Chinese Version
05-08-2018

A few days ago, my little uncle and little aunt who were in charge of the kitchen were away from home. My cousin Xiaohua and I were serving two old men: my father, my uncle, and her father. While cooking double cooked pork belly, Xiaohua didn’t see the bean paste, so we searched for bean paste up and down in an unfamiliar kitchen. This unique experience reminds me of my mother’s homemade bean paste and the trivial process of making bean paste.

In the 1970s, when my mother, who paid great attention to food hygiene, heard that the process of making bean paste in Zigong was not clean, she decided to make her own bean paste at home. Looking back, I thought that paying attention to small details like food hygiene was one of my mother’s way of respecting life.

Because our nanny Yeyi was very capable, my mother’s small plan to improve our food hygiene was always well-executed. When I was in elementary school, I followed Yeyi to go through every step of making bean paste. I still remember the details of making bean paste vividly today.

Our bean paste was fermented from dried fava beans after many steps.

1. Preparing the fava beans

Each dried fava bean needs to be handled twice to become the raw material of bean paste. The first time is cutting a dried fava bean into two pieces with a small sharp and heavy chopper machete. The second time is peeling off the skin on the fava bean by hand. Cutting dried fava beans was a technical job, which could only be done by Yeyi; Peeling off the cut fava bean was cumbersome.

Both my brother and I had a quota of peeled and cut fava beans each day for about a week. Peeling dried fava bean always hurt my fingers, so I didn’t like peeling them at all.

2. Preparing the moldy fava beans

When all the dried fava beans were peeled and softened by soaking them in water, Yeyi would take us to the hillside of MaoJiaBa to cut the five-leaves chaste branches home. Yeyi steam cooked the softened fava beans, put them on the bamboo dustpan, and then covered them with the chaste leaves. In a few days later, the cooked and peeled half fava beans under the chaste leaves grew fragrant yellow mold (after four or five days).

I liked the smell of the moldy fava beans, so I went to smell the fava beans in the bamboo dustpan every day.

3. Pickled bean paste

While the fava beans were becoming moldy, Yeyi would buy a few kilograms of fresh small and spicy red pepper, wash them, dry them, and then chopped them into rice grain size. When a layer of yellow mold covered the fava beans on the bamboo dustpan, Yeyi mixed the chopped red pepper and salt into the moldy fava beans, then put the mixed moldy gourd beans into a ceramic jar and sealed them for a period of time. Then the homemade high quality tasty fava bean paste was ready to use.

Little Episodes

1. 2018-05-21, Grain Full, one of 24 solar terms in Lunar calendar.
【Rainy Day】Today is Grain Full, the leaves full of rain droplets are saying, “It’s raining hard.” Chaste leaves are used to cover the cooked peeled half fava beans to induce mold.

2. Fava beans. From top to bottom, left to right: peeled half fava beans, dry whole fava beans with skin, just harvested fresh fava beans with green shells.