[Don't tell her] always reminds me of when I came home in the middle of the year.
I was born in a small northern county, with a small area and a small population. The winters are as cold and long as all northern cities. The snow on the eaves is always snowed before it has melted cleanly. He fluttered, blowing cold on his temples, and swaying all over.
In the 30th year of the new year, it was even more cold to the extreme.
I missed the train at that time, and it was difficult to buy tickets under the new year. As soon as I showed up, they were sold out immediately, so I had to buy scalpers. But it would not arrive until 30 evening at the earliest, so after getting off the train, I hurried non-stop.
When I got home, I could smell the aroma of meat filling the sky, it was solid and thick, and a mass of heat went straight into my collar.
My parents leaned out of the kitchen, saw it was me, and hurried over to pick up the luggage, blaming me for wearing too little, and looking around for home clothes and slippers. Seeing that I tucked my hands, my cheeks were flushed, and I twisted a hot hand towel to wipe my face, I was in a hurry for a while.
After that, there was a roar of firecrackers, the sound of "News Network" in the living room, two pots in the kitchen gurgling, accompanied by the sound of garlic peeling off, and the news that the prices of vegetables were rising again from my parents.
I suddenly felt relieved and relieved.
Master Hongyi said that the best sound in the world is the sound of wooden fish, but I thought otherwise. I prefer the liveliness of the home in the morning and twilight. I always feel that although these are mundane, they are better than clean.
Cracked chestnuts are being stir-fried in the boiler, fresh and juicy pineapples are piled up outside the fruit and vegetable shop, the vendors are shouting at the green celery and red-colored tomatoes, and the housewife brings her own weighing scale for a little meat filling.
There are also familiar stall owners who waved their hands boldly and said, "Six yuan and two, even if you are six yuan, come again next time."
So dinner came to the table, two plates of dumplings, spinach tofu, tomato scrambled eggs, steamed tiger spots. For cold dishes, you only need to cut two taels of beef, mix a pig's ear with raw garlic, pat a cucumber, and put a plate of vinegar and a few heads of candy garlic outside.
The movie [don't tell her] has that kind of homely feeling.
When it was time to eat, a Chinese family in the United States prepared to eat wontons and asked their daughter how many to eat, and the answer was "five". "Five? That's not enough." The housewife looked at the freezer bag in her hand, and seemed very dissatisfied, "It's almost ten more."
After learning that the old lady in the family had terminal lung cancer, the family of three, like everyone in the family, hid her illness, found an excuse, and rushed from New York to Changchun to visit in the name of attending a cousin's wedding.
Leaving aside this common unspeakable secret, just seeing the brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and aunts gathered together, the East and the West chatted for a short time, indeed a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere transpired.
Especially the scene where the old lady feeds her granddaughter Billy with rice.
The yellow pie that had just been fried, the old lady picked it up with chopsticks and brought it to Billie's mouth. Billie said "I'm not hungry", and was spat by the old lady, " How can I not be hungry? Come and take a big bite! " Although she felt that the granddaughter "is not thin, I don't think she is thin".
Chinese parents don't like children who are too thin, so they always fill up the porridge and press the rice so tightly, as if the children in front of them are so thin that their arms and legs are broken.
The same is true of my parents. Every time I leave home, I have to haggle with them for a while, telling me not to stuff me with those carb-heavy hometown specialties. They all let out a long growl, "Where did this go?" Then, they stuffed a bag of fried lotus root into the box.
In this matter, their parents have never lost.
This of course has to do with the nationwide famine 50 years ago.
Zhang Yimou was jumping in line in Qianxian County, and he once saw a Mack coming from Longdong, Gansu Province. Because he had tasted terribly hungry, he could eat several kilograms of noodles in one meal . My stomach, after the discharge, I will eat a few more kilograms in the next meal ." After reading it, I found it to be very reasonable.
It has been passed down for thousands of years of farming activities, planting in spring and cultivating in autumn, collecting in summer and storing in winter. Suddenly, this piece of land that is worshipped as a god has no grain, and the taste of hunger and the concept of having to be full has taken root in the hearts of the Chinese people and passed it on from generation to generation.
The movie [don't tell her] thinks it has such a meaning, so even breakfast is full, fried dough sticks, pies, porridge, and wotou, each of which can fill one's stomach.
You can't be too thin, it's not good for you to be too thin. How can you be like a famine and can't afford a blessing for a child who is like a phoenix.
When I heard this at the dinner table, I didn’t take it seriously. I just took it as a joke and didn’t take it to heart. It was the luck of our generation to be able to take the famine that made people hungry back in the day as a joke.
