HPDBC Chapter 1622 Dinner
Chapter 1622 Dinner
Chapter 1622 Dinner
Master of ceremonies Zhou Chunming: While I was speaking, people who came to help the Ma family started serving drinks.
Alcohol and beverages refer to liquor and soda.
Before the Chinese New Year, the people of Yong'antun knew what soda was.
But after such a long time, the Ma family was the first to serve soda at a banquet.
There were ten bottles of soda on each table, and the children's eyes were red.
Without waiting for the food to be served, the kids urged the adults to open the soda for them, and then one by one they held the soda bottles and poured them into their mouths.
The adults tried to stop them, saying that the food was too hard and that they would not be able to eat after drinking a bellyful of soda. But this reason did not stop the children at all, and soon the burping caused by the soda continued.
When the witness Zhao Guofeng came on stage, the main dishes were served one after another.
The staple food was not brought out from the backyard, but was brought in from outside the yard.
Today, there were four pots in the backyard with eight dishes, and there was no way to provide staple food.
It has to be said that Ma Dafu is quite popular in this village. Neighbors from all around and in the front and back yards help his family cook rice and steam dry food.
In the rural areas of Northeast China, some elderly people do not eat rice all year round, but only eat noodles. When there is no white flour in difficult times, they eat cornmeal.
Therefore, Ma Dafu specially prepared two staple foods: rice and white steamed buns.
It should be said that the staple food for today's meal was well prepared by the Ma family. Rice and white flour buns were also placed in a washbasin and placed in the middle of the table.
Although the weather warmed up in mid-March, it was limited.
The rice and steamed buns just out of the pot are served on the table, steaming hot.
White mist floated up and dispersed in the middle of the table, revealing faces.
After the main dishes were served, the host announced the start of the meal, and then the dishes started to be carried from the backyard to the front yard.
First there were two cold dishes, one was a home-cooked cold dish, and the other was celery and venison.
As soon as the cold dishes were served, they immediately sparked discussions among the diners at the twenty tables.
People in Northeast China have eaten home-cooked cold dishes, but the dish served by the Ma family not only contains vermicelli, shredded carrots, shredded cabbage, and blanched shredded potatoes, but also cucumbers.
These days, few people in Yong'an Village have seen cucumbers in this season.
And the celery mixed with venison made some people unable to believe their eyes.
Some of them were quick to react and picked up their chopsticks to start eating. Without exception, they all went for the meat.
The venison for the salad is cooked in advance, sliced and mixed with scallion and celery. Then it is drizzled with soy sauce, sprinkled with salt, topped with minced garlic and mountain peppercorns, and then poured with hot oil and mixed. It is fragrant and goes well with rice.
Some of the Ma family's tableware was provided by Han Dachun, and some was borrowed from the villagers.
Therefore, there are various kinds of utensils for serving dishes, including small basins, small helmets, and long plates for fish.
Northeastern cuisine is like this, the portions must be large. Even more so when hosting a banquet, you can't be stingy, so the dishes are not small.
But even so, once the meat salad was served, half of it was gone in less than ten seconds.
In less than thirty seconds, only a few scallion shreds and coriander segments were left of the cold venison.
These people can't possibly eat that fast; they share the food with one chopstick at a time.
In comparison, a table full of forestry workers is better.
But the best ones were not the two tables where the leaders were sitting, but the two tables where the Zhao family’s diners were sitting.
The Zhao family's diners sat at two tables, and the meat on their tables was hardly touched.
On the day Zhao Youcai was injured, he knocked down six big guys, and they were fed up with eating these two days.
Zhang Yuanmin, who had taken a bite of the cold dish after it was served, looked at Chen Youliang from Chen Dalai's family, who was sitting at the table next to him. He saw the child slurping the vermicelli from the cold dish, holding a steamed bun in one hand and using chopsticks to stuff the venison slices from the bowl into his mouth.
Whoever is covered in Luo Qi is not a silkworm breeder.
Although Chen Dalai went hunting, he sold most of the prey he caught.
After taking a look at Chen Youliang's eating habits, Xiao Lingling shook her head, then looked at Zhang Yuanmin and said, "Dad, what are you looking at?"
"Haha..." Zhang Yuanmin smiled, retracted his gaze, and said to Lin Xiangshun beside him: "Look how delicious their meal is?"
It was fine before the Chinese New Year, but after that, the Zhao family’s diners were horrified to find that nothing tasted good anymore.
"Come, let's drink." Lin Xiangshun picked up the wine glass and invited Zhang Yuanmin to drink.
At this time, the dishes were served one after another.
The spicy stir-fried pork offal opened the guests' eyes again. The green peppers in it were bought by Ma Sheng in the city.
But the proportion of green peppers is not large, there are mostly green onions and pork offal.
The so-called pig offal includes not only the heart, liver, lungs, intestines, and tripe, but also pig head meat and stewed pig's trotters chopped into small pieces.
Although it was pork offal, it was considered a staple dish in those days. Once it was served, there was another round of scramble for it.
Who doesn’t know who? Why are you pretending?
Only the Zhao family's diners couldn't help but frown when they saw this dish.
The pork used by the Ma family was all wild boar meat, while the messy stuff on the wild boar was fed to the dogs by the Zhao family.
Fortunately, there was also a dish of crispy white meat served together with the spicy fried pork offal.
Zhao Youcai once cooked this dish at home. The main ingredient was pig fat.
