Country Cookin’

Rice paddies in Guangdong Province (photo by pawightm)

I sat down for another two-hour session with my dad over the holidays, and this time, he talked about his experience as one of the millions of youths who were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. There are, of course, many facets to that subject, and I’ll share some details focusing on one particular area — food and cooking.

In the village that Dad and Uncle Kangtai went to, there were a total of 16 “rusticated youths” or “educated youths” (知青). They were to live together and cook together. I’ll leave the “live together” part for another post. As for cooking together, that lasted about a month or so before the youths splintered into smaller groups due to differences in taste, the level of support from their families, and work ethics.

Playing with Fire

As for the cooking itself, the youths had to master wood-burning stoves rather than the coal-burning stoves they were used to in their homes in the great metropolis of Guangzhou. That learning process took a while, and in the beginning, they made a mess … and a lot of smoke. There was so much smoke that they couldn’t stand in the kitchen while stowing the fire. Instead, they piled up the wood and grass that were to be used for fuel in front of the stove, then stood back in the doorway, and tried to use a long bamboo pole with a pitchfork tied to the end to lift the wood into the stove, often with hilariously disastrous consequences. Aside from filling the kitchen with smoke, they would also occasionally drop a lit piece of wood from the stove and set ablaze the entire pile of firewood that they had stacked up in front of the stove. Until they got a handle on the stove, the youths’ pots of rice were either undercooked or burnt and infused with a … umm … mesquite from the smoke rising out of fire.

Oh, and by the way, the fire wood and grass came from mountains that were a five-hour trek away.

Vegetables

While the rusticated youths never really lacked for rice, other dietary needs — vegetables, oil, and particularly meat — were in short supply. Vegetables generally came from each person’s private plots. The villagers used their private plots to raise pigs or grow sweet potatoes — a white variety that, instead of producing delicious tubers, was known for producing lots of leaves, which were then mixed with ground rice husks and used as pig feed. The rusticated youths, on the other hand, planted vegetables they wanted to eat — leafy greens like bokchoy or cabbage, cucumbers, and sweet potato varieties that were actually good for human consumption. While their plots did produce some decent harvests during good years, it was tough going during droughts. While the peasants in the village would carry water from a distant pond to water their private plots, the rusticated youths — not used to the backbreaking work of rice growing — were often too tired to do so after spending the day laboring in the fields. So they either planted drought-resistant plants such as peanuts, or just gave up on the plot altogether and let the vegetables die. In years when they really didn’t have the time or desire to tend their private plots, they gave the land to the peasants to use as they see fit, as long as the peasants grew some vegetables for them as well.

Oil

Oil was even harder to come by. To get oil in the countryside, one had to grow peanuts and then sell those peanuts to government clearinghouses, which would then give the seller a certain amount of oil stamps according to how much peanuts they sold. Peasants could also take their peanuts directly to a processing plant and have them turn it into oil and a crushed pulp that could be used as fertilizer. The rusticated youths, of course, usually didn’t have a whole lot of peanuts to sell or to be converted into oil, so they often had to take some oil from home when they go back to Guangzhou to visit their families.

Of course, even the city wasn’t exactly swimming in cooking oil. Each person typically got half a tael (a little more than half a pound) of oil per month, and families with children in the countryside would do whatever they could to save up a little bit of oil for their kids to take back with them. Also, when they went back to Guangzhou, the youths would sometimes visit the butcher’s shops and buy hog fat, which they then fried and congealed into gobs of saturated goodness to be used as cooking oil.

Protein

Sources of protein were also scarce. The main source of meat for a peasant in the countryside is pig, but the meat the peasants consume doesn’t come directly from their own pigs. Instead, they sell their pigs to the village store, which estimates how much meat each pig is carrying and gives the peasants the corresponding amount in pork stamps. The store slaughters pigs once a week and puts the meat on sale, and the peasants could then buy the meat with their pork stamps. The portions, though, were meager by today’s standards — one yuan of pork stamp got you just a couple ounces of meat.

The rusticated youths, however, didn’t have their own pigs, so while a few kind-hearted peasants would occasionally share a few pork stamps with them after selling a pig, there was no consistent source of meat. So the youths had to be opportunistic:

• On their way to and from work in the rice paddies, they would look for small fish or shrimps in the flooded fields.
• While working in the rice paddies, they or the peasants would occasionally come across frogs. These made for a nice delicacy, but also set the youths up for a practical joke when some of the young men in the village told them about a large gathering of frogs at a nearby pond. The youths did indeed come back with a bucketful of hopping critters and started preparing them for dinner, only to find out from a village woman who happened to be passing by that these were, in fact, potentially poisonous toads.
• After school, kids in the village often went to the local streams to build makeshift dams to trap small fish, which they would then sell at a low price (a few mao, or tenths of a yuan) to the rusticated youths.
• Sometimes a peasant would have a “lagging behind piglet” — a young pig that can’t compete with its siblings for milk or had caught parasites and therefore couldn’t grow as big as the others. These piglets had to be done away with at some point so as not to hinder the healthy pigs’ growth. Whenever the rusticated youths spotted one such piglet, they would make nice with the peasant and try to buy it — usually a little more than a yuan for a six- or pound-pound piglet. Slaughtering a piglet when you’ve never done it before, though, was a bit adventurous.
• When things got really desperate, the youths even resorted to killing and cooking snakes that they came across on the roadside.
• In the winter, the village would sometimes hold public auctions for animals killed by the cold — typically ducks. The dead animals would be displayed in a public place, and the men of the village, who had relatively little to do in winter, would gather and bid. The rusticated youths, who got a little bit of financial support from their families in the cities, would pool their money together and send one person to these auctions. The bonanza was the time when they mustered together more than eight yuan — a huge sum by their standards — to win a 30- or 40-pound calf that had been killed by the cold. They had beef and cow parts for days after that, with no refrigeration.
• Occasionally, when they’ve saved up some money, the youths would hitch a bike ride or make the two-hour hike to a not-so-nearby hamlet that had a farmers market, where one could buy vegetables, fish, chicken, or eggs. For special occasions such as major holidays, the youths would go not to the hamlet’s farmers market, but its animal hospital. The animal hospital serviced primarily pigs, and when the vets came across a pig that’s beyond help, they would often buy it from the owner at a discount. The sick animal’s organs are discarded, and the meat is never sold raw. Instead, the hospital would roast the pig whole and sell roast pork. It was from a sick pig, but it was roast pork, and it was cheap, and the rusticated youths were ecstatic to get it.