiced peanuts, fried chestnuts with sugar, olives, candied fruit and so on.I still remember that you can buy seven Shanghai spiced cinnamon beans for one penny.Nanjing children call sour preserved fruits (whether they are made of red bayberry, green apricot, shredded mango or sliced ​​peaches) as plums.At the thought of eating plums, every cell on the tongue becomes active.In particular, there is a kind of sour plum called Qiaosan. Because it is covered with salt grains, it feels salty at first when it is contained in the mouth. After five minutes, it is so sour that it makes people frown and feel painful. Even the thin layer of shriveled pulp is peeled off and swallowed, and the small hard core is still submerged and full of five flavors contained in the tongue bed.Huamei can be called a tease to people's sense of taste.It is neither nutritious nor satisfying hunger, but only seeks to indulge the sense of taste.I remembered the allusion of "looking at plum blossoms to quench thirst".If there is no temptation of taste, if the human tongue coating is as thick as iron plate, what kind of pitiful numbness it is.

At that time, plastic bags were still a luxury, and most of the food stalls were stacks of disassembled old book pages or waste newspapers cut into small squares.For a dime, the vendor will roll the paper into a triangular, funnel shape, fill it with food, and then lightly cap it.It is common to see girls with shofar braids in groups of three or four, each holding a paper bag of creamy melon seeds, chewing while walking, and spitting out the shells into the wind.At that moment, they probably felt that they were as happy as a princess.Little princesses of that poor era.Later, bubble gum with a goldfish spitting foam pattern on the sugar paper appeared.The little girls are hooked again.We often see them puffing their cheeks one after another, blowing out big white bubbles like small balloons—and before we have time to applaud, they burst one after another.It's like a dream.A line of girls blowing bubble gum and creating false images of life, dressed in plain clothes, was inspected by the sun on the playground.Like a dream, those beautiful and immature faces appeared and disappeared again.Where are they today?

In the long summer, the sycamore trees are so hot that they spit out their sweaty tongues.A stand selling cold drinks at the school gate came into being.The old lady sat in the shade of a tree and guarded a large wooden box painted white and covered with quilts. She held a small wooden board and tapped on the lid crisply: "Ice Popsicle Horse Head! Horse Head Popsicle!" It is said that this kind of Shouting is like the joint code of "sharpening the mouth of the scissors to strike the kitchen knife" in "The Story of the Red Lantern", which became popular before liberation.Red bean popsicles and orange juice popsicles, four cents each.Butter popsicles are five cents.We held the popsicle in our hands and sucked it slowly, trying to keep it melting as fast as possible - in the sweltering summer, it would be great if there was a popsicle that would never melt.At that time, it was very aristocratic to drink a soda. A bottle of orange soda cost 30 cents, for schoolchildren carrying jingling coins, it was no different from today's Remy Martin wine.It's something to show off when you drink a soda, burp exaggeratedly, and rub your belly as you walk through your mates.The early ice cream was packed in a round paper tube the size of a skin cream box and eaten with a small wooden spoon. We dare not care about it easily.The creamy ice cubes tend to be more popular, with simple paper packaging, the size of a cigarette box, and a dime a piece.Today's children probably don't know what popsicles and ice bricks are-it has disappeared from the market, and there are more than a hundred kinds of ice cream.

At the head of Changgan Bridge, there are two middle-aged men with Anhui accents, guarding a cart of purple-red sugar cane and a press machine made of cast iron. The juice is squeezed and sold by the cup.We squeezed into the crowd to watch the excitement, watching sections of sugarcane being filled in, and then pouring out of the furnace brilliantly like molten steel, with whitish, dry dross everywhere.On the other side of the bridge, there are farmers from Zhejiang who fry fried rice (called popcorn in other provinces). They mix raw rice (or soybeans, corn) with a spoonful of saccharin and seal it into a cylindrical black iron can with a handwheel. Repeatedly turning and heating on the fire, and prying off the iron cover after the air pressure in the tank increases to a certain level. At this time, the children onlookers covered their ears with their hands, listening to the sound of "boom" explosions, and the puffing of white flowers. The fried rice poured into the prepared large bamboo basket.

The sugarcane press and the cupping pot for fried rice are two machines that have been deeply remembered in my childhood.My primordial memory of iron and fire.I used to watch them in amazement like the Indians watching the small trains in the western United States. The tattered dealers walking around the streets are very smart. They also sell maltose, and the sugar basket is carried on the other side of the pole.Hearing the sound of hand-cranked copper bells, the children would collect some toothpaste tins, cans and even scrap copper wire from all corners of the house, and exchange them for candy.The salesman wearing a straw hat casually glanced at the old things presented by our hands, weighed and appraised them with his eyes, and without speaking, he used a small hammer and an iron piece from the edge of the golden maltose, which was as big as a pot lid, to knock on the narrow door. One, turning a blind eye to our dissatisfied pursed lips.He just broke our young hearts.

Childhood gluttony, like a mischievous bug, still seems to linger on my lips.The snacks of childhood, the snacks that once aroused great enthusiasm in children, are all far away.That enthusiasm is also far away.After graduating from primary school, my father came back from Beijing on a business trip and brought me a piece of imported chocolate the size of a pencil case.Peeling off the dazzling tinfoil (it was almost metallic light music), I left tooth marks on this strange food, and the melted chocolate passed through my mouth like an electric current, and I was so happy that I was dizzy, in the bliss squinted his eyes in the bright sunlight.It's a taste I never imagined, that exists outside of my world.Romantic chocolates constitute a child's paradise.From malt candy to chocolate, children of an era walked barefoot through childhood poverty.My childhood ended with the first chocolate.The childhood of future children is paved with chocolate.