Traveling back to 1977

Chapter 494 Waiting to Eat

This year's Spring Festival did not fall on the 30th of the twelfth lunar month.

The 29th day of the twelfth lunar month is Lunar New Year's Eve.

If there's no snow on New Year's Eve, it just doesn't feel right.

Fortunately, it snowed lightly last night, covering the ground with a layer of white. Although it didn't have the atmosphere of heavy snow, it was still pleasing to the eye.

Chen Fan got up early as usual, first doing his morning exercise and washing up, and then going downstairs to the kitchen to cook.

Liu Dan and the others originally wanted to come and cook New Year's Eve dinner for him, but he declined.

Even landlords give their farmhands a day off during the Lunar New Year, so how could he let a few girls come to work today?

That's too outrageous.

Besides, you also have to give a red envelope.

So he took matters into his own hands and became self-sufficient.

He first made a pot of breakfast, not for himself, but to feed the animals.

There are mainly two dogs and a bunch of chickens. The horses and sheep can eat grass on their own, the hawks and mynas can find insects to eat in the spring and summer, and in the dead of winter they only need some meat strips. The three pandas have bamboo, and the raccoon dog Ba Liang is also used to going out to find food on its own, eating everything before coming back.

Only the dog and the chicken need to be fed.

What? A pig?
Ahem, yesterday, on the last day of work at the food station, Captain Yang found two people and carried them to hand in their tasks.

It must be said that Yang Ju and her team really did their best. Both pigs weighed over 150 jin (75 catties), and the smaller one was 152 jin (75 kg). When they were taking them to hand in the task, Master Zhu was there to speak up and they were directly given a special grade. The price of the live pig was 6 mao (0.6 yuan), and they sold it for a total of 91 yuan, which is about the same as the dividend for a strong laborer in Lujiawan last year.

Compared to this year's income, this amount of money is shamefully low. Fortunately, I have 50 jin of meat coupons, which I can keep to buy fresh pork later. They are valid for one year.

The other one is bigger?
Of course, it should be killed and eaten on the spot.

After eating breakfast, Chen Fan changed into a pair of plastic rain boots, took off his cotton-padded coat, put on a long gown, and then slowly walked to the back of the house carrying a bundle of knives.

A path more than two meters wide was carved out in the woods behind the house. The path was paved with gravel, so despite the layer of snow, it was not very slippery.

Walking down the path, after a few steps you will see a large, deep pit, like a dried-up pond.

However, there is still a shallow layer of water in this pond.

That was where the villagers used to get soil to build mud-walled houses. But after family farming became profitable, the villagers no longer cared about mud-walled houses, and the pottery factory was located at the other end of the commune. So they no longer needed to get soil from there, and the pit was abandoned.

A livestock shed was built next to the deep pit.

The livestock sheds were built along the north-south axis, separated by a solid wall, with one side facing east and the other west.

Facing east are the stables and sheepfold, which are actually not separate; the two horses and two sheep live together.

On the other side was the pigsty.

There was a large manure pit at the edge of the livestock shed. Every few days, a designated person from the team would come and haul away the manure, so there was no smell here.

In addition, a small shed was built next to it, specifically for cooking pig feed.

But now Chen Fan uses it to boil water.

In the pig feed shed, there was a cutting board that Chen Fan had prepared in advance, as well as a huge kidney basin.

It wasn't the one he used to bathe in before; he put that one in the storage room, and it'll be a little souvenir from now on.

This was something he did himself, mainly focusing on a large volume and deep water.

As the saying goes, you have to have a good meal before you go, but Chen Fan didn't plan to cook pig feed. He planned to send the fat pig on its way now, so what was there to feed it? It would be hard to clean up after eating it, so he stopped feeding it yesterday, and its stomach should be almost empty by now.

In some places, it is customary not to kill animals on New Year's Eve, but in Yunhu, pigs can be slaughtered from the winter solstice until New Year's Eve.

Only pigs slaughtered during this period are called "New Year pigs".

However, this only lasts until the afternoon of New Year's Eve. After sunset, the procedure must be stopped, and no further surgery is performed on the first day of the Lunar New Year. Normal procedures will resume on the second day of the Lunar New Year.

Place the knife on the long table, first draw water from the large water vat in the corner into the large iron pot, then light the fire to start boiling the water.

Then he picked up two wooden buckets, went up the slope to the tap behind the house, and filled the two buckets with water.

As Chen Fan carried the water back, he thought about finding someone to connect another section of water pipe to the pipe someday, so he wouldn't have to carry water upstairs to boil it.

Oh, right, we also need to buy two electric water pumps so that we can have running water all day long without having to wait for the water delivery time.

Thinking about what to do next year, he filled the water tank in two trips and then carried two more buckets of water to the side.

