The Lady's Sickly Husband

C116. Vinegar

Soon, it was warm spring, and the construction of the factories of soy sauce and vinegar had completed.

In fact, she didn't have to work hard for money. As early as the first month passed, Ning Shaoqing had given her a note of five hundred thousand taels. As to finding a doctor and effective medicine, she had also been told and didn't need to worry anymore.

Now, free from those concerns, her passion for the factories of soy sauce and vinegar no longer lied in making money but in establishing a career as well as in the love for food.

Although the dishes she made by herself were already the supreme cuisines in Ning Shaoqing's eyes, she just couldn't be cheered up or satisfied with the flavor when the dishes lacked soy sauce or vinegar.

In modern times, Mo Qianxue's trade company was an agent of several brands of soy sauce and vinegar. She had personally visited the factories of these brands and participated in the production process, with which, of course, she was quite familiar.

The brewing of vinegar was faster than that of soy sauce, taking merely twenty to thirty days to roll off the production line. Certainly, the longer the brewing, the better the taste.

The vinegar that undergoing twenty to thirty days of brewing would be of the lowest quality. It contained the proper flavor, which, however, was insufficient in both fragrance and aftertaste.

The raw material of vinegar was high quality glutinous rice with auxiliary material of bran rice husk, salt and sugar. The finer ingredients also included wine cube made of bran rice and wheat.

First, steam the soaked glutinous rice, put into wine cube which would ferment bran rice husk followed by the process of vinegar fermentation, then add salt for further fermentation, and at last, through pouring and stir-frying, the finished product was made.

The steps looked simple in words but complicated in actual operation.

First, when soaking glutinous rice, the standard would be meet until each grain of the rice wasn't white in the center. Usually, it took twenty-four hours in winter, fifteen hours in summer and eighteen to twenty hours in spring and autumn.

Then take the rice out and put into a woven bamboo basket for repeated rinse. When the rice was dry, steam it again to the full. It mustn't be overcooked, sticky, or half-cooked before showing with cold water to cool it down to 30 °C in winter and 25 °C in summer. Then, mix evenly with wine to put in a V-shaped cylinder sealed with a grass cover for the prevention from pollution and for thermal preservation...

Because in ancient times, the poor conditions and lacking of proficient workers, at first Mo Qianxue's instruction couldn't be understood since there were too many terminologies.

Therefore, in the end, Mo Qianxue personally demonstrated each step and then supervised the workers doing the same while constantly instructing during the process. The measurement of temperature and temperature different was technical work, and without a thermometer, she only had to take the temperature by hand.

Hence, for most of the time during the vinegar production, Mo Qianxue stayed all day long in the factory.

Since she wasn't home, Tong Zijing moved back to the Tong mansion so that he could visit Mo Qianxue at the factory whenever he'd like to.

More importantly, intentionally or unintentionally, Ning Shaoqing had mentioned to Ji Xuyao that if the Ji family wanted to rise, he must wait until Tong Zijing took power, which could only start when Tong Zijing went back to the Tong mansion and got ready to take over the management of Tong's affairs.

Certainly, Ji Xuyao understood this, so he taught Tong Zijing that if he wanted real freedom and to protect the one he wanted to protect, then he must obtain real power with figuring out the power structure of Tong family as a start so as to gradually devour all of the power. Naturally, old Mr. Tong was overjoyed. Although Tong Zijing didn't talk with him, as long as he stayed in and hung around in the mansion, old Tong felt satisfied and relieved.