Dietary Customs of Laba Festival in Gao Long, Shaanxi Province
"Give birth to a Laba, grow a fork" is a folk proverb in Gao Long, which means that after Laba Festival, the days are getting longer and longer, and the long nights will be shortened. Therefore, local residents should celebrate Laba Festival. On the seventh night, residents held long forks, danced around the bonfire and reveled all night. On the eighth day of the next day, the most important food custom is to eat Laba noodles.
Gao Long is very particular about making Laba noodles locally. On the seventh day of the seventh day, mix the good flour with grey water, cover it with a wet cage cloth and knead it every half hour. After kneading for seven or eight times, roll it with a slender rolling pin into a dough sheet with a diameter of about one and a half meters. Choose a flat land, sweep it with a broom and wipe off the fine soil with a slightly wet cage cloth.
Next, noodles. The round noodles are fan-shaped after being folded in half twice. Choose right-angle knife, one-handed knife and one-handed face pressing, so that the face is even and smooth, and the thin and symmetrical face is the best. The folk song says, "Laba has eight sides like needles, so I can't breathe, and the days in the coming year will continue." It vividly reflects the aesthetic requirements for Laba noodles and the sustenance for a better life in the coming year.
After the noodles are ready, it's time to prepare the soup. The general raw materials are yellow flowers, coriander, onion, tofu, scorpion, spicy noodles, eggs, carrots and tofu, which are cut into diamonds with a thickness of about 3 mm and a length of about 6 mm. The eggs are fried into cakes with a thickness of about 1 mm, and then cut into diamonds like carrots. Diamond-shaped tofu, egg cakes and carrots can only float after being put into the soup.
Boiling soup pays attention to bleaching. After the soup is fried, it floats with red, white, yellow and green, which is delicious. This kind of drift soup's attention not only lies in color and fragrance, but also reflects people's upward desire. After deduction, local residents also implicitly criticized those who refused to give up, did not want to suffer, and just wanted to take advantage. "Everyone wants to float, who will sink to the bottom?"
On the day of Laba, every family gets up before dawn to make a fire. Every year, everyone makes secret efforts to see who will produce Laba noodles and win the first place. Men are squatting outside the door, joking on their faces, afraid that their Laba noodles will be late, laughing impatiently and coughing, signaling their daughter-in-law.
As soon as the food was served, they rushed over. They didn't clean up the dishes, took a pair of chopsticks and a bowl of noodles, and went to find other men without faces. They pretend to pick up a chopstick-headed noodle and greet everyone to eat it. In essence, it is to show off their noodle skills, and other men also boast that the wife who won the first prize is good at cooking.
Gao Long local residents don't call it eating Laba noodles, but it is very tacky. This is called sucking, that is, the noodles with a chopstick head are sucked into their mouths without chewing, so as to achieve a smooth and long taste. The noodles are smooth, soft, silky and very textured after being eaten. If you soak them in a bowl for half an hour, they won't be very thick and still have a texture, which is its unique charm.
It's a pleasure to suck Laba noodles with small flower trumpet bowls in Ankou Kiln and Yaozhou Kiln, with blue flowers on a white background and delicate and silky Laba noodles. Housewives usually encourage their children to eat more bowls when smoking laba noodles, praising it as "laba noodles, sucking eight bowls, making a dragon a phoenix".
This exquisite Laba noodles, Laba noodles, was invented by Gong Liu's wife when Gong Liu stayed in the hotel. Later, descendants of Gong Liu moved to Qishan, which called this kind of noodles, but the workmanship was not as fine as that of Laba noodles in Binxian, and the taste was much worse. Qishan people have commodity consciousness, which makes noodles with minced meat become a brand in local snacks.