Chapter 50 tasty fingers

The most beloved of all baby foods, and the most resisted by parents, are babies' own fingers. The vast majority of babies will suck their own fingers when they are born, and since ultrasound technology has been widely used in obstetrics and gynecology, it is possible to see the fetus in the mother's womb sucking tastefully while floating in the amniotic fluid on the screen finger shadow.This scene of hedonism is not inferior to the big drug lord in American movies floating on the blue waves of the private swimming pool and playing with a cup of colorful drinks. In addition to this innate skill, every baby will cry and howl to ask for food and drink from their parents without a teacher. independent.Whether it is milk or paste, there is no food that can compare to this super buffet that can be done with little effort.

Baby eating hands is a very annoying thing for parents. Biting fingers and nails is commonplace. In some serious cases, parents are even more horrified to find that BB's tiny tender fingers are like an ice cream. There is a phenomenon that the sucking becomes thinner and shorter.In a pinch of desperation, chili sauce will be smeared on the baby's fingers (the cruelty of this behavior is: he looks more like an adult with a big taste who is about to eat a child's finger).During the hoarse crying, the baby will temporarily stop eating, but once the hotness is over, the baby will continue to eat.

Let’s forget about the clichés related to the “oral period” on this issue. The lack of maternal love, lack of attention, frustration, stress, and emptiness and loneliness sound more like adults themselves. question.I am increasingly inclined to believe that the stubborn phenomenon of finger sucking may only mean one thing: fingers are the best food.Once, when my daughter was neither nervous nor depressed, I seriously asked, "Tell me, are fingers really that delicious?" In the darkness, the little woman who was hiding under the blanket and eating her hands nodded her head three times sincerely.

So I have no choice but to believe that the taste of my fingers is something that can be said to be said.The doctor said that babies start to eat their hands frequently from the age of zero to two months old. During this period, they also learn to smile.I think learning to smile is precisely because learning to eat hands.The reason why adults hate this is that they really don't know the joy of fish, or we have completely forgotten the happiest event in our early eating life.We can normally eat finger biscuits, pig knuckles, and chicken feet, but when it comes to babies eating hands, even the most tolerant and unrestricted people in terms of concept and taste may think normally: this thing, even if you want to eat it To eat, even if it must be eaten raw, there must be some condiments.

Although some people still eat their hands as adults, children's fascination with eating hands usually disappears by themselves at the age of five or six.However, children are still obsessed with eating directly with their hands. Rather than saying that this is due to unfamiliarity in the use of tableware, I would rather believe that this is a psychological compensation for lifting hands. McDonald’s does not provide any tableware. So it is very popular among children from all over the world, which is probably one of the reasons. In fact, in the "baby period" in the history of evolution, human beings not only obtained food with bare hands, but also directly ate with bare hands.The appearance of tableware is directly related to the discovery and use of fire. The most obvious reason is that the food that has been burned is not only delicious but also hot. If you eat it with bare hands, it is likely to be your own. hand. "Hot hands" directly creates the need to create a "feeding medium". Tableware is not only a heat insulation device, but also an extension of the hand.

It has to be admitted that so far, among the vast majority of utensils invented by human beings, only tableware and weapons can make users temporarily forget things and me.Henry Petrowski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University, wrote in "The Evolution of Utensils": "We use food utensils every day as naturally as we use our hands: whether it is a knife, fork, or spoon, it can be like fingers. Be obedient, as if you only realize you are using utensils at the dinner table when you touch the elbow of someone with a different handedness." It may also be that the utensils are too close to the hands, or that eating directly with the hands is inevitably reminiscent of the behavior of a baby; it may be the continuous strengthening of the social nature of eating activities, or it may be that food is becoming more and more complex and easier to cook Get your hands "dirty" - in any case, the taboo of eating with your hands is particularly strict in civilized society, and it seems that only murder and adultery can be compared.According to Professor Petroski's research, after knives were commonly used on the dining table, at least in the Saxon era of England, "the common people still took food with their bare hands in style", and only those "more educated people began to develop the habit of using knives." habit", "In formal occasions, the food is usually cut and placed on the bread, and then put into the mouth with a knife to keep hands clean." However, when there are large pieces of beef, the right hand holds the knife to cut, The thing used to fix the "flower lock" has to rely on the left hand.The invention of the fork contributed to the evolution of the left hand groping in the dark from barbarism to civilization.