While waiting for the water to boil, Chen Fan lit a pipe and walked to the pigsty.

Inside the pigpen, a large, fat pig lay on the ground, looking utterly dejected. As soon as it saw someone approaching, it immediately jumped up and ran over, grunting and squealing.

Chen Fan took a drag of his cigarette, looked at the big spotted pig in the pigpen, and exhaled a puff of smoke. "We're about to set off, so don't cry for food. Eating will only make the journey more difficult."

Unfortunately, he was speaking human language, which the big spotted pig couldn't understand, and it kept grunting and squealing.

Chen Fan smacked his lips, silently wondering when the white pigs would be introduced here.

As early as the 60s, my country had already introduced white pigs, but it was still in the stage of breeding and promoting them at the same time. There were not enough piglets to start large-scale promotion, so the pigs raised in my country at present are still mainly native pigs.

The most distinctive feature of native pigs is their black color. In some regions, pigs are entirely black. The old Chinese proverb, "A crow landing on a pig—can't see its own blackness," refers to native pigs.

There are also black and white spotted pigs, such as the Liangtouwu pigs used to make Jinhua ham, as well as other pig breeds with mixed colors.

But there isn't a completely white one.

If it's an all-white pig, then it must be an imported breed.

However, after so many years of breeding, the large-scale promotion of white pigs should be coming soon. ...The second brother in the 86 TV series Journey to the West was a big white pig, so by then the promotion had been completed and native pigs were rarely seen. Otherwise, they wouldn't have chosen a white pig as the prototype for the second brother; they should have chosen a completely black one.

Thinking of this, Chen Fan secretly calculated that he should put the construction of the original seed base on the agenda within one or two years at the latest, otherwise many original seeds would be hard to find.

Besides pigs, local chickens, ducks, geese, horses, cattle, sheep, and even soft-shelled turtles, etc., should all be preserved in their original species and protected.

In addition, after the trial planting of hybrid rice this year, we will definitely expand the planting scale next year, at which time the original rice varieties will also become very rare.

While the yield of native rice varieties is far less than that of hybrid rice, the taste is vastly different. There's another point, though it's uncertain whether it's true, which is that native rice is better suited to the local population's constitution. He remembered an old woman in his maternal grandfather's village who, even when everyone else was planting hybrid rice, insisted on keeping a plot of her own paddy field for native rice. She rarely got sick in her life, and when people asked her, she would say it was related to the rice she ate. She had only ever eaten rice from native varieties, and even without meat, eggs, or dairy, she felt very energetic.

Unfortunately, this claim only came from her and has not been supported by any scientific evidence.

Regardless of whether it's an isolated case or not, even if it's just to make the rice taste better, Chen Fan is thinking of keeping some of the old rice seeds and finding a piece of land to grow them himself.

He smoked as he thought, and soon finished a pipe. He turned and walked to the pigsty, put his pipe away, opened his knife sheath, picked up a chain with an iron hook, fixed it to a wooden bar, and placed a large wooden basin underneath to catch the smoke.

Go back to the pigpen, move the wooden fence aside, and go inside.

The big fat pig stood there, staring blankly at him.

Chen Fan smoothed the hair that had fallen across his forehead, walked over slowly, and suddenly punched the pig on the head.

Without saying a word, the big fat pig lay down on the ground and didn't move.

After a few seconds, he stopped breathing.

Chen Fan bent down and grabbed the pig by the back of its neck. His five fingers were like five iron hooks, almost penetrating into the pig's skin. Then, he exerted his strength and lifted the pig, which weighed more than 160 kilograms, with one hand, dragging it away.

Back in the pigsty, he acted like a seasoned master craftsman with decades of experience, effortlessly hanging the pig upside down on an iron hook. He picked up a long, thin butcher knife from the table, first scraping off a tuft of hair, then plunging the knife into the heart from the throat, the blood gushing out.

After the bleeding stopped, the hot water was ready. He scooped the hot water into the kidney basin, then took the pig off and soaked it in the water.

He then proceeded step by step, without needing any help, and completed the processes of perming and shaving on his own.

Then hang the pig up again, place a new wooden basin underneath, pick up a sharp ox-ear knife, and cut along the belly all the way down. The pig's offal immediately splashes into the basin.

Then, the pig was taken down and placed on the long table. In less than half an hour, the big fat pig was transformed into a neat pile of fresh meat.

After finishing his work, he filled a pot with tobacco and smoked it. He planned to rest for a while before going to the front to get a basket and carry all the pork back.

Before he could even finish his pipe of tobacco, he heard two dogs barking from ahead.

Is someone there? Or is it someone we know?

Chen Fan raised an eyebrow, wondering who it was that would come here today.
It shouldn't be Huang Ying and her group, otherwise the dog wouldn't be so excited.

