take a wife to support the family

Chapter 98

Making clothes is a big job. Every woman in the country can sew a few stitches, but not everyone can make clothes.

Before getting married, the eldest girl often downsized her parents' old clothes for her brothers and sisters to wear. She is proficient in needlework, and a large part of Lily's skills in mending clothes comes from her memory.

Sister-in-law Jin has already helped to cut the material, and the rest is easy to mend.

There is a three-inch wide edge on each piece of clothing, which is convenient for future size changes.Lily puts the two sleeves together first, and sews them into a tube shape. Both ends of the sleeve are open, and cotton is wadding on the side with stitches.

Cotton wadding is very particular about technique. First tear off a small ball of cotton wadding, adjust the shape and size by hand, press it into a thin piece, stick it on the sleeve, and then connect the next piece next to it.

The cotton cloth used to make the sleeves has the ability to absorb the cotton wool. Coupled with the friction between the fibers of the cotton wool, the cotton sticks firmly to the sleeve. As long as it is not shaken vigorously, the cotton wool will not shift.

After the sleeves are evenly and thickly covered with cotton wool, another layer of shorter sleeves is put on the outside, and one end of the sleeves is grasped, and the sleeves are carefully turned inside out, so that all the cotton wool is hidden in the sleeves.

Slightly adjust the position of the cotton batting by hand, then seal the wrist end, and save the end that meets the shoulder for future processing, and a sleeve is ready.

After all the parts of the clothes are sewn, the lines similar to the car stitches are sewn with needles and threads to prevent the cotton from running and misaligning, and it is a brand new and warm clothes.

For Song Haonian, he made a pair of black cotton trousers and a green cotton padded jacket. The clothes of a man's family are easy to wear and tear on the elbows and knees. Lily specially added some pieces of fabric to these two places. Strong and warm.

Her own is a water-red cotton-padded jacket with lotus branches, a small flower lining, and a pair of blue cloth trousers. She is afraid that she will dirty her clothes from working in the kitchen every day, so Lily sewed a blue overall for herself, planning to wear it when she is doing work. outside.

Lamei got a bright red jacket, embroidered with a few delicate yellow wintersweet flowers, which fit her name, and the trousers were also made of blue cloth, filled with thick cotton, which was light and warm.

The sun was warm, and Lily spread out the felt blanket under the eaves, and the fabric, cotton, needles and threads were all piled up on it. She fiddled with the cotton for a while, sweating on her forehead, she couldn't help laughing: "It's a nice day."

Lamei was helping to sew the buttons, rolled the cotton cloth into thin strips and sewed them up, and then bent them into various patterns to fix them, leaving a hole for each section, and a knot at one end for the other, which happened to be a pair.

One-character buckle is the simplest, it is commonly used on men’s clothes, but there are many patterns on women’s clothes, such as eight-character buckle, pipa buckle, butterfly buckle... Lily prefers pipa buckle. On the clothes, he was sweating profusely and buttoning butterfly buttons.

Butterflies are troublesome to buckle and coil. You have to poke several needles on a wooden board, then coil them with strips of cloth, and finally sew them up. Hearing Lily said that the weather is good, Lamei said: "The sun is too big, and my back hurts. Go hide in the house."

"It's cold in the room, don't take off your clothes, lest you freeze."

"I know!" Lamei was exposed to the sun for a long time, and when she entered the room, she felt her eyes were all black. After getting used to it for a while, she finally saw things again. She pulled a small stool to sit at the door, and continued to unbutton her clothes.

It takes at least two or three days to sew a suit of clothes, and this is the case when Lily has Lamei to help cook and doesn't care about anything else.It took Lily ten days to sew a suit of clothes for Song Haonian, herself and her sister.

Lily thought carefully, and then sewed the clothes with cloth strips of the same color, embroidered a few flowers on the skirt, and made some small items such as gloves and socks, and a month passed.

Cotton shoes are also important in winter. Cloth shoes with thousand-ply soles are extremely laborious to make. You have to use an awl to pierce dozens of layers of fabric glued together with paste, and the thick needle can pass through with the hemp rope.

Lamei also knows how to wear layered soles. Lily bought her a new shiny silver thimble and asked her to make her own soles: "Make more of what you want to wear, so you won't suffer in the future."

Mrs. Zhu didn't deliberately teach the daughters. Lily is the eldest in the family, so in order to take care of her sisters and brothers, she knows more.Lamei grew up completely ignorant, and Zhu did whatever she was asked to do. She never systematically learned how to live at home. After following Lily these days, she realized that she knew too little and still had a lot to learn.

Make a layered sole, then use thick cotton cloth to padded the vamp, sew the vamp and the sole firmly together, and put a wooden shoe tree inside, so that you can wear it in a few days.

As soon as December entered, people in the town began to kill the New Year pigs one after another.

A black pig that has been in captivity for a year is tied up and hung upside down on a wooden board. The trachea and blood vessels next to the throat are cut open with a knife. The hot blood is stored in a large basin. Then the whole pig is thrown into boiling water to scald. Stone" hair loss.

Then the belly was disembowelled, the internal organs were taken out and washed, and the pork was cut up one by one, and processed according to different parts.

During the past few days of slaughtering pigs, Lamei didn't dare to go out - she was afraid of the shrill sound of killing pigs when she hit her child, and she wanted to hide in her elder sister's arms when she heard it.

