Setting Up Stalls – Chapter 227

Handwritten Long Review

Setting aside the location, the food this time was something that even Sun Miao found novel.

Gui Province Huaihua Fen is one of the most common summer snacks there, sold on nearly every street. Whether in the morning or night markets, its presence is a given. In the very beginning, it was 5 mao¹ a cup. Now, even at the morning markets in Gui Province, it sells for 3 yuan a cup.

Don’t let its cheap price fool you; the process of making it is anything but simple.

Moreover, it uses an uncommon ingredient—or rather—something you don’t often see in food: quicklime².

And the very first step in making Huaihua Fen is to use quicklime. You select pure white quicklime with no impurities, place it in purified water, stir until it’s fully dispersed and uniform, and then let it sit undisturbed for seven days. Limewater is one of the most important components of Huaihua Fen. But the moment you mention using it in food, many people will wonder: Is that really edible?

Seven days ago, when Sun Miao came out of the System Space and began preparing the limewater in advance, Su Ruixi had raised this very question.

Sun Miao nodded. “Yes, it is. While you certainly can’t eat limewater under normal circumstances, it’s wrong to talk about toxicity without considering the dosage. A small amount is no problem. And actually, a lot of foods use things that might seem strange. Take making tofu, for example.”

It was only because Sun Miao knew so much now that she could speak with such confidence. “Susu-jie, you see, to make tofu, you have to add a coagulant. The brine used in traditional tofu making is limewater. Besides that, some other foods use plant ash³. So using limewater is no big deal.”

“When they make Huaihua Fen in Gui Province, they all use limewater, and they eat a ton of it over there. Some people buy it by the jin⁴.”

Sun Miao explained it all to Su Ruixi. After seven days had passed, Sun Miao began making the Huaihua Fen at home today. Huaihua Fen, naturally, requires pagoda tree flowers—or in this case, their seeds. Sun Miao went to a pharmacy to buy pagoda tree flower seeds, and back home, she immediately put them in a wok to roast. But when roasting pagoda tree flower seeds, you can’t use any oil or water; you just have to roast them until they’re cooked through.

After they were roasted, she combined them with Zhen Gui rice⁵ that had been thoroughly soaked, added an appropriate amount of tapioca starch, and ground it all into a slurry.

The special characteristic of Zhen Gui rice is its relatively high starch yield, making it perfect for producing things like rice noodles. Furthermore, it’s best to choose rice that has been aged for two or three years. Generally speaking, you want fresh ingredients when you eat, especially rice. Fresh rice cooks up into plump, round grains and has a richer fragrance.

But for this particular dish, you really need aged rice. Only then will the resulting rice slurry be rich and smooth.

In the earliest days, people were reluctant to use fresh rice to make rice noodles, but they later discovered that noodles made from aged rice simply tasted better. However, even with aged rice, you can’t choose any that has turned yellow or gotten damp; that kind is inedible.

After grinding it into a rice slurry, she wasn’t done yet. The limewater she’d prepared earlier now came into play. The limewater was brought to a boil and left to simmer slowly in the pot. Then, she poured in the rice slurry, stirring continuously as she did. Throughout the entire process, the rice slurry had to be stirred until it developed structure and couldn’t form lumps. With constant stirring, the rice slurry and limewater integrated into one, and she cooked it until not a single bubble or trace of raw paste remained. It was only considered complete when she could scoop a little out of the pot and observe the dripping slurry form a transparent thread.

But even reaching this step didn’t mean it was over.

She prepared another pot of ice water, filled with ice cubes and purified water. Then she placed a rack over it, and on the rack, she put a perforated basin similar to one used for making Liangxia⁶. The entire pot of huaihua rice slurry was poured into the basin, and the Huaihua Fen would drip through the holes directly into the pot of ice water below.

Only then was the Huaihua Fen considered formed.

The length of the Huaihua Fen strands was determined by the distance between the two pots; the farther apart they were, the longer the tails of the Huaihua Fen would be.

After it was done, she scooped the Huaihua Fen out with a large ladle, placed it in a bowl, and added a spoonful of brown sugar shaved ice to finish.

The Huaihua Fen Sun Miao made was truly as beautiful as a painting. The strands were a golden yellow, and as they fell into the bowl, they spread out like the petals of a chrysanthemum. The brown sugar shaved ice sprinkled in the center was like the flower’s pistil. It was a sight that made you reluctant to dip a spoon in, afraid of disturbing the beautiful scene.

But this beautiful-looking Huaihua Fen also had some rather baffling names back in Gui Province.

Some people called it by the same name as Liangxia, just calling it Yellow Liangxia. Others called it… rice maggots.⁷

To be honest, Sun Miao herself was stunned for a moment when she first heard that name. But on second thought, the plump, yellow strands of Huaihua Fen were about that size, so they really did have… um, a little similarity to maggots.

In some places, Huaihua Fen is actually made into a long, noodle-like form. A large pile of it together really does look like a bowl of rice noodles. For lunch, Sun Miao had eaten Huaihua Fen prepared as rice noodles. She had also saved two different bowls for Su Ruixi: one in the style she was selling, and one like the rice noodles she’d had for lunch.

As for that other name, Sun Miao had no intention of telling Su Ruixi. If she heard it, she might lose her appetite completely.

Sun Miao set up her stall at 5 p.m. Because she arrived a little early, she sold out quickly. She had prepared a huge pot of Huaihua Fen, and it was all gone by six-thirty. Sun Miao sighed in relief that it had sold so fast. She immediately took out her phone to message Su Ruixi, who replied not long after, saying she’d wait to have dinner with her.

