As long as I can remember, I knew that rice that people eat has to go through four or five processes, such as hulling, hulling or milling, before it can become edible rice.
There are similarities between Xi and Shi Mo, but there are also great differences. Both the upper plate and the lower plate; The central hole of that upper plate buckle the small shaft in the center of the chassis and rotate around the axis of the chassis; They are all pushed around with the word' d'. The difference is that chestnut slices are used as teeth, and chestnut slices are fixed with yellow glue. I don't know what the yellow mud is attached to. It's as hard as stone and hard to wear. Both discs are wrapped in wooden boards and tied with wooden strips. The valley fell on the upper wall and a small hole flowed into the surface. The lower plate is surrounded by regular hexagonal wooden grooves (shells), and husked brown rice and chaff are scattered in the hexagonal shells; Put a grain basket below, aim at the rice bowl, and put brown rice.
Cushioning is relatively easy, and old people and children can push it. When the grain is rubbed and crushed by two groups of relatively dense wood teeth, the grain must be shelled and rolled out of brown rice. This is the first process of rice processing. When I was seven or eight years old, I often gave my grandmother a hand and stood by and pushed it with one hand. It was also very fun. Generally, only half a basket or a basket of grain is harvested, which is the amount of rice that can be harvested in dozens of minutes at home.
Milled rice is mixed with chaff and must be sieved with rice. This process is not very heavy manual labor, but it takes time. My family was basically completed by my grandmother. Two benches put a belly basket (bigger and deeper than a dustpan). Grandma sits on the belly basket, with rice and shells on the right and empty shells on the left. Scoop two spoonfuls of rice into the sieve and shake the rice sieve. Not to mention, grandma's sieve is really beautiful. Hands are coordinated with the waist, and the movements are gentle. I saw rice grains scattered in the belly basket like rain, and the chaff was sifting.
After screening out brown rice, rice comes next. There are many cockroaches in the village. There are three cockroaches in my small village of four. Clever ancestors used the principle of stem to put a stone with a mouth of 30 kilograms on a board five feet long, wide and thick, and let the old, weak, women and children step on it with their feet. So the work of pounding rice is naturally done by grandmothers who do housework. Grandmothers stepped on one end of the pheasant with their little feet and turned over the rice with long bamboo sticks in their hands. Four or five seconds (one second for young adults), you can harvest 70 to 80 kilograms of rice in one morning, and a family of five or six will have four or five days. At that time, farmers were thrifty and didn't have the habit of eating black rice. They usually ate rice. Or vegetables, or radishes, or pumpkins, or sweet potatoes, in short, what is on the market, what kind of rice, one liter of rice a day is enough. A few days later, I did the work over and over again. There are always some children at home, and sometimes they can help. I like to help my grandmother cook, as if it were a game. The sweet voice of "eyah-hua" immediately attracted a few friends to flock.
There is a mill in the big village a mile away. Sometimes, my mother plows a load of grain for rice milling, and at the end of the year, she plows two loads of grain for rice milling (making rice cakes or boiling sugar). Although rice milling saves time and effort, after all, it's a long way and it's not convenient to pick cows and petunias. Therefore, a small amount of rice is more worry-free.
It is a great leap from cymbals to grinding, and it has a sense of science and technology.
Grinding is to make a large and round stone groove ring with a section of grooved stone, with a diameter of about seven meters (by impression). Two large stone rollers (about two feet in diameter) are combined into a roller frame, which is a bit like a bicycle. A wide wooden board about ten feet long is installed in the center of the inner side of the grinding frame, and a round hole is sleeved on the central shaft of the grinding groove ring at the other end of the wooden board. Cattle drive the axle wood on the outside of the grinding frame, and make circles repeatedly on the original track in the grinding groove (the radius is unchanged). Smart ancestors applied the mathematical principle of circle to rice milling, which is amazing!
Mother put me on the mill and sat side by side. Wide roller frame (slightly curved), five feet long, made of big trees, and the supporting feet of the mound are also made of generous hard boards, which are very solid and stable. Cows walk one step at a time, but it is not easy to cook rice too fast. Riding a mill is fun. It's like riding a car. Very comfortable, and very lively, with a pleasant squeak. My mother sometimes comes down and pushes the stirring tank with a shoulder pole to turn the rice. You can grind one trough of rice (one load of rice) in an hour and two troughs of rice in half a day. When the meal is cooked, grind it out with a special shovel.
When you get home, you have to fan out the rice bran with a windmill. Some people want to use a sieve (smaller than the mesh of the rice sieve) to screen out the rice in the fan, and the fine rice can be ground into flour to make cakes.
Until the early 1970s, the enterprise group of the brigade bought a diesel engine and a mechanical rice bucket, and sent two young people to the county for short-term study. Soon began to process rice for the whole brigade in the rice machine room, and the traditional rice processing method was completely eliminated.
In the era of collective production, with rice machine, it really saves trouble. A truckload of grain will be ready in a few minutes. Just fan it a little in the windmill and it will be clean white rice. However, this kind of diesel engine is difficult to start in winter, and it needs several powerful people to shake it for a while. Women really can't shake it.
After another 30 years, in the early 1920s, there was an electric rice mill in the village. It starts when you press the button, and you don't have to shake it with your hands anymore. In addition, it is equipped with a mill to facilitate eating.
In recent years, the village has become rich (there is a battlefield) and spent more than 10 thousand to buy a new type of special motorized rice mill. This is a smart motor (I don't know how many generations). It's perfect.
First of all, the bucket is low and the ruler is high. Old people and women can fall into the bucket. The two square column tubes are internally provided with conveying bucket belts, and the grains are sent to the hulling chamber for hulling; Shells enter the crushing chamber to become powder chaff; The leaked grain enters the grain hopper after being blocked by the rice screen; The powder chaff of machine-made rice is also sent to the chaff pipeline. Machine-made rice is clean and need not be fanned any more.
The rice cookers in our village are white and clean, and the chaff is as fine as powder, which is deeply loved by the masses. Even people from Ma 'an Administrative Village come to this rice machine.
What I record here is a rice culture, which has changed a little in the past 60 years. Although it has long been nothing to advanced countries, are we still complacent? Because we have always been a very traditional and conservative country, our people's understanding is just like that. With this progress, we will be satisfied.