A-A+201517: 081comments on Sina blog on October 28th.

Chinese cabbage stored in winter

Chinese cabbage stored in winter

"Thousand Characters" says that "winter comes and summer goes, autumn harvest and winter storage", and winter storage is a state of life. In an agricultural society, food and vegetables should be stored in winter for future needs. You can dig a vegetable cellar in the countryside and put all kinds of vegetables in autumn until the end of next spring. There are not so many places in the city for you to dig vegetable pits. Every household tries to store vegetables according to local conditions. Food can be bought at the grain store at any time, but vegetables can't. There were no out-of-season vegetables at that time. The whole winter in the north depends on the old three kinds of Chinese cabbage, potatoes and radishes.

Every year when the autumn wind just blows into winter, many trucks will drive into Beijing late at night, unloading the full cabbages and piling them into hills. At that time, the weather was colder than in recent years, and Chinese cabbage was covered with tarpaulins or quilts at night to prevent freezing; When the sun is fine during the day, some people will put Chinese cabbage in the sun, and dehydrated Chinese cabbage is not easy to rot when stored. Every family with a small population has to buy a few hundred kilograms of vegetables, and those with a large population can't survive the winter without buying a few kilograms.

At that time, there were different varieties of Chinese cabbage, all of which were produced in Beijing and Hebei. There was a kind of green cabbage in Tianjin, which was sharp at the top and thick at the bottom, unlike local cabbage. One year, the Chinese cabbages pulled from Shandong were very large, each weighing tens of kilograms, completely Qilu style. As for radish, there are long ivory white, red flat radish, and raw water radish mixed with cold dishes, commonly known as heart beauty. Beauty in our hearts is the "fruit" that we often ate when we were young. Crispy and sweet, but burping smells bad after eating. So there is a proverb: radish is a pear, burping is a fart, and when it comes to burping, just say something.

When storing vegetables every winter, there are long queues everywhere in Beijing. At that time, people had a good temper, and it was difficult to see a quarrelling person for hours in the cold wind. When moving, neighbors will give a hand, and no one cares about gains and losses. This is the last hot day in Beijing before the long winter comes, which is unforgettable.