I don't think it's right that a lot of articles write about three difficult years in the dark and without any fun. In that special time, there was still joy, and of course all the joy was probably related to getting food. At that time, I was six, seven, eight years old, and together with the children of the village, wandering around in search of food, living like a group of elves. Like the legendary Shennong, we have tasted almost all the herbs and insects in the fields, contributing to the enrichment of human recipes. At that time, the children all had a big belly, their calves were as thin as sticks, and their heads were surprisingly large. I'm certainly no exception.
Outside our village was a fairly vast meadow, low-lying, with a lot of water and grass. It is both our food store and our paradise. In the spring, we dig grass roots and pick wild vegetables, eat while digging, and sing while eating, partly like cows and sheep, partly like singers. We were the cattle and sheep singers of that era. One of our favorite songs is that we wrote ourselves. The tunes are ever-changing, but the lyrics are always the same few lines: 1960, it's really extraordinary; Eating thatched cakes and drinking sweet potato vines...... The thatch cake in the song is to wash the white sweet root of the thatch, cut it into inch-long segments, put it on a pan to dry, then put it in a stone mill to grind it into powder, and then mix it with water to form a dough to make a cake, and put it on a pan to bake. Thatch cake is a high-end food, and not everyone can eat it every day.
I've sung about thatch cakes a thousand times, but in the end I've only eaten them once, and thatch cakes were eaten 30 years later, after a feast of chicken, duck and fish, as a small snack with a local flavor. Sweet potato vine is the vine of sweet potato, crushed with a stone mill and boiled into porridge, with a little salt, this porridge was also rare at that time, not everyone can drink it every day. When we sing about these two kinds of food, it means that we want to eat it but can't get it, just like a young man who loves a girl but can't get it, so he sings the girl's name a thousand times.
We could only gulp on the wild vegetables we had picked up, and green juice was dripping from the corners of our mouths. We have big heads and small bodies, like grasshoppers that have not yet given birth to wings. There are many grasshoppers in the famine year, which is probably also the manifestation of the endless sky. I forgot everything, and I couldn't forget the fiery red, shiny oil grasshopper. This kind of grasshopper has a high oil content, put it in a pot and stir-fry it with a sizzling sound, the color is fiery red, the aroma is tangy, and sprinkle with a few grains of salt. It tastes really good. I remember that during the grasshopper season in those years, adults and children would go to the grass to catch grasshoppers with gourd heads. At first, grasshoppers are silly and easy to catch, but they are quickly caught. At first, everyone could go home full of gourds, but later they couldn't catch even half a gourd. I am the only one who holds the glorious record of full gourds every day. I have a trick: before I start catching grasshoppers, I dye my hands green with grass juice. It's that simple. The oil grasshopper was caught, and as soon as a person stretched out his hand, it jumped. They have two extremely well-developed hind legs and double wings, and they can hardly be approached by people when they jump and fly. I thought to myself that they could probably smell the smell of human hands, and when they were coated with grass juice, they would cover the human smell. I didn't even tell my grandfather the trick, because my grandmother distributed according to work, and whoever caught more grasshoppers would get more food.
After eating grasshoppers, summer soon ushered in. Summer food is plentiful and it was a good time for us. In those three years, the rain was extremely heavy, and as soon as it entered June, the sky seemed to leak, big and small, endless. The crops were all waterlogged and died. The depression was full of water, and it became an ocean. Where there is water, there are fish. There are many kinds of fish that seem to have fallen from the sky, and some of them have never been seen by a centenarian. I caught a strange and bevelous fish that was green all over its body, with bright red wings, and could glide against the water. It has something like feathers on its spine and fish scales on its belly. So whether it was a fish or a bird, I still can't tell. The reason why it was said earlier that it was a fish was just for convenience. This strange creature may be a new species, or maybe a mongrel, it is strange enough, and if it can be fed until now, it will probably become a treasure, but in that era, it can only be killed and eaten.
