Eating more colorful and glamorous Internet red pastries, seeing more chain stores with the same decoration taste, the more I miss the unique taste we ate at the simple stalls when we were young.
At that time, every bowl of slippery frog fish and hot lotus flour was filled with rustic city pyrotechnics.
I remember when I was a child, there would always be vendors riding tricycles in the streets and alleys, and they put several large buckets on the tricycles, which contained snacks such as frogfish, bean brains, and lotus flour, and walked slowly on the street, and shouted in their mouths: "Bean brain, frog fish!" ”
The sound of shouting is not loud, the tail note is very long, and the tone echoes throughout the alley. People who want to eat frog fish listen to this sound, and it is not long before someone carries an enamel jar or a large porcelain bowl, stops the vendor, and "beats" a bowl of frog fish.
The vendor lifts the lid of the bucket, scoops a few spoonfuls of frog fish into an enamel jar, sprinkles with crispy squeezed vegetables, a few drops of sweet and sour sauce and chili oil, and the frog fish is fine.
The frog fish is translucent and soft, full of elasticity, with squeezed vegetables, sour, spicy and crisp, and you can eat a large bowl by sucking and sucking.
There are fewer hawkers now, even fewer people selling frog fish. Occasionally, I came across a stall selling frogfish, which was made by machine, soft like a ball of gnocchi, and it was inelastic and chewy.
Even the sweet and sour sauce in the frog fish is not mixed with white sugar and rice vinegar, but is mixed with chemical additives, and it is very greasy to eat a mouthful full of chemical flavors.
Such frogs are cheap, but not tasty. And occasionally do pure handmade frogfish, the craft is good, but survival is not easy.
Just like the red sister who has been doing handmade frogfish for decades, her "lotus frogfish" has been open for decades, because the cost of handicraft is high, the amount of making is low, and she can't earn a few dollars a year.
The small shop is open in a remote alley and looks very shabby. Many people have long been accustomed to going in and out of various chain restaurants, or some expensive shops, and avoid such small broken shops.
They feel that they have lost their identity when they walk into this kind of small shop, and they have long forgotten that when we were children, we were waiting for a delicious meal in front of the stall.
The clean, spacious and bright new shop has fried chicken burgers, mousse cakes, and a cup of coffee and milk tea for tens of yuan and a variety of Chinese delicacies, but it does not have our childhood taste and the ancient memory of the city.
The city memories and childhood memories carried by frogfish cannot be carried by the new store.
We always walk and walk, and we forget how we are. I also forgot that my favorite food was not fried chicken, milk tea, Western restaurants and chain stores at the beginning, but the delicacies of the streets and alleys of the old city.
The anticipation of waiting for a bowl of frogs and fish in front of the stall, the childhood happiness of walking through the streets, the happy attitude of crying and drooling one second, and being healed by eating snacks the next second, we have gradually forgotten.
Fortunately, the things that the head forgets, the tip of the tongue remembers. Eating a familiar taste, sucking a bowl of frog fish, you may not think of a happy thing for a while, but the happy, warm, carefree feeling of childhood will reverberate in your heart and warm yourself.