The Taste of My Parents in Dumplings
Li Yun-sheng Wen, Mr. Yu Mu Wood, with picture
It is said that taste memories are fixed at seven years old, so there are South sweet north salty east spicy west sour eating habits, such as old Beijing people love to drink bean curd which seems to have been diluted, Sichuan people are fond of chili peppers that make outsiders unbearable
Wanshi, although located south of Qinling Mountains and Huai River, has brought northern dietary culture in several large migrations in history, eating dumplings is one of them
The scenes in memory are always a family happily gathered around a small table together making dumplings, making dough is Mom's job, she wears a apron, the kneaded dough also needs to be covered with a wet towel for a while
While doing this, start mixing the dumpling filling, Mom likes to make vegetarian filling, in winter it's watercress, eggs, soy sauce, vermicelli,, oil slag, if there's no watercress, it's replaced with chives
Rolling the dumpling skins is Dad's job, his skills are mainly learned from neighbor Liu Shu Shu. When we lived in the dormitory of the county commercial bureau, where many employees and their families of department stores, food companies, and pharmaceutical companies lived, the west end of a row of houses was our home, and the east end was Liu Shu Shu's home
Liu Shu Shu was a chef in the canteen of the food company, he used to work in restaurants, he learned from a teacher and studied skills, his dishes were highly praised by everyone
Because he was a neighbor and liked to cook, he got some genuine tips from Liu Shu Shu, such as Huangzhou zoni, big zoni, vegetarian fish, red date pork, which are still in our family's recipe and passed on to my younger brother. Of course, vegetarian dumplings are also a family recipe, and the younger brothers and sisters in our family make the same taste
When I was young, my appetite was not very good, but I surprisingly could eat a lot of dumplings. It was common for neighbors to visit each other, and when someone made a delicious dish, they would politely offer it to guests to taste. Once a neighbor ate too many dumplings, and all the filling was finished, Dad and Mom cut the remaining dumpling skins into strips and gave them to me to eat, which made me unable to sleep for a night. From then on, whenever someone made dumplings at home, I would close the door to prevent Dad and Mom from making too many dumplings for me
So Dad and Mom specially made a lot of dumplings on a Sunday and smiled and said to me, 'Today you can eat whatever you want, let's see how many you can eat!'
I ate 40 dumplings in one go, and I was 15 years old at the time, in the second year of junior high school.
