Chapter 19 Chapter 19 Crispy Rice Porridge

In the early years, I used relatively primitive cooking utensils to cook, and the iron pots and tripod pots were very easy to produce crispy rice.Crispy rice is stuck to the bottom of the pot. When eating it, it is extremely hard. People in the south of the Yangtze River like to smash the rice crust and boil it into rice porridge. It is delicious and better than normal rice.The best of the crispy rice is the crispy rice cooked in a firewood stove and an iron pot. It is golden in color, crisp but not burnt. It is cooked with rice soup. You only need a few sticks of salted radish when you eat it, which is very appetizing.Nowadays, there are also special hotels that make rice crackers, which are cooked with rice soup. This is a Pop art, like Internet literature, but its taste is also good. Last year, I lived in Huanggang Xiaoju, and I met with Huanggang literati Xiong Wenxiang, He Cunzhong, Chen Minggang, and Wang Haohong. The elder brother drank heavily on the edge of the Red Cliff in Dongpo. After drinking, he drank rice porridge with chopped ground vegetables (shepherd's purse), which was not only fragrant, but also had a bitter taste from the ground vegetables. in heaven.

However, eating crispy rice porridge in Huanggang remains in my deepest memory, or the Laozu Temple in Huangmei the year before last.The famous temples in Huangmei include Sizu Temple, Wuzu Temple and Laozu Temple. The first two temples are presided over by Daoxin and Hongren respectively.Wuzu Temple needs to say a few more words. Wuzu Temple is located in Dongfeng Maoshan, referred to as Dongshan Temple. The biography of the sixth patriarch Huineng in Buddhism says: Huineng's surname is Lu. He was born in Zhuo County, Hebei. Chai's adoptive mother, who came to enlightenment by listening to the "Diamond Sutra", learned that it came from Dongfeng Maoshan Zen Buddhism Hongren, so she chased the Yangtze River from the Pearl River to the Wuzu Temple, and spent eight months on the pestle in the temple. , Huineng's tiredness can be seen in the Zen mind.One day, in order to test the Zen audience's understanding of his Zen and prepare to pass on the mantle, Hongren ordered everyone to write gatha to testify.At that time, Shenxiu was recognized as the successor of the mantle, so he wrote a verse: "The body is a bodhi tree, and the heart is like a mirror stand. Always wipe it diligently, so as not to stir up dust.".After watching it, Hongren said to the Zen audience: If future generations can practice according to this, they will also achieve victory, please recite it.Hui Neng stayed in the dungeon and heard more than seven hundred monks recite the verse aloud. He felt that it was very general and had no Zen meaning, so he also wrote a verse. He couldn't read, so he asked someone to inscribe it on the wall. , the bright mirror is not a stand; there is nothing in the first place, where can the dust be aroused!".This gatha was so good that Master Hongren immediately changed his mind and decided to pass on the mantle to Huineng.There is a strange tree behind the Wuzu Temple. The lower end of each branch is curved and the upper end is straight, like the reflection of a bamboo pole cast in the water distorted by waves. It has nothing to do with Zen.

After seeing the Wuzu Temple, I have to go to the Laozu Temple if I think about it.The Laozu Temple is located on Ziyun Mountain, Huangmei Kuzhu Township. There are many huge stones on Ziyun Mountain, and bamboo forests grow on the stones, and there are wild goats screaming.When we arrived at the Laozu Temple, it was dusk, no one came and went, only the sound of insects, so we lived in the temple and had vegetarian meals.The only host was Master Wei, a 69-year-old female with a solitary upper front tooth and wearing a black monk hat.She cooks rice in an iron pot with a firewood stove, and there is a pot buried beside the stove. When cooking rice, she adds some rice soup into it.There are only two dishes, vegetarian fried tofu sticks and salted radish sticks, which are delicious. The lamp is a long burning candle, and a moon hangs on the top of the mountain outside the door.

The Laozu Temple was bombed by the Japanese Air Force. The temple on the ruins was rebuilt several years ago. The atmosphere is not as good as before. The temple building is dilapidated. hand. It is said that today's cooking has a trend of innovation, and electric cookers controlled by chips can no longer cook rice.I would like to talk about the cooking utensil tripod pot. The tripod pot can only be seen occasionally in the remote countryside. It is made of cast iron just like the iron pot. It looks like the tripod in the Forbidden City, but it does not have two ears and three legs. The bottom is pointed, and the circle gradually becomes larger. There is a circle of straight circles on the top, and there are four symmetrical holes on both sides, and the wire is used as a handle.Generally, tripod pots use wooden lids, and some have cast iron lids, which are matched with tripod pots.Ding pots can be used to simmer soup or stew rice. Last year in a blacksmith shop in Majia Village, there was also a tripod pot hanging on an iron stove, with soybeans and pig's feet simmering inside.According to historical records, Ding is a cooking utensil that existed in the Xia and Shang Dynasties. Many words implying grandeur and power are used in the word Ding. It is said to eat with tripods. There are many tripods lined up when eating, just like the buffet in Tongli Bar in Sanlitun. The richness of food can be imagined; tripods are also much more noble than iron pots. The word Dingdang jade is The saying "Take tripod as an iron pot and jade as an inferior stone" means to waste food indiscriminately.Purely at the present time, it is difficult to figure out why an iron pot for cooking rice and stewing soup, which is clumsy in shape and ugly in appearance, was favored by the emperor and regarded as a symbol of power.In the Forbidden City, the tripod was gold-plated. According to the report sent by the commander of the Eight-Power Allied Forces to the German emperor, the Russian soldiers were dedicated to the despicable act of scraping the gold from the tripod.

I have used tripod pots for cooking before, but it is still easy to char the rice. If there is no such shortcoming, tripod pots are really good.The stewed rice cooker contains the balance of life, or the idea of ​​the mean. When the rice cooker is stewed with less heat, it will not be fragrant, and with a little more fire, it will be burnt and miserable. Only when the heat is moderate, it will be crisp but not burnt. It is golden in color and fragrant. , because of its porridge, the elegant Suzhou people call the rice porridge "a soup of a hundred shovels". When you read it, you are reminiscent of the appearance of housewives shoveling the rice. The fragrance comes from afar.