Speaking of yellow cakes, I am afraid that in Zhangjiakou only with Wei County and Yangyuan people have the deepest experience, what is this kind of food, Yangyuan people will say morning porridge, afternoon cake, night paste boiled yam. As you can imagine, the place of the cake in their minds, Yangyuan dialect said: "You will eat cake" means that you will not do this. When I was a child, on the first day of the Chinese New Year, the morning new year meal was yellow cake stewed chicken, that fragrant, a person can eat several shovels of cakes, and finally had to lie down and talk to the family. When I was young, the conditions at home were not good, I only ate cake noodles mixed with corn flour cakes every day, hard and not delicious, sometimes the family gave me a cake, that is, the blacks did not peel off, directly ground into cake noodles, ate for a few days, can not urinate out, but still want to eat. The taste of yellow cake has long penetrated the living customs of the people in Yangyuan, WeiXian County, talking about marriage, building a house on the beam, and entertaining guests are inseparable from the food of yellow cake.
The predecessor of the yellow son is this life
The history of huangzi is very long, the dating test of the early crop seed ashing sample preserved at the Neolithic site of Cishan in Hebei Province found that it was planted about 10,000-8,700 years ago, and the remains of the excavated millet were the earliest in The ruins of Wanrong Jingcun in Shanxi and The Dadiwan site in Qin'an, Gansu, which are 60000 or 7000 years old. In the early stages of agriculture, farming techniques are low, and it is valued for its short growth period, barrenness, drought tolerance, and strong competitiveness with weeds.
The poem of Meng Haoran in the Tang Dynasty said: The old man has a chicken and invites me to the Tian family. The green tree village is on the edge, and the green mountain is oblique. At that time, guests were entertained to eat yellow rice porridge. There are many words in the ancient oracle bones, and the poems often talk about the word 黍, which shows that the yellow zi has been a very important delicacy in the lives of people in ancient times, "Han Feizi Wai Chu said that the lower left" said that Confucius accompanied Lu Aigong, Lu Aigong brought confucius and peaches, Confucius opened his mouth to eat the millet first and then ate the peach, lu aigong around the waiters quietly laughed at him, Lu Aigong said that the yellow is not eaten, is used to brush peach hair. Confucius said that I knew this way of eating, but I think that the dragon was a superior sacrifice when it was sacrificed to the king, there were six kinds of melons, fruits and vegetables, and the peach was the lower product. None of the sacrificial kings could be brought into the temple. It seems that millet is a very noble food in the grain.
In the Zhangjiakou area, Yangyuan in Weixian County is the place where the most millet is planted, and the land here is barren and dry for ten years. The crop is drought-tolerant and has a short growth date, so it has become a specialty here, and the yellow rice noodles are particularly sticky, and they are more resistant to hunger when eaten, so there is a saying of "thirty miles of noodles, forty miles of cakes".
The story of the yellow cake
Zhangjiakou Yangyuan's yellow cake is very strong, what is the strength of the road? The old people said: There is an old woman eating cake at noon, she did not pay attention to a small piece of the kang, as a result, she went to the neighbor's house to visit the door, she dipped the cake and pulled far, a close door, the cake bounced back to the kang, haha, think about it, how strong this cake is, pull so long.
Once went to Yangyuan, I listened to an old man: their village ancestors were relocated from under the big locust tree in Hongdong County, Shanxi, and at that time, only the two brothers were relocated, and every year the brothers planted a plant called huangzi, which began to be harvested every late September, milled, peeled and ground into yellow, orange and orange, steamed and eaten in the mouth, soft and strong, and sweet in the mouth. Once, the brothers took the yellow cake out of the pot and put it in the pot, turned their heads and was taken away by their domestic dog, the cake was getting longer and longer, the brothers were in a hurry, took a kitchen knife to chop the cake in two, half bounced back to the cake pot and half was pulled away by the dog, three miles and five villages heard about this, they all begged for seeds, and Yangyuan began to plant millet in a large area. Of course, this is just a story, but in fact, the cultivation of millet has a history of 8,000 years.
Yellow cake, do you love what you eat
In a thousand places, there are a thousand dialects, a thousand delicacies. Traditions are always passed down from generation to generation and continue to this day.
Yangyuan, Weixian County, in October, when the grains of the millet ears reach wax ripeness, the protein content in the millet gradually increases, and it is also the period of harvesting the millet. Huangzi has a history of thousands of years in Weixian Yang, and the thousand-year-old cuisine has a reason to continue to be delicious. Every delicacy has to go through a process, and the birth of yellow cake is more complicated. Sowing the millet in the spring, after the autumn harvest, crushing, with the millet seed, peeling the millet into yellow rice, and finally grinding the yellow rice into noodles, this is the cake noodles. The method of making cake noodles is relatively simple, and it is necessary to use warm water and noodles when making cakes, because the water of the noodles themselves is larger, and the water should not be put too much, and the noodles can be collected.
Spread out the cake noodles on the cage drawer, steam for about fifteen minutes, put them in a large basin, and start kneading the dough, also known as "carrying cakes".
The cake is very exquisite, and it is necessary to start kneading the dough back and forth while it is hot, and at the same time, you must press the noodles hard with your fist. The noodles are very hot, take a bowl of cold boiling water, put your hands in the cool water to soak it, to continue to soak, hard to carry, kneading and pounding, the cake will be more tendon, the more elastic the more you think, the good cake is very shiny. In Wei County, there is a proverb that "carrying yellow cakes, the more you carry the more tendons".
Finally, a layer of sesame oil is applied to the surface to keep warm and prevent dry skin. When eating, use a shovel to shovel a piece, and eat it with Lai, this soup dish is best boiled by ordinary people. Yellow cakes are sweet and delicious to eat, and the tendons are resistant to hunger.
The skilled production of yellow cake comes from the master of the hometown, the domestic production of millet are grown on the best land in the village, their own processing of grinding noodles and then made into cakes, because the cake noodles are delicious, yellow cakes, its best matching vegetables are also particularly exquisite, can be cold or hot. Hot dishes include cabbage braised yam or tofu smoked tofu dried shredded pork with leek heads and vermicelli.
In addition to the soup dish, the more famous and exquisite yellow cake is the fried cake. The method of fried cake is to cut the steamed yellow cake into small pieces, wrap it with sugar, bean paste or date paste, and then fry it in a frying pan, until it is fried into a soft outside, and when the yellow is red, it can be eaten. In the early years, this kind of food was only eaten in Yangyuan, WeiXian County, when there were distinguished guests or wedding parties. Now it has entered the table of ordinary people.
During the harvest season, busy people carry heavy grains of full millet into the car, a harvest, a sweat. The sweet smell of autumn millet pervades the whole village, and these ordinary people, traditional food, are writing the beautiful memories of human food by these ordinary people.