Life is a five-flavor bottle, and there is no end to eating shark fin dragon liver. Sometimes I think about it, boiling, stewing, steaming, and feasting, but between this water and fire, in fact, only simplicity is the real beauty. In this impetuous era, learning the spirit of steaming vegetables in our true colors may really make our hearts as still as water.

For the food in simple life, things have no fixed taste, and those who are palatable are precious. It's like turning down a cultural lecture with a lunch at noon, and calmly relieving myself of a steamed crucian carp that I just made at home—the fish was sent by a friend who loves fishing. Now, the fish is steaming on the table, and the green and red pepper shreds and green onions are the same white fish belly between the red and the green...... So, in the slowly moving light and shadow, I smelled a long-standing mellow fish-smelling wild fragrance.

Stinky tofu and stinky amaranth stalks, add a small amount of oil, sugar, ginger slices and other condiments, put them on a hot fire and steam them through water, sprinkle them with chopped green onions and pepper shreds before serving. Out of politeness, I took two bites, and it was stinky, and it felt like the stinky vegetable tofu in our hometown. Two years ago, I ate a sand pot stinky tofu at the foot of Jingting Mountain in Xuancheng at the door of my house, the content is much richer, it is to stew bamboo shoots, fungus, minced meat, coriander and stinky tofu together, stinky tofu to "Du" out of countless tiny holes, both full and full of inhalation into the meat fragrance, and to the fullest release of their own smell, the taste is really fragrant and attractive and stinky domineering, as soon as it is on the table, it will be divided by a hand-eyed friend with a spoon. Smelling the smell and eating the fragrance, those who are addicted to this way especially refuse to let go of such a food machine.

In the early years, on the dinner table of ordinary people here, we could see a big bowl of stinky vegetable tofu at any time, just looking at the contents, it was a bit of a mix and spoof: in the dark green vegetable marinade, there was an unsophisticated white jade-like tender tofu, just steamed out of the pot, exuding a hot and strong smell...... It's just that many people are hungry for this smell, and their appetite is aroused when they smell it. Nowadays, in some beautifully decorated restaurants, this stinky rotten vegetable tofu with black and white has a touching name called "Thousands of Miles of Fragrance". In fact, in addition to stinky rotten vegetables, there are also stinky tofu, moldy bean dregs, moldy thousands of zhang, moldy beans, etc., which can be "fragrant". People in the north may not be able to understand it: Why should they deliberately make a good thing moldy, black, and rotten, so that it stinks so much that people cover their noses before they come to eat it? Shouldn't the people of Jiangnan who grew up in the land of bright mountains and beautiful rivers have a "habit of chasing odors"? This is a bit easy to say and not to hear, so a person as profound and skilled as Zhou Zuoren can't help but come out to defend his shortcomings and make a few sentences: "Reading the articles of the foreigner You Yue, most of them ridicule the Venerable Master's stinky food, in fact, this is not surprising......

The taste of the mouth is also not the same as the taste. As the saying goes, "It smells bad, it tastes good", and people like it. For example, stinky dried seeds are the most widely based delicacy.

In the early years, among the large and small teahouses, which place was not noisy and lively. Some of those tea customers are old customers who have come to drink a pot or two pots every morning for decades (making teahouses in the morning is "leather water", and bathing in the bathhouse at night is "water wrapping"), there are also relatives and friends who gather or come here to drink and talk for business, and there are also passers-by who come from south to north like idle clouds and wild cranes. The tea guests are fond of not only the cup after cup of sweet and pleasant tea, but also the stinky dried seeds cut into small cubes and placed on the plate to accompany the tea, and this stinky dried seeds are always accompanied by pickled garlic, ginger slices and red pepper flakes like the common singing and dancing at the same time, some white, some red and some yellow. The stinky dried seeds themselves are indigo on the outside, tender white on the inside, and then poured on a bright and fragrant small grinding sesame oil, not to mention tasting, just by looking at it, it tastes good in the mouth!

Wuhu's stinky dry is really a stunner, it is not as rotten and crooked as a rotten vegetable, but a gentle smell, smelly in the smell, smelly in the smell, like a pair of lovers, I can't tell who is holding whom...... It can be mixed with coriander, peanuts and rice with wine, can be boiled, steamed, fried parsley, fried artemisia, can also be fried first, and then stuffed with minced meat with winter bamboo shoots, mushroom soup. But the most common way to eat in the streets and alleys is to reflect the lights of the night market, scoop up the stinky dried seeds with fried shells from the squeaky oil pan, dip them in water-milled red peppers, sit on the vendors' small stools, hold small plates, and eat them in front of the figures. That kind of fried stinky dried seeds, with a coquettish secular smell of wind and dust, old on the outside and tender on the inside, fragrant, smelly and spicy, plus the love under the eyes, the love is delicious, taste it once, it makes you unforgettable for life!

The most flavorful stinky dried seeds in the history of Wuhu are, of course, "Wang Yitai's stinky dried seeds". "Wang Yitai" is the number of a sauce shop, the former site is at No. 90 Zhongchang Street, formerly known as the "Cha Yuantai Sauce Garden" founded by Jing County people in the early 20th century, and has always been famous for its stinky dried seeds. It is said that at that time, merchants were very particular about brands, and no matter how good the market was, they only listed fifteen catties of stinky dried seeds every day, and they didn't do one or two more.

The process of making stinky dried seeds is not complicated, it is soaked in white billet dry marinade, ** degenerated. The general marinade is made by stir-froiled sesame seeds mixed with water. According to Yun, in addition to burnt sesame seeds, bamboo shoots and mustard greens are cooked and fermented and filtered, and they are ground together with fresh lotus leaf ash, cypress ash and fried salt.

The older the marinade, the better, because of the continuous consumption, so it needs to be added every half a month. The white dry billet is boiled in a pot of water to "white", but the white dry seeds cannot be boiled and foamed. After leaving the pot, it is dried for half an hour, and after it is thoroughly dried, it is put into the marinade tank to soak for ** hours, and it can be five or six hours in summer. There is also a special small stinky dried seeds, which need to be soaked in the marinade for about ten days, if the thumb and index forceps shake together, the empty hanging half of the piece does not fall, indicating that the soaking heat is not yet home.

The marinade is not changed for many years, and it is usually placed in a place where the light is not very good, the stench is smoky, unbearable, if you test it, it will definitely not pass through the inspection equipment of the health department, but it can be soaked out of the elegant and vulgar food, which is also considered to be stinky to the extreme.