But then again, it seems that only "cheesy" meals like [Don't Tell Her] can bring out that long-lost homely feeling. If it is replaced with exquisite stir-fry or high-end western food, the mundane and clean atmosphere will be lost in an instant.
So I always can't like Ang Lee's [Diet Men and Women] .
The opening is the wall of the old Zhu's house where the chopping, chopping, planing, and cutting knives are hung.
The handle of the scoop can be long or short, the holes of the sieve can be thick or thin, and the seasonings in the large and small jars are lined up just like the pharmacist's prescription.
After that, Lao Zhu used his skills as a cook to skillfully cook for his family: sometimes cuttlefish knife, whole chicken deboned, sometimes blanched jellyfish skin, deep-fried pork, stir-fried double-crisp, and then sprinkled with rock sugar. Pot Dongpo Pork, and rolling out the dough to make Xiao Long Bao.
In the evening, Lao Zhu and his three daughters were sitting around the table. The chrysanthemum pot, simmering shark fins, and jellyfish skins were all dazzling and glamorous.
However, I felt dizzy and felt a sense of distance for no reason. If I were there, I would not know how to place my hands and feet. In the end, the dishes were only slightly changed, and it seemed that both father and sister were involved in business.
The closer people are, the more casually they will be arranged without being too troublesome. On the contrary, it is the people who are not close who will show the pretentious love and the courtesy to overcome all difficulties, and they will appear more comprehensive.
Zhang Ziyi also has two films that show this difference.
One is [My Father and Mother] . She played Zhao Di, a well-known beauty with a radius of more than ten miles. She used her own blue-and-white bowl as a mark to make "distribution meals" for the new teacher in a flowery way: " I sent scallion pancakes on the first day, scrambled eggs with rice and green onion on the second day, and steamed dumplings with mushroom filling on the third day. "
When she arrived at [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] , she didn't change, but her words were far different: " Huadiao steamed mandarin fish, dry-fried top loin, slipped meatballs, smaller meatballs, less glutinous rice flour, and another fin. Chinese cabbage soup, two taels of rose water, warmed. ”
The dishes are obviously more than one grade higher than before, but the mundane and clean liveliness is no longer there. After listening to it, it only makes people feel that the dishes are golden and silver, and the flowers are beautiful. They are good everywhere, but they are not down to earth.
Huang Rong was someone who knew how to order food. When she met Guo Jing for the first time, she asked, "How much do you want me to eat?" Guo Jing replied, "Of course, of course." So Huang Rong turned to the second shopkeeper. With one mouth, there were four dried fruits, four fresh fruits, two salty and sour fruits, four candied fruits, and then eight "so-so" appetizers, with twelve dishes and eight snacks.
I ordered more than 40 dishes in a row. Although I knew she was deliberately teasing Guo Jing, I still felt a little pretentious after reading it.
Later, in order to let Hong Qigong teach Guo Jing to subdue the dragon's eighteen palms, Huang Rong did a variety of dishes to please him, such as lamb sitting buttocks, pig ears, veal kidneys, cherries, bamboo shoots, sparrow meat, and ham tofu. It is euphemistically called "Twenty-Four Bridges Bright Moon Night".
In the end, Cai Lan took it down and said, " Jin Yong didn't like to eat when he was young, and many dishes were made by himself. " Oh!
When it comes to starters and banquets, the cutest character in Jin Yong's writings is Guo Xiang.
Once, on Guo Xiang's birthday, he held a small banquet in the boudoir, and waved his long sleeves: "Boil two more legs of lamb and cut 20 catties of cooked beef!" Only a broken gong-like voice in the room said, "Miss Guo Er. It's really too bold, but unfortunately my cook didn't know it before, otherwise I would have made friends with you!" Guo Xiang smiled: "It's not too late to make friends now."
On that day, heroes from all walks of life sat around the fireplace, drinking and eating meat, and feasting, which was very vivid and beautiful.
It's not the craftsmanship that makes people miss it. Most of the time, what foreigners care about is just three or five families sitting around the fireplace, a bowl of brown rice porridge, freshly cooked lamb legs, sprinkled with green onion leaves, feeling. After tearing it off, it has a rough texture with its head buried in it and chewed hard.
After eating the night, I took two more sips of wine, looked at the heavy snow outside the window slightly, and sighed, "Fate, don't blame anyone."
