Rice and some Foochow Archaic terms

 In my younger days, my Grandmother or ngie mah would asked us to go and buy some rice. She would say, " Diak Mi", not "meh mi" i.e. buy.

Then rice would come come in Suoh derng, lang derng from the shops in Sibu...these would be similar to gantangs. The rice would be wrapped in paper bags. The tough paper bags would be made from recycled cement paper, the strongest paper found in Sibu.

一筒米 or suoh derng rice was equivalent to 6 katis of rice.

My siblings and I made a lot of paper bags from newspapers to earn a bit of pocket money.

These are 21st century kraft brown paper bags used by the Mainland Chinese to hold 1kg,2kg,3kg and 5 kg rice. Wonderful!!

But I loved listening to my ngie mah telling us stories about the ancient days when Minqing folks sold their rice by the DOU, a kind of wooden bucket measurement.

The photo from Google shows an antique rice bucket called suoh dou, measuring 6.25 kg.

It is nice to think about old days...An era has gone by and may memories remain with us..

For a big family, winter solstice or Derng Jek, would mean soaking suoh derng glutinous rice on the eve of the Winter solstice to make all those delicious glutinous rice balls coated with soy bean powder and peanut crunch and sugar. 

Nowadays we don't have to mill our rice flour using the stone grinder. We can just buy ready made, wet rice dough and make the balls immediately.....for the evening feast!!

With love and Happy Winter solstice.

(A gantang of rice, the Malaysian way of measuring rice was the equivalent of 3.5 kg of rice or 14 milk tins of rice.)