Song Dagui is the best butcher in the town, he is invited to kill pigs every day, and the reward is a pair of meat or a front leg, his family has no shortage of meat to eat, remembering how many of his brothers did not raise pigs, he called him Song Ermei went door-to-door to give away, and Lily got a pork leg, a piece of pork belly with skin, and a pot of blood buns.

Mix flour, scallions and salt into the steaming pig's blood, stir well, and steam it directly in the basket. After two quarters of an hour, the blood will solidify into dark red, and the surface is covered with dense pores, like a honeycomb.

The blood steamed buns are eaten while they are hot, they are soft and tough, without any smell of blood, but have a special fragrance.It hardens after being cooled, and when you want to eat it, you can fry it with kidney or pork liver. It is crispy, fragrant and chewy.

Sprinkle fresh pork with salt and hang it on the kitchen stove to smoke for half a month, and then it becomes a smoked bacon that is not greasy or firewood. Some people also use minced meat to stuff sausages.

Although Lily's family doesn't raise pigs, she also bought twenty strips of pork with skin on. There were still unplucked hairs on the skin. She burned them with fire and plucked them with her hands.

Hang a long bamboo pole on the roof of the kitchen, hang both ends on the earth wall, and then hang pork one by one with hemp rope.

There are a lot of firewood in the countryside, and the smoke will slowly smoke through these meat strips.In order to make the bacon taste better, Lily went to Xiaodonggou to cut some cypress branches, and smoked the meat with cypress branches to have a special aroma.

At this time, the weather is so cold that splashing water turns into ice, and the meat can be stored for a month or two if you hang it in a place where the sun does not shine, and the smoked meat can be stored for a longer period of time.

Lamei looked at the piles of meat in the room in surprise: "Sister, I've never seen so much meat!" The eldest sister was beyond her expectation every time, and Lamei was also very supportive, surprised and pleasantly surprised every time.

Lily clapped her hands: "In addition to these bacon, there are also smoked sausages."

Pig butchers, not every family has the patience to clean pig intestines, so Lily bought some and washed them with well water outside the house several times to wash all the dirt inside into the vegetable field before taking it into the yard. .

Lamei knew that her elder sister loved to be clean, so she also disliked these things, pinching her nose and saying, "This thing is so dirty, why don't you want it?"

Lily said: "If you clean it, you won't feel dirty when you eat it."

First rinse with warm water a dozen times, then turn the large intestine over, add flour and rub it inch by inch, rub off all the mucous membrane, grease and other debris inside the intestinal wall, and rinse again.

Repeat many times until the casing is completely clean and there is no peculiar smell at all, it is considered to be an end.Because Lily loves to be clean, the two sisters deliberately washed it several times and checked it carefully until they were completely at ease.

The washed casings are dried until there are no water droplets on the surface, and then the meat filling can be filled.

Filling the sausage requires dozens of catties of fresh meat. Lily and Lamei took turns chopping it up with a kitchen knife. Both of them were so tired that their hands ached and their waists hurt. Thinking of the delicious sausage, they were both full of energy.

Fresh meat stuffing is seasoned with autumn oil, salt, sugar, wine, ginger powder, pepper powder, etc., marinated for a day, and a seven or eight-foot-long casing is selected, and one end is tied tightly with hemp rope, and then the meat stuffing is stuffed into it. While stuffing the stuffing, stroke the tail with your hands, making sure the stuffing is tight and compacted.

After stuffing it half a foot long, it was tied tightly with hemp rope, and then another section was poured.This section of casing is completely filled, and the other end can be tied. The casing still contains air. Lily tied the thin needles used for sewing clothes to the wood chips and tied them in a row. There are no gaps between the fat and lean meat fillings.

After the sausages are stuffed, they cannot be exposed to the sun, so as not to change their color and taste. They are hung on the moso bamboo on the top of the kitchen like bacon for smoking.

Every once in a while, Lily has to refine some lard and oil residue to eat. At such a time, every household in the town smells of meat and oil, so she naturally refines a lot.

After finishing a day’s work, put a pot of noodles, put some cabbage leaves in it, stir-fry with leeks and lard residue, add water, autumn oil, and vinegar to make an oil-and-vinegar soup, take out the noodles and pour the soup, which is local It is called oil and vinegar noodles, and it is a delicate food.

The freshly ground flour and the noodles kneaded by yourself are fresh and chewy, and the rich aroma of wheat fills the mouth.The lard dregs are fat and thin, the lean meat dregs are dry and chewy, the fat meat dregs are soft and sweet, and the noodle soup is hot and fragrant. It is very comfortable to eat a bowl in winter.

"It's getting dark early today..." While eating, Lamei realized that the light was getting dark, so she could only rely on the fire in the stove for illumination.

Lily's heart skipped a beat, and she hurriedly looked outside, and sure enough, the sky outside was dark, and the north wind was also swirling, blowing the torn tissue paper stuck on the window sills.

"It's going to snow." Lily murmured, feeling very worried.

Sure enough, within half an hour, the snow began to fall from the sky, and within a quarter of an hour, the ground was completely white. The two sisters could already feel the soles of their shoes slipping on the snow during the few steps they walked from the kitchen to the bedroom. .

It was snowing heavily, but the people who went out to sell mountain goods were still outside...

(End of this chapter)