The taste of memory, the taste of college.

"I suddenly want to eat a fried chicken rack!"

I was bored at night, brushing my college classmates, and suddenly I saw someone leave such a sentence.

She is talking about the fried chicken rack bought by the stall at the gate of our university. It was almost twenty years ago that I went to college. For those of us who haven't seen each other since graduation, life during that time has long been blurred, and we can't even remember the names of our classmates. Almost all the topics we can talk about now are related to food, and fried chicken rack is one of them.

My university is in a third-tier town, and the major of science and engineering is that Yang flourishes while Yin declines. There are only 8 girls in a class of nearly 50 people, all of whom happen to be in the same dormitory. Different from the complicated interpersonal relationship in university dormitory, our dormitory is surprisingly harmonious. Eight girls have never been uncomfortable. They are willing to tie up almost anything, attend classes, study together, go shopping together, eat together ... and watch movies together.

Our school is on a hillside in the suburbs, and the hills behind it are covered with dense chestnut trees. When chestnuts bloom in autumn, the whole campus smells of chestnut flowers. Just know the taste of chestnuts blooming all over the mountain is really ... smelly! In front of the school gate is a spillway coming down from the mountain, as wide as a river. Crossing the stone bridge on the canal is a downhill road. Walking along the road for more than ten minutes is another university. Our two universities use a cinema.

Every Friday night, eight girls in our dormitory will hang out on the stone bridge together, back over the top of the mountain to shoot the sunset all over the sky, follow the swaying ducks on the road and go to the cinema with laughter all the way. There is a small tin house in front of the cinema, and a sign is hung on the wall: fried chicken rack, fried skewers. What we sell here is a fixed restaurant for watching movies, fried chicken rack.

The chicken rack is made in advance, 2.5 1 yuan each. The stall owner is a clean proprietress. She picked up the chicken rack with a big clamp and put it in the boiling oil pan. The aroma is rich, and the chicken rack will turn into attractive red and bright colors in just a few minutes. The proprietress took out the fried chicken rack and put it on the side plate, picked up the brush, and began to brush the inside and outside of the fried chicken rack with a layer of sauce-the sauce is said to be the proprietress's unique formula, which looks red, but not spicy, and has a compound fragrance, which is particularly fragrant when brushed on the fried chicken rack-and finally sprinkled with a layer of cumin, and bagged. The chicken rack is so big that eight girls can buy four.

Eating is not forbidden in the school cinema, and the chicken rack you bought can be taken directly in. When entering the stadium, the lights often dim. A group of people sat in a row in the dark and couldn't help asking each other, "Is everyone here? I didn't leave anything ... "But I can't count it. At this time, the eldest sister will decisively give an order: "Stop arguing and count off!" So a group of silly girls counted out according to the dormitory ranking in the dark cinema: "One, two, three …". When all the people are together, everyone will sit down and eat together.

Drag a piece directly into the mouth by hand: the fried skin at the mouth is a little crispy, and the sauce brushed on the outer layer is a little burnt, but the aroma is stimulated more strongly, with a little spicy and salty fragrance, accompanied by the aroma of hot oil, which instantly fills the whole mouth; Bite down the inner layer of meat is still very thick and tender, the original bottom taste is very fresh, making the meat taste particularly prominent; If you continue to bite, you will get a bone, but it is already crisp and rotten. You can chew it directly, and the bone is fragrant. This mouthful is full of fragrance and has a solid and rich taste. It's full of satisfaction for my stomach after eating the food in the canteen for a week, and I can't wait to eat the next bite. When I finished eating all of them, my mouth was full of fragrance, and I couldn't help eating ten fingers one by one and breaking my tongue. In those years, many movies, such as The Matrix, Guoan and Titanic, were watched on a chicken rack. At the end of the party, eight people walked on the quiet mountain avenue full of stars, talking and laughing all the way back to the dormitory, holding chicken rack incense in their hands.

On Saturday, the whole dormitory also has group activities, collectively ... taking a bath. (lll￢ω￢)

Because there are many people in the public bathroom of the school and the facilities are not very good, the girls in our dormitory go to the public bathroom in the nearby town to take a bath on Saturday and walk in the residential alley around the school for 20 minutes. It takes a lot of time for girls to take a bath. They leave at nine o'clock in the morning and usually come back at lunch time after washing, so those small restaurants in hutong have become our first choice, among which the shops selling tofu soup and cupcakes have the highest click-through rate. This shop is so small that it doesn't even have a sign. It's hidden in an alley, on the way we have to walk back and forth. There are only three small square tables in the shop, and the room is dark. Only the boss and his wife manage it. There are only two things in the shop: bean curd soup and luobing.

