Editor's note:
Every house hangs red lights, every household sticks Spring Festival couplets, and there is a good show in the villages - go home for the New Year! On January 18, the 2024 Spring Festival Shandong Rural Cultural Tourism Festival was officially launched, and a colorful folk culture feast kicked off. As the saying goes, after Laba is the New Year, "going home for the New Year" is always the deepest nostalgia and the strongest nostalgia of the Chinese. Following the growing flavor of the New Year, Poster News launched a series of short reports on "Returning to the Village for the New Year", taking you to appreciate folk customs, make handicrafts, visit large collections, choose special products, taste food, and watch exhibitions and ......performancesFeel the new atmosphere of Shandong countryside in the new era, taste the hot fireworks and the strong nostalgic New Year's flavor.
Reporter: Liu Bowen).
Laiwu Chenlou sugar melon, which began in the Tongzhi period of the Qing Dynasty, has a production history of more than 100 years. Sugar melon is made by mixing yellow rice and barley malt in a certain proportion. This kind of caramel is processed into many varieties of flowers and colors by "Qiaoren Painting Spring", the shape is called sugar melon (the big one weighs five or six catties), and there is a thin layer of sesame seeds stuck on the surface, and it is sticky and sweet in the mouth, and the aroma is overflowing. In the past, every year on the twenty-third night of the lunar month, every household bought a few sugar melons to quit the stove (stove prince), with the intention of sticking the mouth of the "stove prince" with sugar melons, telling him to "say good things to heaven", so as to "keep the lower world safe". Nowadays, Chenlou sugar melon has become a good food for people's nutrition, health care, and gifts to relatives and friends.
Chenlou sugar melon is made in a traditional way, and the maltose contained in it has the effect of relieving cough and reducing phlegm. After the sugar melon is cooked, it is cooled, and there is a thin layer of sesame seeds stuck to the surface, which is sticky and sweet in the mouth, and the aroma is overflowing, and the mouth is broken when chewed, and it is not greasy to chew for a long time, and the longer the chewing time, the more fragrant it is.
In 2009, "Chenlou Sugar Melon" was successfully declared as "Provincial Intangible Cultural Heritage".