This might be a cliché, but thinking about the small, secondary kitchen on the ground level of my parents' home leads me straight
to my memories about my mother. There is a Chinese story about a man who cried whenever he was served sweet leek soup (canh hẹ),
because it reminded him of his mother who used to cook that special soup for him.
In that small, secondary kitchen on the ground floor, we had breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all cooked from scratch by my mother. The main
kitchen itself was in an annex building connected to the main residence by a covered, tiled corridor about 20 meters long. My mother did
not have any electric or gas range. She had only a raised floor of concrete where two open fires were made, pots and pans were put over a
three legged support (kiềng) made of iron or a set of three bricks. Her maid had to keep the flames alive by blowing air on them
intermittently, through a hollowed segment of bamboo tree (ống thổi lửa), or fanning them with a fan made from an
areca palm frond (quạt mo cau). Rice was our staple. There were many kinds of rice. Its taste, consistency and even its aroma
depended on its provenance. In the fifties, we still bought paddy (unhusked rice, lúa) from local farmers and had it decorticate
by our domestics using a small manual grinding mill (cối xay). In fact, that kind of organic rice, which still kept a vitamin B
rich outer layer of bran, was much more healthy than industrially processed rice that later became more and more popular. Gạo
nàng hương and Gạo nàng thơm were very sought-after domestic products, brought from the plains of
the Mekong River, in the Southern part of the country. Gạo Mỹ, imported American rice, although cheaper, was less well liked
because its blandness. We occasionally ate yams (khoai lang) and different tubercles like củ sắn (cassava) or khoai
tía ("purple yam") that we grew in our own field in the back of our house. At harvest season, after my brothers dug the beds for
the tubercles, we just boiled them and ate them without any added sugar but somehow, in their natural and fresh savor, they were so sweet
and so appetizing. However, once in while, we also had a special treat of very sweet cassava or purple yam porridge (chè sắn,
chè khoai tía).
|