The menu is simple and the food is extremely simple. Tofu soup has only tofu and soup, tofu is north tofu, and soup is a stock that is somehow hung out, with some chopped green onion sprinkled in it, and nothing else. But the smell is enough to make everyone who has drunk it fall in love with it and never forget it again. Today, many years later, I don't quite remember the appearance of that bowl of bean curd soup, but the feeling after drinking it is still so clear: delicious and moist. Just like a person who has been thirsty for a long time in the hot summer, he suddenly drinks a bowl of fairy juice nectar, and the strange fresh fragrance instantly fills his nose and mouth and flows to the whole body. Suddenly, he feels that every cell in his body has been moistened and become intimate. Sliced tofu is also tender and fragrant, and it slides down the throat with a thick bean flavor when chewed gently. At this time, I'll have another bite of luobing-luobing looks like the present hand-grabbed cake, but it's baked in the oven, so it's not greasy, crisp and tender outside, and it smells like green onion, which is a perfect match with refreshing tofu soup!

I don't know if it is because there is really no oil and water in the university cafeteria. Just a bowl of simple bean curd soup and a hanging luobing captured the taste buds of countless classmates nearby, so that whenever I go, the small room is full of people and never deserted. I will never forget it. I went to eat almost once a week during college, and I never forgot it after graduation. It's a pity that I have never tasted that taste again. Moreover, more than ten years have passed, and the town near the original university has been rebuilt several times. It is estimated that small restaurants without signs have long since disappeared.

Another delicious food that I can't forget is strawberries. Strawberries are very common now and can be eaten all year round. But this was a rare thing in Northeast China more than ten years ago. I never ate it before I went to college. At that time, the city where I went to college regarded strawberry cultivation as a key agricultural project to develop the economy, so the farmland near our university was all strawberry greenhouses. When strawberries are ripe in spring, the air is filled with the unique sweetness of strawberries.

Early in the morning, strawberry farmers pick ripe fresh strawberries and sell them around the school in big bamboo baskets at two yuan a catty. Because it is ripe fruit, it looks less fresh after noon than in the morning, and it drops to 5 1 kg. If they are not sold out at night, farmers will buckle the bamboo baskets on the roadside, dump the remaining strawberries on the roadside and go home empty. At that time, at night, I often saw a large row of strawberry piles on a road, all of which were dumped by farmers. Chickens and ducks raised by farmers nearby are very happy to eat around.

Strawberries are different now. It is very small, only the size of a chestnut. It is a regular oval, unlike the huge, strange shape pushed by hormones now. Besides, strawberries smell good. If there are strawberries on the roadside, you can smell them half a block away. If someone in the dormitory buys strawberries and hides them in the table, it won't be long before everyone will find them, because the whole room smells good. Because they are all picked when they are ripe in the field, it is completely different from the half-baked ones sold now. Strawberries are sweet in one bite and melt in the mouth. You hardly need to chew it, and it becomes a sweet juice. There is no dross at all. Even the exhaled air is sweet. After eating, it will leave a fragrance in your mouth and cheeks. Even the hand that has taken the strawberry has a sweet taste and will last for a long time.

There is only one bad thing. Strawberries are too ripe to put away at all. You can only eat it when you buy it, or it will start to rot in a few hours. And very delicate, you will get hurt when you touch it lightly, and then it will rot. Even if it is washed with water, the surface will turn white, start to rot and taste worse. So what we often did at that time was to eat strawberries without washing them. Especially when strawberries are just picked in the morning, with morning dew, they are particularly watery, fresh, sweet and juicy, and there is no pressure to eliminate a catty or two in one breath. In this way, I formed the habit of eating strawberries crazily for one or two months every spring during my college years. Later, I graduated to work in Beijing and bought a box of strawberries in Beijing for the first time. As a result, I almost cried myself That half-baked, rootwood smell, that tasteless, sweet and sour, random taste of water and water, and it hasn't changed for three days, and it's still as hard as a chaff ... which makes me have no courage to try again for a long time.

Now every strawberry season, I miss my college days very much, and even want to have a chance to go back to that city to eat strawberries. Until one year, a friend who couldn't stand listening to my nagging bought me a box of strawberries online, which satisfied my desire. As a result, when I saw that box of strawberries was big and hard, and they were generally second to none in nearby fruit shops, I knew that the taste of strawberries could only be the taste in my memory like fried chicken rack and tofu soup.