At that time, I was eleven or twelve years old, and every week I went to the Children's Palace to take poetry interest classes. At that time, the interest class was not the same thing as the current training institution, no money or examination, I usually took a bus to class after school, pinched the dinner time home, a total of two years. I'm ashamed to say that the motivation that underpinned me to never miss class during that time was not—at least not mainly Tang poetry and Song Ci, but the eight cents that adults stuffed when they gave me fare. "Late at night, hungry, buy an oil pier to eat on the way back."
There is a rain or shine oil pier stall next to the No. 8 station. The oil pan was buzzing, two or three long-handled mold spoons were resting on the semi-cut filter net, and a large handful of white radish shreds were waiting in a basin of batter for my eight-cent call. The best thing was in the early winter, I rubbed my hands and approached, reaching for the mouth of the money, the mold spoon filled with radish shredded batter had reached into the oil pot, and suddenly it was golden, and the nose that I rubbed red was instantly filled with greasy aroma. Once, when I got on the No. 8 bus, I realized that I had lost some money. Seeing that the oil pier was about to fail, I resolutely got off two stops early and saved half of the fare to fill the deficit. The tired legs must have released a lot of chemical elements, increased gastrointestinal peristalsis, stimulated taste bud cells - in short, the oil piers of that day were delicious and tearful, and every detail was burned in my personal foodie history with high magnification pixels.
I'm often amazed at why memories like these are so clear that they often require only one noun — a snack or a dish name — to instantly mobilize all the senses to recall together. In terms of its warmth, the only thing that can be compared to love is probably love – but how many loves in your personal history are you completely unable to find wounds and do not need to be deliberately avoided? In contrast, in addition to quietly accumulating fat for you, food is always loyal and reliable. The memory of them is a warm and fluffy clump whenever they are taken out. So there's nothing wrong with the way "China on the Tip of the Tongue" is filmed — what else can you say about food outside the recipe, without hooking up memories or laying out feelings?
In the subjective feelings of individuals, how delicious a food is, I always feel that it can be expressed in a simple and beautiful mathematical formula similar to E=mc², and the decisive variable has little to do with whether the ingredients are rare and whether the cooking is excellent, otherwise it is impossible to explain why the snack stalls that guarded the school gate rain or shine in childhood, the gray maltose and the grilled squid that emitted fumes of unknown origin would flourish forever. How many realistic stories (three-foot-long roundworms) have our parents and teachers used to intimidate us? Is it that the more seriously they say it, the more we can't resist curiosity? So, the most critical variable is when you first meet this food. The taste buds are organs that grind away a layer of sensitivity with one more use, so when you encounter the right food at the right time, E can reach the maximum. It's also like love.
All love creates illusions. At a certain point, rituals are a shortcut to the illusion of reinforcement (or at least in a vain attempt), and food is more or less the same. When I encountered headaches and brain fever as a child, in addition to skipping school, I could also get the privilege of giving orders to the kitchen weakly, and over time I formed a ritualized recipe. The face should be soft, but not too soft (unless it is dental disease); Sprinkle the shallots more, but cut them finely; Lard was reduced from one spoonful to half a spoon, and the other half spoon was replaced by sesame oil, Titian was smooth, smelled, and the disease was half better. A pine blossom egg with a clear 3D effect, a plate of slightly overcooked pork liver to ensure a soft white cut pork liver, must be served with shrimp soy sauce. Memories of these home-cooked foods are tied to a slight hallucination at thirty-eight degrees of body temperature for life. For example, I have seen a very cute girl before, her boyfriend is a "carnivore", and the fixed program of dating is to buy two oil-paper wrapped hooves in Shen Dacheng and sit on the school lawn to feast. The shelf life of this love has not yet been hoofed, but this oily and heavy ritual has been left behind, constituting a person's and lifelong interpretation of the term "love".
Recite Shu Yi SMG News Anchor
Titled Gu Tingting
The opening child voice Chen Chushi
Huang Yuning is a writer, translator, and foreign literary editor who has translated the works of Fitzgerald, Henry James, Agatha Christie, Ian McEwan, and many other writers. He has published works such as "A Man's Castle", "Dreaming of Schubert's Dog", "Negative Reading, Masculine Writing", "Metamorphosis", "A Woman Thinks, God Is Crazy".
This issue is an excerpt from
Yilin Publishing House", "When Pretending to Be True"