Nowadays, or even in the past, people's living standards are generally not high, which leads to a lack of oil and water.
In this context, ribs and lean meat are bad meat, and the fattier the meat, the more popular it is.
The icy crispy white meat is not only made of fat meat, but also fried. After frying, it is coated with icing sugar. Therefore, in the past ten years, the icy crispy white meat has been the most popular dish in Yongan.
This dish requires a lot of oil and sugar to make, and the timing of applying the icing sugar in the last step is difficult to master, so not many people can make this dish.
Most of these people are professional chefs, and they usually cook this dish at banquets.
In Yong'an Forest District, whoever serves crispy white meat at a banquet will be respected.
From the beginning of the meal till now, all the Zhao family diners picked up their chopsticks for the first time.
After eating a piece of crispy white meat, Xu Chunyan smacked her lips and whispered to Lin Xiangshun, "It's delicious, Uncle's cooking."
Upon hearing this, Lin Xiangshun nudged Xu Chunyan with his elbow, signaling her not to talk nonsense.
Then, Lin Xiangshun leaned close to Xu Chunyan's ear and whispered, "Don't make any noise, or someone will hear you."
After saying this, Lin Xiangshun paused for a moment and continued, "Uncle Ma, Aunt Ma, you can't spend less for these forty tables!"
Lin Xiangshun was right. Ma Dafu and Wang Cuihua spent a lot of money on today's banquet.
In order to make the banquet prestigious, Ma Dafu and Ma Sheng purchased four wild boars and a red deer.
Since Wang Cuihua said that her mother-in-law only ate yellow-haired boars and the previous year's heavy wild boars, and only ate the eggs of red deer, so the four wild boars were three yellow-haired boars and one previous year's heavy wild boar, and the red deer also had eggs weighing nearly 300 kilograms.
Recently, Yong'an is having spring hunting season, and many people are selling game, so the price is relatively cheap.
Four wild boars were gutted and bled without skinning, head or hooves removed. They were weighed with lanterns attached, and the price was three cents per pound.
After bleeding four wild boars, they weighed nearly 400 jin, which was 120 yuan. The same was done for red deer, but the price was 5 cents higher than that of yellow-haired deer. After bleeding more than 230 jin, the red deer cost a little over 80 yuan, and Ma Dafu was asked to pay 80 yuan.
I went to the city to buy vegetables yesterday and spent 80 yuan. But Wang Cuihua felt sorry for spending this 80 yuan.
What she didn't expect was that the vegetables were even more expensive than wild boar meat!
In terms of food ingredients, there is rice, noodles, and oil. One hundred kilograms of rice, fifty kilograms of white noodles, and forty kilograms of soybean oil cost about two hundred yuan.
In addition to the alcohol and cigarettes, the alcohol was sorghum liquor brewed in the winery. Ma Dafu picked the best aged liquor, which had been stored in large vats for twenty years. One pound cost Ma Dafu one dollar and fifteen cents. Ma Dafu gritted his teeth and bought one hundred pounds, spending another one hundred and fifteen cents.
Soda was cheap, only five cents a bottle, but everyone bought a bottle, so it cost twenty-five dollars.
The money was not much, but Wang Cuihua complained to Ma Dafu for half the night.
Over the years, Yong'an has never served soda at banquets. Why spend the money?
But Ma Dafu said that no one had gone there before because there was no place, and this honor was prepared for his daughter.
Besides that, there are cigarettes. The Ma family used Yingchun for the banquet, with one plate on each table, and each plate had 20 cigarettes placed in a circle, which is a box.
Today, there were forty tables, which meant forty packs of cigarettes, or four cartons. In addition to the cigarettes for friends, relatives, and helpers, Ma Dafu bought six cartons of cigarettes, spending twenty-seven yuan.
All these cost six hundred and forty-seven, plus hiring musicians and some miscellaneous items, the Ma family's spending today was nearly eight hundred.
This amount of money is nothing to Zhao Jun's family, but it is a lot to the Ma family, so Lin Xiangshun said that the Ma family is going to bleed.
Next, two more dishes were served, one was celery vermicelli, which is celery fried with vermicelli, and the other was dried tofu with hot peppers.
At this time, the guests slowed down their pace, and Zhao Jun and Ma Ling began to toast each table.
The young couple neither knew how to drink, but the wine prepared for them had been tampered with.
After all ten tables were toasted, the last two dishes were served: wild boar meat stewed with pickled cabbage, and venison stewed with radish.
There were eight dishes, two cold, two vegetarian, and the other six all with meat. By the time the couple had finished toasting, some of the tables in front had already left.
Zhao Jun and Ma Ling, who had been smiling for a long time, smiled at each other. At this time, the girls were no longer as shy as before.
The meal was over in about 20 minutes. Some people had already left, while others stayed to pack up the leftovers.
After finishing the banquet, the guests from the Zhao family left first, but Zhao Chun, who was from the husband's family, could not leave. She held her child and went around looking for people to chat with.
She grew up in this village, married to Yongsheng in the past two years and soon had a child. So when Zhao Chun was in Yongsheng, she stayed at home most of the time and interacted with these people less and less.
Zhao Chun was so happy that he finally had this opportunity today and looked for people to chat with everywhere.
Because of Zhao Chun's identity, those people were very enthusiastic towards her.
Just when Zhao Chun was happily chatting with Wei Tie's wife, a dark figure jumped out from the side, and then Zhao Chun heard a familiar voice shouting, "What are you doing here?"
(End of this chapter)