First of all, cooking tools have changed from a single earthen stove to a gas stove and various electrical appliances. My home is in the countryside. In the past, I used to cook with an earthen stove, like this:
Now only relatives come to use the stove, because cooking with the stove is heavy and powerful, and it is suitable for many people to eat. However, when there are few people in the family, cooking is usually done with gas stoves, and it is not convenient to lay natural gas pipelines in rural areas. Therefore, it is basically gas, and cooking with a rice cooker saves time and effort, and the cooked rice is fragrant.
In addition to rice cookers, there are also small household appliances such as ovens, microwave ovens, conditioners and soymilk machines, which can be said to greatly facilitate our lives. My grandmother is in poor health. If she cooks in the old way, she will be exhausted from cooking a meal. But with these appliances, it is easy for the elderly to cook.
Then talk about cooking methods. According to my mother, when they were young, oil was very precious. Before cooking, they dip a cloth in oil, wipe it clean in the pan, and then pour the food into the frying pan. You can imagine the taste of food, but even so, they still can't afford oil. . . And salt. When my mother was young, salt was not as thin as flour now, but large and coarse particles. Add salt when cooking, or it won't melt, instead of adding salt first and then cooking. If the food is weak, it can be eaten anyway, and no amount of salt can melt it.
Life used to be hard, and frugality was not a virtue, but a necessity. Therefore, the older generation formed the habit of "unwilling to give up", unwilling to eat food, unwilling to wear clothes and unwilling to throw useless things. The old woman who lives in front of my house, her son is very kind to her and buys everything for her, but she still lives the way she lived decades ago. A dish should be eaten repeatedly for several days, and then cooked when it tastes good. Her son throws a bunch of dishes for her every time he comes. . .
Over the past decades, our life has undergone earth-shaking changes, as can be seen from the changes in the kitchen. Sometimes I feel that I am listening to a story when I listen to people from the previous generation talking about their hard life as a child, but those things really existed, just a few decades ago. We are fortunate to be born in an era of peace and prosperity, and we should know how to cherish it.