Xu Jihan: My big pot of rice

The first time I ate a big pot of rice was when I was a student at Jingyao Middle School. It should have been in 1973 that the state gave us, the high school students whose families lived in the rural areas, 31 catties of net grain and 3 taels of edible oil per person per month, and the method was to set up a monthly average of the village's grain distribution from the village accountant, and the state would make up for the shortfall after handing over the shortfall to the school.

In order to meet the needs of the new situation, the school opened a student stove for the first time in a real sense, why do you say that, because the original student stove is only responsible for steaming the bun from home to heat it, and in winter you can also use this method to heat the red lotus, students only need to put their buns or red vetches in the net pocket, and put them in the kind of generous wooden cage outside the door of the stove room at the specified time, so they should put the buns or red buns into the net pocket not because they are afraid of being eaten and run away, but there are few mistakes in doing so. Despite this, mistakes are inevitable, and the essence of them is that some students deliberately do it and fish in troubled waters. Speaking of it, it is called a student stove, there is no food, let alone a dish, and almost every "meal" is accompanied by "fat baby crossing the river".

The staple grain of the country is wheat flour, and the miscellaneous grain is corn grits or cornmeal, and the school will buy back the subsidized grain and oil, and then issue meal tickets according to the number of each person, and the meal tickets are divided into miscellaneous grains and staple grains, and the face value is one or two, two taels, two taels and one catty. The face value of vegetable gold is divided into one cent, two cents, five cents and one dime.

I remember that before the meal was served, the master of the student stove would put the cooked porridge in two "small haizi" in front of the stove in advance, (it is the kind of coarse ceramic urn fired a little smaller, with a large mouth and relatively short, and it can hold two loads of water at most.) As soon as the bell rang for the end of the last class, everyone rushed out of the classroom, went to the dormitory to grab the dishes and chopsticks, and hurriedly queued up to buy food, for fear that they would be late and not be able to eat. I remember that a kind of porridge often drunk in summer is called washing foam paste, the gluten silk suspended in the foam paste is like egg foam, and the slightly larger gluten will become like a soaked yuba, and a few pieces of green onion the size of a small green finger cover are suspended in the delicate foam paste, which is fragrant if you don't eat it. The porridge eaten in winter is mostly corn grits, and the big iron pot used to kill pigs is staged in the game of corn grits and water chasing each other, they continue to absorb the energy from the bottom of the pot, and keep tumbling up and down, and the bubbles produced burst at the moment of being squeezed out, in order to make it evenly heated, the cook also uses a long-handled iron spoon to stir constantly, the starch in the corn grits makes the porridge viscous through gelatinization, and makes the porridge fragrant and sweet by converting it into glucose, and keeps "goo, goo" The essence absorbed from the sun is released in the sound. I remember that every time I ate corn grits, I felt that it was so sweet, and I ate it in one go, and I almost licked the few corn grits adhered to the bowl. In the years that followed, I ate corn grits every year, but I could no longer eat the taste of that time, which may be the reason why people often say "big pot porridge, small pot meat", but I think the deeper factor is a kind of nostalgia for the high school years.

The masters of the student stove will think of a way to make the coarse grains finely, and the fine grains will be refined to improve the lives of the students, remember to press the cornmeal into steel wire dumplings first, and then pass it in warm water when eating, and eat it when it is steamed. To this day, I can remember that when we were waiting in line in front of the stove room to buy food, the teacher in charge of the stove stood on the steps in front of the stove room and said loudly: "Students, students, eat dumplings at noon today, four two or three, four two or three, please make money for money, grain for food, and separate money and food." Fifty years later, the voice still rings in my ears. I remember one of my classmates, I forget the specific name, he once went on a trip, but when he came back, he said with emotion in our class group that eating and eating is not as delicious as the bowl of steel wire dumplings that Chang Shi made for us back then.

The second time I ate a big pot of rice was after September 1983. This year, I was transferred to the Mingde Junior High School not long after the establishment of the school to teach, the school opened a teaching stove, hired a cook, the grain is brought by itself, the vegetables are basically by the school, there are vegetable fields in the school, contracted to outsiders to operate, the premise is to provide teachers with vegetables for free, what vegetables are planted in the vegetable field, and teachers who often eat on the stove are also.

Six or seven people, just buy some oil, salt, sauce and vinegar and seasonings, and the food cost for a month is only a few yuan.

The best dishes on the stove in winter are mainly white radish, white radish is stored before winter, followed by the kind of cooked soybeans, there are not many opportunities to buy green vegetables, so this is to spend as little money as possible, and the salary of private teachers at that time was only 3333 yuan, 33 yuan per month, and the remaining part will be issued again after accumulating enough yuan.

The third time I ate a big pot of rice was in September 1985. This year, I was inexplicably transferred to Jingyao Town Junior High School, which is known as the highest school in Jingyao Town. At that time, the school boasted a staff of sixty-three and more than a thousand students. Naturally, there are more people who eat in the teaching stove, and the teaching stove is specially responsible for managing the stove, and there is a special person responsible for buying tickets, it seems that the big school is not ordinary, and there are two cooks on the stove, and the leading cooks call him Master Liang, this person speaks softly, can knit sweaters and spin threads, and has a little less masculinity of a manly husband.

When I first arrived in Jingyao Town, I came back from buying food several times, and I always felt that Liang Shi was still a little weird, he was responsible for cooking vegetables, taking buns and collecting meal tickets, and the other deputy was responsible for serving rice. Many times when I queued up to buy food, when I saw him fetch buns for the people in the original town in front of me, I would pick up the bun to see if it was partially soaked in distilled water, and if it was, I would put it aside first, and replace it with a new one, and when it was my turn, there would be a dozen dishes, and the nengnehg bun that had just been put aside would be put on the dish again.