So Wang Zengqi wrote that Zhao Shuli ate supper at ten o'clock, "a bowl of wontons, two biscuits with pig's head meat, drinking two or two wines, and enjoying himself"; Liang Shiqiu was thinking about the lamb's head under an oil lamp, "pull out a A thin, sharp knife, with the blade cut across the sheep's face, sprinkled with some salt and pepper"; the writer Sanmao couldn't sleep at night, thinking about the cabbage and dumplings in the refrigerator, and he was not reconciled, so he "slipped into the kitchen barefoot, shredded the cabbage and mixed it. Serve with soy sauce and eat it raw with cold fat dumplings, it's almost dawn."
Li Bihua praised the "Xian Delai" at Shanghai's Yunnan Road, saying that "the pork chops are fried very fragrantly, the pork ribs rice cakes are rough and the taste is rich, even if I am very full, I can't help but eat two bites".
Her "Rouge Buckle" has such a homely scene. "I" who works in the Hong Kong newspaper office go out to eat food stalls, roast goose vermicelli with a plate of pig carrots, and the open-air stove is scorching hot, and the wok is full of gas.
Let alone Xiao Jun and Xiao Hong in [Golden Age] .
Xiao Jun got the royalties, and took Xiao Hong, who was so hungry that his chest against his back, went out to the restaurant, saying that it was "a very good restaurant, the chauffeur and all the workers eat here", with eagerness and joy in his voice.
What came first was a bowl of stewed noodles with pork, Xiao Hong swallowed eagerly. Xiao Jun also asked the boss to cut half a dime of pork head meat and put it in a small bowl of coarse porcelain, which was full.
Not long after, she saw Xiao Hong staring at the hot meatball soup on the pavement next to her, a little displeased, "That's nothing to eat." Xiao Hong also hurriedly covered up, "There are already a lot of dishes."
Most of the literati were poor, and the articles they wrote were nothing more than a few chores that they groped and did. Xiao Hong used to write the manuscript and used the kind of Japanese-made Meinong paper. Once Xiao Jun went to buy it, he pawned an old sweater for 70 cents in the winter. He thought that if he bought paper, he could not take a car, and if he took a car, he could not buy paper, and he got home. His feet were red and swollen, and his heels were dripping with blood.
Forced by life, he was forced to dig every ounce of calculation into the bones. Seeing Xiao Hong pretending to be saying "there are already a lot of vegetables", she smiled and waved at the vendor in a rare pomp, " Meatballs with soup, here's a bowl! "
I always feel that compared with "I love you", Xiao Jun's words are mundane but thick, and the listeners don't praise them, but they feel it in their hearts.
So the bowls and plates are lined up, and the meatballs are full of them, and they are happy for a while.
It was freezing cold outside the house, and inside the house there were laughter mixed with the smell of meat, and the crisp sound of chopsticks bumping against the bowls and dishes, lingering around the beams.
Such an air of fireworks from the floating world is more than a feast for the eyes.
When spending New Year's Eve with Li Xiaojun, Li Qiao also ate deliciously.
She is the girl in [Sweet Honey] who dreams of becoming a Hong Konger. The biggest joy is seeing the increase in the number of deposits, and she is full of hunger that wants to grab it crazy. But after eating a bowl of ordinary dumplings on New Year's Eve, he said, "I'm full."
Later, she opened her shop and made a little money. She should have eaten more delicious food, but she kept saying "I'm so hungry".
Only the plate of dumplings made her full, and she suddenly lost the hunger to survive.
"If you have nothing to do, you can help me clean up, and it will be the rent." In [If Love] , Sun Na lifted the lid of the pot while talking, shredded the cabbage and threw it in, and poured another half a glass of beer.
Lamb, coriander, frozen tofu and chili sauce are piled on the table, clear soup and boiling water are in the pot, and the freshly sliced meat is still dancing.
Sun Na and Lin Jiandong were talking and clinking glasses, and then the camera zoomed out to a small window in the basement. It was snowing heavily outside, and Qi Qin's love song sounded appropriately: A long, long time ago, you owned me , I have you.
There are two directors in Japan who can make this kind of feeling very well, one is Yasujiro Ozu, and the other is Hirokazu-eda.
Ozu's films always like to be named after food, such as [the taste of saury] and [the taste of tea and rice], which are all interesting names.
Unlike other fish, saury is cooked in only one way: sprinkle some fine salt and grill it over a fire.
I didn't believe it at first, I felt that it couldn't suppress the fishy smell, so I added green onion and ginger and roasted it together, but the fishy smell was even stronger.
So I had to honestly follow the Japanese method and only sprinkle a little salt. I didn't expect the roasted taste to be slightly bitter and slightly sweet.