On her way home, Sun Miao had no idea that the people from Gui Province in the group chat had already blown up, and someone had even handwritten a long, glowing review for her.

The person who wrote the review was a grandmother with salt-and-pepper hair. She was wealthy and had plenty of free time, and she was one of Sun Miao’s regular customers, though she hadn’t come to eat at the stall recently. At her age, she couldn’t handle such hot weather and tried to avoid going out when it was hot during the day. She hadn’t come to buy the fried skewers Sun Miao had been selling at night, either.

This time, she had dragged her juniors along to Sun Miao’s stall only after hearing she was selling Huaihua Fen.

After eating the Huaihua Fen and returning home, she began writing the review for Sun Miao. She only posted it when Sun Miao was almost home:

【That girl Sun’s Huaihua Fen is just so, so good. I went back to my hometown a while ago, and even what I ate there wasn’t this delicious. The big restaurants don’t make this, so you can’t get it there; and when you buy it at the morning market, it’s not as good as it used to be. In some shops, the Huaihua Fen you get is soft on the ends but dry and hard in the middle. That’s not the real deal at all, I reckon it’s probably made from some semi-finished product, just thrown together carelessly.

These years, so many snacks just don’t have that old flavor anymore. Technology has advanced, and there are shortcuts for everything. They don’t use real pagoda flower seeds, you can tell at a glance. The year before last, I went back and had a bowl at the morning market, and the broth was yellow. My grandkid told me it was most likely food coloring. It tasted of nothing but sweetness, not a hint of any other flavor.

Not to mention the noodles themselves, they probably weren’t even made from pagoda flowers at all.

I reckon they didn’t use brown sugar either, just cyclamate.⁸

If you’re not from Gui Province and a bit older, you’ve probably never had authentic Huaihua Fen.

That girl Sun has done a wonderful job! Letting me eat such authentic and delicious Huaihua Fen even when I’m so far from Gui Province. I sincerely recommend it. I hope everyone goes to try it—this is what Huaihua Fen is supposed to be. Don’t get fooled when you go to Gui Province.】

Making Huaihua Fen was time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially the process of constantly stirring it in the hot pot. You couldn’t stop your hand for a second, or it would start to clump up. Although you could restore it to a thick slurry by continuing to stir, the texture wouldn’t be as good as when it was made perfectly in one go.

This time, she had spent a month in the System Space learning to make Huaihua Fen. Even though she didn’t feel fatigue in the System Space, Sun Miao still felt like her hands were about to fall off. Back in reality, stirring like that day after day, and not being able to sell it at a high price, was why the taste of Huaihua Fen had declined year after year.

But even so, there were still many who made delicious Huaihua Fen, and it was a memory etched deep in the hearts of the people of Gui Province. Every summer, when the weather grew hot, they wouldn’t eat popsicles but a bowl of chilled Huaihua Fen. Or, going back even further in time, it might have been homemade by a family member.

When the old pagoda tree at the village entrance was about to blossom, someone would be looking to climb it and pick the flowers. They might be picked to be used directly in cooking or made into pancakes, or the seeds would be used to make Huaihua Fen at home. Back then, sugar was precious and used sparingly in food. If an honored guest came, they might steep a cup or two of sweet broth, but it would never be the children’s turn to eat it.

Only when they made Huaihua Fen would they add a little brown sugar to it.

Sun Miao only saw the grandmother’s handwritten review after she got home. For a moment, she felt she didn’t quite deserve it.

The reason the grandmother found it so exceptionally delicious was certainly due in part to Sun Miao’s skill, but it was more likely due to the purest, most beautiful memories from her own past.

Once home, Sun Miao first had dinner with Su Ruixi, then took the Huaihua Fen out of the refrigerator to have as a dessert.

Su Ruixi wanted the bowl with the short strands because it looked like a chrysanthemum blooming in the bowl. Su Ruixi liked pretty things, and Sun Miao didn’t fight her for it.

Unlike how it was sold outside, the Huaihua Fen at home was served in a white porcelain bowl, and the sight was truly like a chrysanthemum in a dish. The white porcelain spoon clinked crisply against the side of the bowl. At first, Su Ruixi couldn’t bear to destroy it, but Sun Miao was already eating beside her, so she started as well.

As she stirred gently with the spoon, she could feel the slight resistance from the shaved ice, but very quickly, the “chrysanthemum” petals scattered, clumping together messily in the bowl. The sound of the spoon became more distinct, and that clinking sound, paradoxically, brought a sense of peace to Su Ruixi’s heart.

Only after stirring it well did Su Ruixi scoop some up with her spoon.

While Sun Miao was out, she had secretly read the grandmother’s handwritten review in the group chat and had seen the line “the broth was yellow.” Now, she observed carefully. Sun Miao’s broth was crystal clear, without a trace of color.

Logically, the broth shouldn’t be yellow. The Huaihua Fen was already formed in the pot, its color coming from the pagoda tree flower seeds. When it dripped from the colander into the ice water, it shouldn’t dye the water. That’s why the Huaihua Fen could fall onto the spoon like petals landing in water, as if swimming in the void with nothing to cling to.⁹

If even the broth was yellow, it was most likely because food coloring had bled.

On the spoon, besides the “chrysanthemum petals,” were little specks of red sugar. Scooped up together, it looked even more beautiful. Su Ruixi hesitated for a moment before finally putting it in her mouth.

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The author has something to say:

Waaah, who wouldn’t want a handwritten long review?

It really hit the spot for the inwardly smug Boss Sun.

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