Moreover, on New Year's Eve, even the closest relatives will not easily visit each other's homes. Everyone is busy with their New Year's Eve reunion dinner, so who would run around and cause trouble for others?

That's right, visiting someone's house today only caused trouble.

He took a deep breath, finished smoking the last bit of tobacco, then knocked the pipe clean and walked upstairs with his hands behind his back.

They had only walked a short distance when they saw a window on the second floor open. Jiang Lili leaned out halfway and waved excitedly at him, "Xiao Fan, Xiao Fan."

Chen Fan's face immediately broke into a smile, and he looked up and asked with a laugh, "What brings you here?"

The next second, Jiang Tiantian came out from the corner of the room, waved to him and shouted, "I'm here too!"

Chen Fan quickened his pace and walked up to her, beaming from ear to ear as he looked at the beautiful woman before him. "You didn't sneak out, did you?"

Jiang Tiantian stared at him intently and said with a smile, "No, my parents sent us."

She paused for a moment, glanced back at the empty window on the second floor that was no longer occupied, then turned back and said with a light laugh, "My parents saw that Lili looked sullen, so they asked her to come and spend the New Year with you. They were worried that it wouldn't be safe for her to travel alone, so they asked me to come with her too."

Chen Fan nodded in realization, "I see."

Then he asked, "What about your uncle and aunt?"

Jiang Tiantian smiled and said, "They're going to the factory today to celebrate the Spring Festival with the employees who are still working. They won't be home until tonight. We had a reunion dinner with you and are catching the afternoon bus back so we can have New Year's Eve dinner with them."

Chen Fan couldn't help but chuckle, "So you're celebrating both northern and southern customs together."

Unlike the northern regions where the New Year's Eve dinner is eaten in the evening, the reunion dinner in Yunhu is usually held at noon, because noon is a time for "big reunion," when children who have moved out of the family home will come back to eat and reunite with their elders.

Since both sets of parents are present, they will have two family reunion meals during the day, usually at the groom's house in the morning or at the bride's house in the afternoon or evening.

When it gets dark and people in the north start having their New Year's Eve dinner, they go back to their own homes and gather together to listen to the radio or loudspeaker to stay up late, or simply sit around playing mahjong and chatting until around 11 p.m. before starting to prepare their own family's "New Year's Eve dinner".

For more elaborate meals, a table of dishes is prepared; for simpler meals, a pot of dumplings is cooked. After eating, it's past midnight before going to sleep.

As for Jiang Heng having to have meals with employees at work, that's not a mandatory requirement, but rather a benefit offered by the factory.

At that time, the national regulations stipulated that the Spring Festival holiday would only be 3 days long, namely the first, second and third days of the lunar new year, so there would be no holiday on New Year's Eve.

Moreover, very few people even take leave to go home and prepare the New Year's Eve dinner. After all, taking leave is not in line with "making contributions." Even if it's just for show, they still have to put on an act.

Since employees "emphasize contribution," then leaders should also emphasize welfare. It is only right to hold a family reunion dinner in the canteen and distribute some welfare items.

Of course, this also depends on the organization's financial situation. Organizations with money can hold a grand celebration, while those without money can only offer verbal condolences and send a bag of welfare gifts, wishing all colleagues a happy Spring Festival.

After Jiang Tiantian finished speaking, she looked at Chen Fan's clothes and couldn't help but ask curiously, "What are you doing?"

At this moment, Jiang Lili also ran over excitedly. She almost couldn't stop in front of Chen Fan. She quickly grabbed her sister's arm to steady herself. Her face was flushed, but she could only grin and couldn't say a word.

Chen Fan couldn't help but chuckle as he looked at her.

After a two-second pause, he said, "You guys are lucky. I just slaughtered a pig for the New Year and I'm on my way to get a basket to carry it back. I'll make you a pig-killing feast later."

Upon hearing this, both sisters were filled with surprise.

Jiang Tiantian stared intently at him. "You killed a whole pig all by yourself?"

Jiang Lili looked at his clothes, then at his back, and said, "Is it over there? I'll help you pick one out."

Chen Fan gestured to walk forward and explained with a smile, "The former educated youth compound in front will be occupied by educated youth after the New Year, so I asked Captain Yang to help build a livestock shed in the back. All the animals from the former educated youth compound have been moved here. I was too lazy to go there myself, so I just slaughtered the New Year's pig there."

Jiang Lili nodded. "Yes, I've heard you mention it."

She rubbed her little hands together and smiled, "Then we're in for a treat!"

Jiang Tiantian looked at her affectionately, then at Chen Fan, and smiled, "You cooked last year's reunion dinner, and you slaughtered the New Year's pig again today, so why don't we take over the reunion dinner?"

Chen Fan raised an eyebrow and laughed, "Alright, then I'll wait to eat."

(End of this chapter)