Online public welfare classes
Table naturalism
In the "Children's Reading Island" online public welfare class, Mr. Jiang Hao, a member of the "Children's Reading Island" expert team, will open up the "Children's Reading Island" online nature reading class with a broader vision and richer biological species - "Table Naturalism".
Jiang-hsien
Senior Internship Instructor of School of Landscape Engineering, Qingdao Technician College
Let's learn together
Vegetables
Mouse curve
(b)
What I know of rat shell grass is the "rat shell kueh" that only appears in the Chaocai restaurant, and the "koji" and "shell" in Chaoshan dialect have the same sound, so it should also be a forgery of rat koji grass. It is said that because of the reputation of Chaoshan people's food, "rat shell kueh" has frightened many outsiders, thinking that it is made of mouse skin. In fact, rat koji kueh is a kueh product made of glutinous rice + rat koji grass + filling, and it has nothing to do with mice.
Rat koji cake
Chaoshan's rat koji kueh has three kinds of fillings: salty, sweet and salty-sweet, which are suitable for different tastes. The sweet filling is mainly mung bean paste and black bean paste; The main salty filling is glutinous rice fragrant rice, accompanied by diced pork, diced shiitake mushrooms, minced peanuts, etc. Other regions also have a tradition of using koji grass to make "Qingming fruit". The method is similar to that of glutinous rice cakes: the juice of koji grass is added to glutinous rice flour or rice flour, and the filling is mostly similar. Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangzhou, Fujian and Taiwan all have the custom of eating, mainly used to worship ancestors.
Shaoxing writer Zhou Zuoren called this wild grass as goldenrod wheat fruit in "Wild Vegetables of Hometown", he wrote: Huanghua wheat fruit is commonly known as rattle grass, which is a plant of the Asteraceae family, with small leaves and slightly round and alternate, white hairs on the surface, yellow flowers, and clusters of tips. In spring, pick young leaves, mash them to remove the juice, and make cakes with powder, called Huanghua wheat fruit cake. The children have a cloud of praise with songs: the yellow flower wheat fruit is tenacious, and the door is closed to eat, half of Naph is out, and one is to be eaten.
In China, rat koji grass has been used to make glutinous rice dumplings for a long time. It is recorded in Nanliang's "Jing Chu Years Chronicles" that on March 3, the rat koji grass juice was added with honey and flour to make rice cakes, which could be eaten to suppress the season. People in various places use the juice of rat koji grass mixed with glutinous rice to make glutinous rice, which can be dyed green with glutinous rice, and its beautiful name is Qingming Baba, and this wind still exists. March 3, the ancient Shangsi Festival. Now with the "cold food" in the Qingming Festival, before the Qingming Festival, the rat song has not yet bloomed, the light green ball cluster of small flower buds spit out the stars and tender yellow, at this time the rat grass is covered with rich white silk, the recognition is very high, the stems and leaves are tender, the fiber is less, and it is just right to make the green cake. After the Qingming Dynasty, the yellow flowers bloomed, the stems became harder, and the white cotton silk became thinner, and even if it was crushed and in the dough, the fibers of the weeds were still easy to distinguish by the tongue. Take a bite of the Qingtuan green cake, pull out the slender and long weed fibers, and feel unhappy. After the season, don't pick the rattle grass at all, let them grow, keep it for seeding, and lay the groundwork for next year's Qingming on the tip of the tongue.
Particular people use koji grass juice, mash the young leaves to make green grass juice, and form a dough with dough, so that there will be no gaffe where the weed fibers are embedded between the teeth. Experienced elders will leave the cooked koji grass for a few days until it releases a stronger grassy aroma before using it. Rat koji grass itself has a special herbal fragrance, just as Pi Rixiu said: "Deeply pick the first sight of the ox lip liquid, pinch and smell the mouse ear fragrance", this herbal fragrance is faint, faint, and no offensive. After boiling and draining, the koji grass is left for a few days, and the aroma of this herb becomes stronger.
The Qingtuan green cake is called "green", and it has always been named because of its color. Until one time, I saw it by chance in the "Illustrated Examination of Plant Names": "Rat koji dyes glutinous glutinous, dark green in color, and porridge is in the city in the spring of central Hunan Province." Wuxi Pass is particularly important, it will be mined during the Qingming Festival, and people worship it first, and the name is called green. It means that after the kiss is gone, I will see the spring grass again! When the rain and dew are wet, the gentleman will be scared. ”。 It turns out that the name of "green" is not just a word, but is closely related to family affection and time. The relatives are dead, the spring grass is rejuvenated, and the gentleman is scared in his heart, and the so-called shackles in the world are also. The deceased relatives no longer exist, but this spring grass is green, but it can meet the appointment on time every year, as if with the entrustment and oral message of the deceased relatives, how many sorrows, sorrows and sustenance that cannot be let go are brewing in it! In this white velvet cotton silk, how many inextricable feelings linger in it! As the saying goes, "those who know me say that I am worried, and those who don't know me say what I want", people have love and affection, and it is not heavenly! The name varies depending on the region. For example, the Qingming Baba in Guizhou, the Youth League in the Jiangnan region, the rat shell cake in Chaoshan, and the pineapple cake in Fuzhou are all traditional foods of the Qingming Festival made of rat koji grass, which is the taste of the Qingming Festival for the locals.