Once or twice is called normal, and it is not normal if there are too many times, I obviously feel that Liang Shi is bullying life, he is deceiving me to be small and thin, and I have few words when I first arrive, I am resentful, but it is really not good to have a seizure.

When I was chatting with my colleagues in the evening, I overheard them talking about the details of Liang Shi, and I suddenly had a bottom in my heart. When I had breakfast on the second day, this Liang Shi still treated me like usual, and as soon as I finished the meal, I turned around and scolded in a low voice: "Make Ha, this is called hammer rice, Chen Chen Cai, nengneng bun." ”

When I went to eat again at noon, Master Liang asked me, "The surname is Xu, who are you scolding this morning?" ”

Scold you, because I see that you have saved miles for me at your place, why should I eat nengneng buns, the vegetables are not Chen, and the green vegetables are black. ”

When the other teachers heard this, they all felt that Liang Shi was unreasonable, and Liang Shi didn't say anything.

Since then, Master Liang not only did not hate me, but made me suddenly improve my status in the eyes of Master Liang. When I was cooking again, Master Liang also picked buns for me, and this time I picked the kind of buns that were not eneng. Master Liang also affectionately called me brother, and I naturally called him Brother Liang as well. Once, when I went to eat early, Master Liang said to me, "Brother, you write on the small blackboard that you hope you will not owe you any debts for dinner." I picked up the chalk and thought for a while, and wrote Master Liang's notice:

Eat with a ticket. No chargebacks.

Dish Golden Triangle. It only goes up, not down.

There is rice and there is no rice. Collect two taels.

Come if you want to eat. If you don't eat, you go.

After I finished writing, I also read it to Master Liang, which made my Brother Liang cry and laugh, and asked me to quickly wipe it off, in fact, these thirty-two words, I just said the reality of the big pot of rice in Jingyao Town at that time, and there was no exaggeration.

Speaking of which, some people may say that teachers and students divide and drink rice soup to count the rice grains in the bowl, and the teachers say, we still use compasses to divide the pot, will you? These all reflect the low remuneration of teachers under the historical conditions at that time, especially those private teachers, whose salary in one month is the cost of evaluating a professional title, and they do not hesitate to use extreme means such as a strike in order to obtain an additional 5 yuan per month according to the policy. Who would have hair and think about how to pretend to be bald?

I think: in life, no matter what kind of work you do, and whether the work is lowly or noble in your opinion, the first priority of work is to solve the problem of eating, solving the problem of survival, if you can't even solve the problem of eating and survival, no matter how bright and beautiful the halo is crowned, it will not help, and talking about anything can only be a castle in the air.

My Brother Liang's cooking level is really not flattering, the maximum is to be able to make life mature, even I, a person who can only eat, can't look down on his two strokes, in Jingyao Town for decades, I haven't heard anyone say that my Brother Liang's cooking is okay. Personal hygiene is not very good, I personally ate vegetable worms in the vegetables he made, some people also said that I was really lucky, paid for vegetarian dishes, but enjoyed the treatment of meat dishes, when he was brought to show him, he just didn't say a word and poured it out again, you said I can still eat it. It is not uncommon to find rat feces in the porridge, the rice is cooked, but the rat feces are not scattered, but they are swollen some, this rat feces is really scattered, then it is not called rat feces, according to the modern fashionable name should be called food additives is appropriate, fortunately, this is the big pot of rice in our rural schools, rat feces are no strangers to anyone, if it is placed in the city, people may think that it is a black bean that fell in.

I really didn't want to eat such a big pot of rice, but in those years, except for a few teachers in the vicinity, the rest were held day and night, and as for the eight-hour work week for the majority of teachers, it was only something written on paper. If you want to stick to it, you have to eat, but you don't have to choose where to eat, and the only thing you can do is to try to eat on the stove as many times as possible.

My brother Liang, I don't know what we have eaten behind our backs, the body is quite fat, walking staggeringly, lying on the bed, snoring like thunder, I once joked: "Brother Liang, if the thief comes to steal the things in the stove room at night, he must be very relieved." ”

Where does this begin? ”

I think as long as the thief goes to the south wall of our school (more than 100 meters away from the stove room) and listens, he will know that you are not in the stove room at night. ”

As soon as my brother Liang heard it, it was immediately one word, "Get out!" ”

Don't look at my Brother Liang's cooking, but there are a lot of deputies, but none of them have reached the graduation level after his training, and they can be regarded as unemployed at most.

When I sometimes go to him to buy meal tickets and food tickets, he will give him an extra three yuan or three catties, and when he asks the reason, he will be inarticulate (because he has been engaged in logistics work for a long time) and tell you that this is a surplus on the stove, and everyone who often cooks will give some. Have you ever seen such a stove manager, anyway, I have seen or heard of only one person.

Until one day, there was a new person in charge of the cauldron in Jingyao Town, and I found out that my brother Liang could no longer engage in this job because of his ill health. Since then, I have rarely seen my brother Liang. In May last year, several of our colleagues went to his village for business, and after finishing the errand, they said that they went to see my brother Liang, and when they inquired, they found out that he had moved to a new house in the northeast of the village a few years ago.

The big pot of rice, as the memory of a generation has been forever left in the long river of years, today it is difficult to find the traces of the big pot rice, if there is a little clue, it can only be found in the gap of the text, but it will leave too many memories, too many stories to you, but also to me, but also to our generation.

About the Author:Xu Jihan, male, born in 1954, Shaanxi Province, Jingyao Town, Pucheng County, member of the Pucheng County Writers Association, junior high school chemistry teacher, now retired, loves literature, is good at recording the small things that happen around him at the end of the pen, writing the years, writing and singing life.