In the vicissitudes of life, although the delicacy of cooked food and the obedient and easy-to-use utensils have caused human beings to lose the memory of hands, adults have their own ways to seek comfort, at least subconsciously. One of the safest and most convenient ways for adults to complete their subconscious recollection of hand-eating and relive the joy that has been lost for many years is to experience a heterogeneous eating style in the so-called civilized norms.In other words, you can achieve this ulterior purpose by trying a way of eating directly with your hands. As far as the Han people are concerned, as long as they mention the "hand-picked meat" or "hand-picked rice" in the Northwest, have they ever experienced this kind of experience? I believe that the first command issued by the central nervous system of these people is not "drool quickly!" ", the first thing to be awakened should be a long-lost primitive pleasure of eating hands in infancy or even fetal life, and then it will be the turn of "delicious", "want to eat" and the irresistible desire to break taboos impulse.

The basic materials of pilaf are: fresh mutton (also snow chicken, pheasant, chicken, duck, goose and beef), carrots, onions, clear oil or ghee, bone marrow oil, rice, and can also be served with raisins, dried apricots, Peaches and other dried fruits.Method: First chop the mutton into small pieces and deep-fry them in clear oil, then fry them with onions and carrots, add salt and water as appropriate, after about 20 minutes, put the rice into the pot, do not stir, and simmer for 40 minutes Ready in minutes.Before eating, the host holds the basin in one hand and the pot in the other, and asks the guests to wash their hands one by one. After all the guests have cleaned their hands, the pilaf is placed on the tablecloth, and they can be eaten directly from the plate with their hands.

As for "caught mutton", there are two kinds: seasoned and unseasoned: the one in Xilu is seasoned, in addition to refined salt, there are onions, peppers, ginger slices and pepper, etc.The one on the North Road, especially in the pastoral areas, is very simple to cook, that is, put the fresh lamb leg meat into the pot and stew it, and then take it out and eat it when it is seven or eight mature, eliminating all seasoning and peeling. After breaking into small pieces, you can eat them with your hands. Why do you have to use your hands to eat finger meat, and why can finger meat be eaten without any seasoning at all?Some people think that this is caused by the unrestrained genes in the national temperament, or that it was not easy to buy condiments on the grasslands in the past, so there is a tradition of free condiments.These explanations are reasonable, but to be honest, they are not very accurate.Why do you have to eat meat with your hands?Why can it be eaten with relish without seasoning?I think there is probably no deeper truth in it. To put it bluntly, it is due to the direct involvement of the hand, which is better than all the utensils and all the seasonings.

If you believe that the formation of such "finger food" is due to the lack of corresponding eating utensils in history, you are even more wrong. , which one would be inferior to the Han people? Although the tableware in the world is enough for us to deal with all kinds of food with ease and handy, even though the proficiency of Eastern people in using knives and forks has been comparable to that of Westerners, we still have to admit that there are still some For such a small amount of food, it is better to eat it with bare hands. When I have to "eat" with my hands, the first thing I think of is crabs, to be precise, steamed hairy crabs.The strong and hard shell of hairy crabs undoubtedly provides a great place for eating tools: as early as the Ming Dynasty, some craftsmen invented a full set of crab-eating tools. The first timepieces included hammers, forging, pliers, spoons, forks, and shovels. There are eight pieces of scraping, scraping and needles, so it is also called "eight crabs". Later, it was increased to twelve pieces on this basis, which is a bit like the current set of family combination tools.I have never seen these crab-eating tools in museums. It is said that the common ones are made of copper, while the advanced ones are made of silver, and they are extremely exquisitely made.According to expert research, the shape of the scraper is a bit like a sword, the spoon is like a water bowl in a study, and the crab meat is served with a three-legged jue.These tools are all equipped with a round, lotus leaf-shaped plate. There are also three legs under the plate. The three legs are all carved into dragon shapes, and the three dragons support a lotus leaf plate.When eating crabs, first put the crabs into the lotus leaf tray, beat each part of the whole crab with a hammer, then split the crab shell, cut off the claws and feet, and use scrapers and tweezers to remove the crab roe and crab meat. Cream and each part of crab meat, each part should be spooned into the meat, and then the spoon should be filled with seasonings, and tasted bit by bit.

