in ancient times, animal teeth were the most primitive food processing instruments. They first bite the hard shell of food with their teeth, and then chew it up. This is the original and only food processing process at that time. Later, after a long evolution, humans learned to use stones to hit the shell of food and "process" it into a more edible form. When our ancestors learned to use tools outside the body, they completed the transformation from animals to people. In the Stone Age, whether in the Paleolithic Age or the Neolithic Age, the tools used by human beings were stones available everywhere. Therefore, it can be concluded that the stone mill and mortar that have been used until modern times also originated from that long time. Primitive people held a stone in one hand and crushed the grain in it, which was the embryonic form of modern stone mill. They crushed the grain in the pit of the stone with wooden sticks, which was a trap in ancient times. What young people can't imagine now is that in the 195s and 196s, the food processing instruments and methods used in rural areas were still the remains of the Stone Age. I was born in the 194s, and I really used those food processing instruments for several years when I was young. If readers are interested, please listen to me.
let's start with the stone mill. The stone mill is used to crush grain, and its function is similar to that of the stone mill used in the northern countryside. The stone mill is a stone pillar as thick as a petrol can, which is pulled by livestock and rolled on a circular grinding plate. The grain spread on the grinding plate is processed into powder after being repeatedly crushed by the stone mill. I have also seen the scene of a peasant woman pushing a roller in the north, clutching the roller with both hands, hunching over, and struggling to turn around along the roller. Most people in the south have never seen a stone mill. Almost every family has a stone mill. The stone mill is composed of two round stones, the lower one is fixed on a wooden millstone, and the upper one is a rotating millstone, which is generally thicker than the lower one. The center of the lower fan is inlaid with an iron ring with round eyes, which is called "grinding navel", and the center of the upper fan is inlaid with a short iron column, which is called "male drill". In fact, "male drill" is equal to the axis, and "grinding navel" is the bearing. There is also a wooden stake tied to the upper fan of the grinding plate, which is commonly called "grinding force", and its function is quite the crank of the crankshaft in modern machinery. It has a round eye at the top, and with this round eye, the reciprocating motion driven by human power can be changed into the circular motion of the grinding plate. There is also a device made of tree branches, which is called "grinding load". The "grinding load" is triangular, with a wooden pin at its tip and a parallel wooden stick opposite. The hand holding the wooden stick pushes and pulls hard, and the grinding blade rotates through the pin on the "grinding load" and the round eye on the "grinding force". Because there is a rope to hang the "grinding load" on the roof beam, people who push the mill don't have to worry that the "grinding load" will fall down, just push and pull hard. When the mill is pushed, there must be a person beside to feed the mill. The person who feeds the mill keeps adding material to the grinding eye with one hand, and the other person has to pull the "grinding load" with his hand to cooperate with the person who pushes the mill to turn the mill. The ground grain is mainly wheat, and sometimes rice is ground. The speed of feeding and grinding depends on the thickness of the finished product. If you only want to grind large particles that can cook dry rice, the feeding speed will be faster. On the contrary, if you want to grind the wheat flour, you can only add less and feed slowly.
in the first few years of people's communalization, every year, two or three months before rice harvest, members' rations were all based on dozens of kilograms of wheat distributed by the team, of which barley and barley were used to grind wheat grains and cook porridge, and only wheat could be ground into flour to make handmade noodles. It is midsummer, and the farm work in the team is particularly tense. Every family is busy grinding wheat whenever it is rainy and rainy and can't work. If it doesn't rain for a long time, we'll have to work at night. Generally, men push the mill and women feed it. Often the children are put to sleep first, and the couple start grinding wheat. In order to make the grinder see clearly, an oil lamp should be lit near the grinding disc. Because the two people kept leaning forward and backward, the oil lamp was shaken to put it out. After a day's farm work, they had to pull themselves together and push and pull hard in order to get some food into the pot tomorrow. At this time, the monotonous noise made by the stone mill is more like a lullaby, which makes the people who push the mill sleepy. The most terrible thing is that they can't spare their hands to fight mosquitoes. Therefore, no matter how stuffy the room is, they have to wear trousers and tops.
