至今还记得小时候家里拉大白菜时候的场景——在中国还没有引进暖棚的时代，大白菜就成为了大部分北方家庭过冬时节的唯一蔬菜。它很便宜，你可以炒着吃，炖着吃，煮着吃，还有凉拌着吃。
记得以前有个，一个人向自己的同事夸耀说：“我今天中午吃了4菜一汤。”同事羡慕地问：“什么菜什么汤？”这人说：“辣椒炒白菜，醋溜白菜，凉拌白菜，白菜炖豆腐和白菜汤。”——果然四菜一汤。
记得早年间10月的时候，家里一般会叫来一大车的白菜，至少半吨吧，都码起来，放在菜窖里，吃的时候再下去拿。那时候冰箱还不是很普及呢，家家都住小平房里，院子里往往带一个菜窖，大约一人多高吧，外面用锁子锁起来，因为老妈不让我到菜窖里去玩。到晚上做饭的时候，妈妈就会打发爸爸去菜窖里区白菜，或者一些土豆和胡萝卜。在没有暖棚的时代，北方的冬天还能吃什么？
Before greenhouses, the Chinese cabbage known as baicai was a mainstay of Chinese dinner tables. Especially in the north, where most areas are covered with thick snow or a light coat of frost much of the year, Chinese cabbage remains popular because it’s often the only local vegetable
left. Plus, it’s cheap.“I had a ‘four dishes and one soup’(四菜一汤 ) style lunch this afternoon,” said a man to his colleague, aiming to show off his high standard of living. (“Four dishes and one soup” is a popular expression in China.)
“What were they?” asked his colleague, jealously.
“Fried baicai with dry red pepper, sweet and sour baicai, baicai salad,stewed tofu with baicai, and a baicai soup. You see, not too much and not too little, just four dishes and one soup. ”
It may be funnier in Chinese. But it’s easy to see why baicai rules dinner tables nationwide: it’s easy to grow, cheap, and you can cook it with anything.
Not so long ago, October was an important month across China’s northeast. As the weather turned, every family stored away a winter’s worth of baicai. They’d store it in the courtyards, or between windows and the window bars, or under their beds, peeling off the slowly-rotting layers to reveal untouched leaves underneath.
Li Wenzhong, the manager of Liaoning Provincial Restaurant in Beijing, remembers the process he’d go through every winter. “My parents would buy more than a half-ton of baicai at a time. The truck driver helped deliver it to our door, but the rest was up to us young boys. We dug a deep ditch in advance, maybe one meter across. Then we planted the baicai by the roots, and covered them with a think layer of soil. This way, we could store the baicai for the whole winter. It was a kind of natural refrigerator.”
That’s the way we did it in my hometown. Back when most Chinese people still lived in one-story houses, almost everyone had a little vegetable cellar in their courtyard. Our cellar was very deep, deep enough for an adult to stand upright. It was so cold in the winter that my mother never allowed me to go in—she would lock it from the outside to make sure. Every winter, we’d fill it with sacks of baicai. They were the staple of our meals, and winters wouldn’t have felt like winters without them.
There are so many ways to cook baicai… It can be fried, stewed, used in a salad, boiled in a soup, or—and this is one of my favorite ways—pickled in a big clay pot. Pickled baicai is known as suancai (酸菜, “sour cabbage” literally), and is one of the most important foods in Dongbei, northeastern China, as Dongbeiren (Northeastern Chinese) say in their dialect:
“Where I’m from, we’re all addicted to eating suancai. Suancai is wicked good!” 1/2 12下一页尾页