Still, most crab eaters (including those who lack the aforementioned tools and lack the patience for them), or those who wholeheartedly enjoy hairy crabs, basically choose to eat them directly by hand.Aunt Xue in the movie not only has no shortage of tools, but someone even brought the peeled crab meat to her mouth, but she said to Sister Feng who was in charge of peeling the crabs: "We eat it ourselves, and we don't need anyone to let us." The fun of peeling crabs by hand cannot be exhausted in a few words.Li Yu said: "Everyone who eats crabs only takes the whole old body, steams it and eats it, stores it on an ice tray, and puts it on the table, and let the guests eat it by themselves." I believe that the "self-eating" that Li Yu said is to use it. own fingers.Otherwise, it would be impossible for Bi Maoshi, a native of Jin Dynasty, to top the list of China's "crab-eating celebrities" with the words "holding a crab claw with one hand and a wine glass with the other, and swimming in the wine pool for a lifetime".If you pay attention to figure and rely on tools, I am afraid that "holding a crab claw in one hand and a wine glass in the other" has to be rewritten as "holding a crab claw in one hand and 'eight pieces of crab' in the other". When the posture of celebrities has become a luxury, another practicality of peeling crabs by hand is still worthy of attention: there are a large number of fake Yangcheng Lake crabs on the market, and pure Yangcheng Lake crabs have suffered from the devastating "racial chaos" of hybrid crabs in recent years ", so that the two are difficult to distinguish in appearance, and the only credible way to prove it is to smell your fingers after eating. If there is a strong crab smell and it lasts for a long time, it is true, and vice versa. false.At the thirty-eighth chrysanthemum crab meeting, Jia Baoyu wrote a poem chanting crabs, which included the sentence "It is still fragrant to wash the fishy fish on your fingers".Although this method is the most simple and reliable, it is a pity that you have to wait until after the event.Now is the season for holding claws, you may wish to test yourself after eating crabs.If you can't get the result of "staining the fishy smell and washing the fragrance" on the fingers of the fund-raising, you can also snatch the hands of the neighbors and sniff them wildly. Foods that must be "touched", except shrimp and crab, also include individual parts of poultry (such as chicken legs, chicken wings, pig knuckles), certain parts of vegetables and fruits, most nuts, and rice such as sushi, steamed buns and steamed buns , Flour products. If you subdivide these foods, it is not difficult to find that, except for some of them, which do not need to be cut with tools due to their small size or complete shape (although someone has invented a machine for peeling melon seeds), all of them can be eaten. With the help of various utensils to get them into the mouth smoothly, in other words, in a sense, such as etiquette or personal hygiene, this is by no means saying that it is technically impossible to eat them into the mouth without hands, In addition to the human nature of greed for convenience, "doing it really tastes better than not doing it" seems to be the only credible reason. Conversely, the entertaining nature of Peking duck and mutton steamed buns and their enduring popularity in various regional cultures in China is also related to the encouraged "intervention" of eaters during the eating process.On the one hand, this kind of pleasure comes from the temporary breaking of daily taboos (sadly, even if you occasionally encounter this kind of opportunity, such as eating finger meat, you have to wear a pair of gloves like everyone else, stuffed in transparent plastic Safely flaunting frivolity in the cover).At the same time, it is also very likely that the eater will subconsciously recall the joy of sucking fingers in childhood.In fact, in terms of the overall experience of food, the tongue is not the only one, and the taste buds can only perceive four kinds of tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty.In addition to the sense of smell, the involvement of hands is extremely important.The blood circulation in the hands is extremely rich, and the microcirculation is dense. There are extremely rich capillary networks and nerve endings, especially the fingers, which contain as many as 50,000 nerve endings per square inch.Therefore, directly touching the food with hands not only can feel the temperature of the food more clearly, but also experience the mechanism and texture of the food that cannot be detected by the lips and tongue.The direct participation of the hands will undoubtedly make the feelings brought by the diet to the brain more comprehensive and rich.Perry Garfunkel writes: "The movement of the hands provides an enormous amount of information to the brain . The proportion in the sensory center is about equal to the sum of the three states of Alaska, California and Texas." The Chinese expression can be "moving the index finger", or "ten fingers connecting the heart". The Sixth Patriarch said: "The heart of the benevolent moves." Of course, as far as the physical eating behavior is concerned, no matter whether it is the heart or fingers, it must be one's own.