The terroir is small| the wonton burden that has gone away

Late Qing Dynasty Shanghai camel burden wonton burden Austrian photography

Count nine cold days, finish your business and hurry home. It's dark at night. It was particularly cold again.

Suddenly in the street market not far from my home to turn the corner found a wonton burden, I thought to myself, now the urban management is so strict, there is a chai wonton burden, it is really not easy! The owner is from Anhui, brings his wife to do it together, and comes out at night to do a business. I think that in Shanghai, as long as you work hard, there will always be a place where you can earn money. I stepped forward, asked for a bowl of ravioli, and talked to the boss, who said to me, there is no way, the children have to go to school, always have to spend. I'm right, it's not easy for anyone these days.

Next to this wonton, I remembered a kind of wonton burden that could be seen everywhere on the streets of Shanghai decades ago: the skeleton of the burden was made mainly of bamboo, one was a pot stove, and the stove was burned with small chopped firewood; the other end was filled with wontons, spoons and oil and salt as ingredients. When the guests came, the host would quickly wrap up the wontons, then cook them in the pot, and after a while, a bowl of steaming delicious wontons was handed to the guests.

This ravioli is divided from the market at night until late at night. Especially at night, at the end of the streets and alleys, the wontons are glowing with red fires, floating in the night, becoming a special scenery on the streets of Shanghai in that era. The stove fire, so that the nocturnal people from a long distance to notice its presence, its wafting in the air of the smell of green onions, it is easy to arouse people's appetite, and then pull out a few horns to serve a bowl as a supper. Nowadays, the urban management is very strict, and this kind of food burden is almost extinct.

The history of wontons appearing on the streets of Shanghai should be very long. I remember that Suzhou shen fu wrote "Six Records of Floating Life" and wrote about "wonton burden": the male host Shen Sanbai and several friends, "One year in Suzhou cauliflower yellow spring tour, bitter no restaurant to drink." The hostess, Yunniang, came up with the idea to hire a wonton in the city, the pot stove was complete, and went together..." Mr. Yu Quyuan, who later compiled the "Six Chronology of Floating Life", wrote out the street market "Wonton Bear", and Shen Sanbai's spring trip was in the fifty-eighth year of Qianlong (1793) in the Qing Dynasty, which was also hundreds of years. It can be seen that this kind of wonton burden has a history of hundreds of years in Shanghai and Suzhou. In the 1980s, I worked a news outlet, and when I got off the night shift, when I was about to get home, I went to chai wontons and ate a bowl of wontons, which was also a very tasty thing.

Back in the 1960s, when I was still a primary school student, it was the difficult period of the country, and in Xujiahui, the main business of wontons seemed to be at night, selling wontons on a bamboo tube and constantly beating, making the sound of the sticks. At that time, the wonton burden was very exquisite, and the two ends of the burden were stoves and pots on one side, and on the other side were fillings, skins, ingredients and utensils, which were quite clean. The aged bone soup in the pot is full of umami. The ravioli is delicious, half thanks to this soup. I always had to drag my mother home to buy this flavored ravioli, and now that my mother is gone, I don't have this luxury.

People who pick wontons, like those of us in any profession, are not easy and hard. Go out in the morning, carry the burden through the streets, there is no time for idleness. Someone came to eat, busy with customers. When there are no customers, busy adding coal soup or wrapping ravioli. Erosion wraps up quickly. The meat filling was prepared in advance, only to see him holding the skin in his left hand, flicking the meat filling with a small bamboo stick in his right hand, and pinching it with his left hand, which was a highly skilled job. Especially in Suzhou, Shanghai, Wuxi, Changzhou and other places, the snack burden of walking the streets and alleys is the most popular. The people take food as the sky, and this mobile Jiangnan snack burden seems to be tied to the daily life of ordinary people in the past.

Especially in the cold winter days of the ninth month, every dusk, at the beginning of the lantern, wontons (known as "camel dan" in the Qing Dynasty) walk through the streets, and there are many kinds of snacks on the daner, and with the change of seasons, from fresh meat wontons and glutinous rice soup balls, to osmanthus sugar taro, sugar porridge, sugar rice cakes. Oil tofu noodle soup and so on, the sound is suppressed, and the shouting sometimes sounds a bit like the nagging of the mother urging the child to eat.

Recently, I was doing research on the flavor of Jiangnan diet, but I always thought about the taste of chai wontons when I was a child, but I couldn't find it anymore, just like when I ate haggis soup in Taicang Shuangfeng Town, I felt very good, and I couldn't find that shop anymore. Sometimes I miss the taste of chai wontons, including shrimp skin, green onions, chopped winter vegetables, soy sauce, sesame oil, coriander, and other memories are not clear. Once the ravioli is cooked, it is first fished into a bowl, and then poured with hot soup, and the aroma of green onions immediately floats into your nose. On a winter night, you who are frozen, come to a bowl of hot and fragrant hot wontons, and the sweat on the tip of your nose will immediately come out. That's why I'm so impressed with it...

Nowadays, the wonton burden has been driven away, a little capital of the hawkers settled in the big shopping mall to open a shop, no capital is not easy to do business, in Shanghai, Suzhou and even all over the Jiangnan, the street food burden has basically disappeared, I have nothing to say.

On December 30, 2020, it was held in Shanghai