In 1922, Lu Xun wrote the "Translator's Notes" when translating the fairy tale drama "Peach-colored Clouds" by Luo Xianke, and later changed the title to "Remembering the Translated Names of the Characters in the Play", which also mentioned that in Japan, rat koji grass is one of the seven grasses of spring and is also picked for dim sum, which is like mugwort dumplings, and is called "grass cake".
The custom of eating rat koji grass has actually existed in the northern countryside, but it is rare now. Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" in the Ming Dynasty: "The northern cold food picks mothergrass and powder food", and Gu Jingxing, a Qing person, also mentioned rattle grass in his "Praise of Wild Vegetables": "Born in March, the leaves are like rat ears, and rice is pounded into cakes." The northerners are still cold and fed. It shows that in the Ming and Qing dynasties, in some places in the north, there was still the custom of eating rattle.
In the essays "Endless Green", a plant-based essay, you can see a detailed description of this wild vegetable as a delicacy. Excerpt from "Endless Green" - "Green and Qingming Fruit"
The practice of Qingming fruit is different according to the different raw materials and shapes. The most typical Qingming fruit is the Qingtuan, which can also give a glimpse of the doorway of making the fruit, such as the processing of green, the ratio of rice noodles, the steps of modeling, the control of heat, and so on. If the Youth League uses rat koji grass to make it, the steps are simpler than using May mugwort, because before May mugwort is made, it needs to be treated to remove bitterness and color. In the early practice in the countryside, after picking the tender shoots of May Ai to pick up the boiling water, they were first pickled with lime water for a day and a night (even some were pickled for a week), fished out and rinsed, controlled to dry, placed in a stone mortar, and pounded into grass mud with a large wooden mallet in the shape of "D". Then mix it with the glutinous rice flour and evening rice flour that have been proportioned, and knead it with hot water. After kneading well, steam the powder in the pot, and then hammer it in a stone mortar. The skin of the fruit thus created is particularly chewy. Nowadays, the simple method is to wash the green leaves, put them in boiling water with alkali or baking soda as a substitute for lime, boil them and let them cool in the original water. Why add lime, alkali, or baking soda? According to word of mouth, pickling with such additives has three uses: first, it helps green leaves stay green; Second, it can extend the storage time of evergreen - the pickled green leaves, dried and stored, and put them in the winter of a year to be used again, and the effect is the same as when it is fresh. In addition, it can soften the May wormwood plant, and it is easy to knead into the dough when making fruit, and the dyed green color will be more uniform.
After this treatment, take out the appropriate amount of green leaves to be used, rinse and squeeze out the water as much as possible (to remove the bitter taste), chop it, and boil it in a pot of clean water to make it a fresh and green grass puree. When the silk strands of the grass are pinched and melted, you can add rice flour to it while stirring and mixing thoroughly. The ratio of rice flour, late rice flour and glutinous rice flour can be 28 or 37 open, so that the fruit is not easy to collapse and does not stick to the teeth. However, this ratio is not absolute, and it can be adjusted according to the actual taste, so that it is advisable not to make more than half of the late rice noodles, because there are too many late rice noodles, and the dumplings are too stiff and difficult to chew after cooling. If you use glutinous rice flour to make it, you can do it, but it is not easy to make it so "stylish" and not sticky to your teeth. After mixing the green leaf mud and rice noodles, they slowly become sticky, and the rice noodles are dyed a fresh pale green. When the viscosity is suitable, remove from the pan, add a small amount of powder and knead it vigorously into a flexible and elastic dough. The next fillings are already prepared: finely pounded bean paste or sugar sesame seeds. Pick a piece of dough, knead it into a bowl, fill it with sweet filling, wrap it and make it into a dough. If there is a mold, you can also fill the dumplings into it and press out specific shapes and patterns. There are more simple, no fillings, just rub a solid dough. Before steaming, the bottom of the dumplings is often covered with cut zongzi leaves (bamboo leaves) to replace the cage cloth. Mistletoe leaves are also a good material for the bottom after pruning, because the mistletoe leaves are oily and there is no risk of sticking to the bottom. In Xiaoshan, Zhuji, Cixi and other places, it is customary to use glutinous rice grains soaked in advance to roll the Qingtuan, so that the dumplings will not stick to your hands after steaming. This kind of dumplings covered with glutinous rice grains have a nice name called "snow balls". The snow balls are made of pure glutinous rice flour, and the glutinous rice grains rolled on the outer ring of the dumplings help them form without collapsing.
After the Qingming fruit is steamed, it is turquoise or slightly dark yellow, which is different from the fruit made of matcha powder. This color is dyed blue. Is the more green in the dough, the better? If you actually add too much, the fruit will be darkened. If you add less, the fruit will turn white. When you are in a dilemma, you can try a method: pick the small grains in the dough, blanch it in hot water, and see the color of it after cooking, so that you can know how to adjust the amount of green. Qingming fruit should not be steamed for a long time, and the color of the peel will also deteriorate if it is steamed for a long time, and the fruit is easy to collapse, so it will generally not exceed 20 minutes on the fire. When the lid is lifted, the skin becomes tight and bright, which can save the step of brushing the raw fruit with oil before steaming - it is also a trick. Qingming fruit is not only steamed, but also fried. The latter is similar to the artemisia baba preparation method in Anhui. After frying, the Qingming fruit becomes a dark yellow-green color due to the action of high temperature.
Notice:
In the next online nature reading class, Mr. Jiang Hao will continue to talk about the topic of mountain vegetables, so stay tuned!