It turns out that this is the taste of saury, like the ordinary and trivial parents in daily life, and the deep affection hidden in the years.
So the taciturn Shan Ping came to the tavern for a drink after his daughter got married. The proprietress saw that he was wearing a very formal suit and asked, "Where did you come from today, is it a funeral?" Shan Ping took a sip of wine and thought about it: "Also Let's put it that way."
It's Hirokazu Kore-eda's [Non-Walking] and it's also about the trivialities of life in a traditional Japanese family.
Early in the morning, the old lady and daughter of the Hengshan family started busy, washing carrots, peeling white radish, peeling green beans, mashing radish, cutting mycelium, and stewing meat. After one is done, there is another, the corn is fried so loudly, and the pots and pans are clinking.
It's not a great delicacy, and even every dish is unbearable, but no matter how stubborn the old man is, he will still come to eat immediately when he smells the aroma of fried corn.
What if we changed those dishes? Change it to Babao Duck, Lotus Crisp, Buddha Jumping Over the Wall, Cui Gai Roasted Wings, Seven-Star Spotted Roll, Dragon and Phoenix are auspicious, what will it become?
The dishes that are too serious and delicate are not in line with the commonplace temperament, but are like a well-dressed family affection.
So I like [don't tell her], like the family, like those ordinary dishes on the table, rough and delicate, firm and soft, and eating to the fullest. After being full, it seems that the stomach has been washed again, and even the old stains in my heart have been washed away.
But don't be angry at me for talking too much. Ordinary people gather together, which one is not Lao Lao Chengcheng? How many bowls to keep, how many meals to eat.
After tea and dinner, they talked about the parents' shortcomings, and the small enmity should have been turned into a surface peace to obey the overall situation, but they still mixed up a few words.
An aunt who has achieved little in China provocatively asked the Billie family, "How long does it take to earn a million dollars in the United States?" Billie said it would take a long time, and the other party pretended to be incredulous, "It's true or false. , in China it's a matter of minutes."
Coincidentally, this happened to me too.
It was also a family banquet, and everyone was there. On the table were shrimps with slippery eggs, dried cauliflower, and fried small yellow croaker. The soup was sprinkled with a handful of green chopped green onions, and the other plate was filled with oil-splashed river prawns.
After eating, I looked up and greeted my relatives, "Can I make one million by writing articles? No? Then why do I write about it."
People who live in their hometown always have the kind of expression on their faces that people in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are not used to, but only in their hometown. But in fact, only close people can blame so negatively, there is no evil intention.
Next is "the lazier a person is, the less good they are", "the advantages of short-sighted women and short-sightedness", "who can guarantee a lifetime of smooth sailing when they become narrow", and "although human feelings do not generate interest, But it's more useful than money", and so on.
In the end, I have been in the front line for three or four years, and my life is not in vain. When I was in crisis, I learned to do Tai Chi, and I couldn't go wrong.
But in [Don't Tell Her], Billie's mother retorted that, with so much money in the country, why send her children to the United States to study?
The aunt, who had a sense of superiority, was stuck in her throat and couldn't answer, and said shyly, "He will come back." Billie's mother said, "There's no guarantee, but if he really wanted to stay there, you'd still send him out, wouldn't you?"
Suddenly, I saw the expressions of my parents on this aunt's face - it was a kind of sad expression facing the children who stayed in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and wanted to drag them home, but there was nothing else I could do.
Therefore, every time I leave home, the atmosphere is not very good, and the second old man murmured for a while, and he could only say " Go, come home and have dinner ".
I had already walked out of the door, and when I heard the phrase "there is food at home", my nose was sore, and I knew that this mundane sentence was the love that carried me and kept me alive in this world.
So I managed to endure the soreness of my nose, embarrassed with joy, but quickly calmed down, waved my hand from a distance, and said, hey, hey.
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Author/Aunt Liu
This article was first published on the WeChat public account [Brocier (ID: pocier)]
Reference: [1] Writers who don't sleep at night, what should I eat? -Sand between your fingers, "Granny" magazine[2] Foodies look at it, a list of full-fledged films, deep focus DeepFocus, 2016.09.13[3] The deceased Rusifu, Ai Xiaoke, 2009.08.10[4 ] People of Qin Country - Remembering Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, "Contemporary Films", 1985[5] Zhang Jun's family banquet and Huang Rong's ordering, Xuan Rong, 2016.06.14[6] The winter is approaching, and I suddenly miss Huangsang's favorite bite. Tao, 2016.11.23[7] The script of "Diet Men and Women", Ang Lee/Wang Huiling/James Shamus, 1994
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