The above is a common domestic stone mill, which is about 5 cm in diameter. There is also a very small and exquisite stone mill, called hand mill, also called sesame oil mill, which can be turned by one person's hand. As the name implies, that mill is specially used to process sesame oil. The Big Mac in the stone mill is the big mill in the "mill". At that time, the "mill" was equivalent to the current flour processing factory. The diameter of the big mill was more than one meter, and the upper fan of the mill had a thick horizontal stick. A donkey was blindfolded and slowly circled along the mill. It is said that farmers with better family economic conditions can grind more than 1 kilograms of flour a day and exchange it with wheat. At that time, farmers also called the flour processed by machines "foreign noodles", which is rare in rural areas. Country people can only eat pasta made of "foreign noodles" once in a while when they enter the city.
Let's talk about the stone mill and the stone mortar. The stone mortar is a pot-shaped container chiseled with a block stone. In our place, there is a common name called "shoving mortar". Put the brown rice with rice husk peeled into the stone mortar and pound it repeatedly with a short stick called a pestle. A layer of skin wrapped around the rice will be pounded into rice bran, and the brown rice will be processed into polished rice. There is also a common name for "pestle", which is called "mortar bar". The "mortar bar" is a short and thick wooden stick with iron teeth at its top. I'm afraid it has a history of thousands of years to pestle rice by hand, and its efficiency is extremely low. Later, people invented a pedal device, which is called "treading", so the stone mortar is also called "squatting". "Treadmill" is like a seesaw played by children in kindergarten. A tree segment is supported by a bracket in the middle, and a pestle is installed at one end of the mortar. In order to increase the weight, a round stone is tied to this end. Step down the other end of the wooden bar with your feet, and the end with the pestle will be lifted high. When it falls, the pestle will hit the stone mortar buried in the ground heavily. Because it uses the anti-lever principle, the distance between this end of the pedal and the bracket is short, and it is very laborious to step on it, but as long as you step down a little distance, the end with the pestle will be raised high. When stepping on the cymbals, there is another person squatting on the ground to stir the cymbals. That person will reach into the cymbals and turn them over at the moment when the cymbals and pestles are lifted, and at the same time, he will use the broom in the other hand to sweep the spilled rice into the cymbals. Sometimes, there will be a few free-range chickens around, and if no one is watching, they will scramble for food crazily. "Tanchi" is a public facility, which is generally supported in the open air and shared by dozens of families, somewhat similar to the public wells in the northern rural areas.
rice can also be pestled into rice by directly putting it in a stone mortar, but it is too time-consuming and laborious. Most of them are to shell the rice and process it into brown rice first, and then use a mortar for further processing. There is a device specially used for rice hulling called Nong (with the same pronunciation, this little-used word has not been found). The shape of Nong is like a stone mill, and it is also an upper piece and a lower piece, which is thicker than the stone mill. It is a bit strange that it is not stony. It is said that Nong is rammed with a kind of sandy clay north of the Yellow River and surrounded by several strong bamboo hoops. In order to increase the coefficient of friction, there are many vertical pieces in it, and the pieces exposed on the soil surface are grinding teeth. The operation is similar to pulling mill, so it is called pulling "getting". There is also a person who is constantly adding rice to it. Not every farmer has a "lane" in his home. In Zhuangzi, only one family runs a "lane workshop", and it is necessary to pay by quantity to process rice there, and most of them are given some rice. When I was a child, I used to help my father pull through the lane. I remember that it was dusty and choking, and the noise of the lane was particularly loud. When talking to people, I had to shout at each other to hear it.
In the 196s, rice mills driven by machines were gradually popularized in rural areas, and "Nongfang" gradually declined, and all of them closed down in a few years. Later, there were grinding machines, and the stone mills handed down from several generations in farmers' homes were also moved to the river to make water docks.
After the reform and opening up, the output of rice has increased exponentially. Farmers who got rich first have set up many large-scale rice factories, and rice trucks have continuously sent our "rice from northern Jiangsu" to large and medium-sized cities such as Shanghai and Hangzhou. The grain processing machinery equipped in the rice mill is all the most advanced equipment with a total price of millions. Even a few grains of yellow rice can be removed by a device called "color selection".
History has turned a big bend in the lifetime of our generation. We have witnessed many scenery before and after this bend and feel extremely lucky.