But it's not good-looking, it's fishy and smelly, and even cats don't smell it. In fact, the best fish is the most unsightly loach. The loaches I have seen in the Beijing market over the years are as thin as pencil shafts, which are also called loaches? I think of the loaches in my hometown in the sixties, one by one, golden yellow, like sticks. Legend has it that there are many ways to eat loaches. I've heard of two kinds: one is to put the live loach in clean water for a few days, let it vomit the mud in its belly, and then beat a few eggs and put it in the water, and the hungry loach is naturally swallowed by sharks and whales. When they finish eating the eggs, they pick them up and throw them into the oil pan, and after frying them, they dip them in salt and pepper, and they are said to be delicious. The second is to put a piece of tofu and a dozen loaches into a basin, and then put this basin into the pot to steam, the loaches are afraid of heat, and they will inevitably die if they get into the cold tofu. This dish is said to have a unique flavor as well, but unfortunately I haven't eaten it either. The loach is the most modest and cautious of the fish, burrowing in the mud, and easily does not dare to show its head, but people like to bully the honest fish, and refuse to slaughter it with a knife, but let it suffer some torture.
Autumn is the harvest season. The vast land is full of fish and shrimp, and crabs are rampant. As the saying goes, "the bean leaves are yellow, the autumn breeze is cool, and the crab feet are itchy". On a windy autumn night, swarms of crabs descend the river, and my grandfather says that they are going to the East China Sea to lay eggs, and I think they are more like they are going to some big meeting. The crab is clumsy, but it moves like a shadow in the water, and it is unpredictable, and it is not easy to catch it. If you want to catch crabs, it's best to go at night. Wearing a robe, wearing a hat, waiting patiently, the most taboo.
I once followed my sixth uncle to catch crabs once, which can be described as novel and mysterious, and endlessly interesting. During the day, the sixth uncle was optimistic about the terrain and quietly kept silent. In the evening, when the people were astigmatized, they used sorghum stalks to build a fence in the ditch, leaving an opening, and a pocket net was attached to the opening. In the first half of the night, people's feet were not still, and the crabs did not move. Waited patiently until the second half of the night, the night air was heavy, the drizzle was misty, and the river rose like a mist, and shrunk his body in his coat, saying that cold was not cold, that heat was not hot, listening to the mysterious sound of crackling, smelling the smell of water, the smell of grass, the smell of earth, and by the dim light of the horse lamp, I saw them coming. They're coming, the time has come, they're finally here. They climbed up along the sorghum stalks made of shovels, and a very few heroes could climb up, but most of them couldn't, and those who couldn't climb had to walk through the mouth of the rapid current, and then they became prisoners of me and the sixth uncle. That night, Uncle Six and I caught a sack of crabs. It was 1963 and people's lives were improving. We sold most of the crabs for five cents a piece, in exchange for a dozen catties of bran, grandma was very happy, in order to reward us, her old man cut the remaining crabs in half with a knife, dipped in bran, dripped a dozen drops of oil in a hot pan, and fried for us to eat. The shell full of crab roe and the bran that fell from the rope, the taste and feeling cannot be described in words.
In autumn, in addition to crabs, there are also many delicious insects. Grasshoppers, bean insects, gnats, crickets...... The crickets in late autumn are black and red, with big shoulders and round waists, and their stomachs are full of children, and they are fried and eaten, and they have a unique aroma that cannot be compared. There is also a kind of worm, now I know that its scientific name is beetle, it is an adult of the grub, as big as an apricot kernel, black and bright in color, phototaxis, and pounces on the lamp, commonly known as "blind and blind". The insects are easy to swarm and fall on branches or grass, and they are like ripe grapes in bunches. At night, we go to the dark to "break blind", and we can roll a pocket at night. After this insect is fried, the taste is very different from that of grasshoppers and crickets. There are also bean worms, which sting after the Mid-Autumn Festival. After this insect stung, its stomach was full of white fat and fat, and there was not a single grain of feces, all of which was high in protein.
It's a bit miserable going into winter. In winter, the grass and trees wither, freeze three feet, there are insects in the ground that cannot be dug out, and there are fish in the water that cannot be caught, but human wisdom is infinite, especially in terms of eating. We soon found that there was a layer of dry moss on the watery ground, which was peeled off one by one like a cake, soaked in water, and then put into a pot to dry, crispy like a pot and tasted like fish fillet. After eating up the moss, he peeled the bark of the tree. Peel the bark, chop it with a knife and axe, and then put it on a stone to smash, and then put it in a jar to soak, and when it is soaked, stir it with a stick, until it is stirred into a paste, take it out, spoon by spoon, and spread it on the pan, like a pancake. From the point of view of eating, elm bark is the top grade, willow bark is second, and locust bark is even more secondary. The process of eating tree bark is very similar to the process of making paper by Cai Lun, but we are not Cai Lun, and what we make is not paper.