Article and photos: DUY KHOI
Never before has homegrown cuisine continuously created a "trend" on social networks like now. After the "stormy" mangosteen chicken salad, there are royal poinciana flower salad, strawberry salad, custard apple tea and even crispy fried bougainvillea, stewed young durian with meat... Video clips flooded social networking platforms with instructions on how to prepare, cook, and enjoy, attracting hundreds of millions of views and interactions from the audience. The "fever" of Southern cuisine became intense and as one "trend" passed, another one emerged.
Strawberry salad with shrimp and meat.
Thanks to these new culinary trends, farmers benefited when the price of agricultural products, typically raw mangosteen and young custard apples, increased significantly and sold very well. Thanks to this, the specialties of the Southern garden region became known to many people, spreading to the Central region, the North, and even abroad.
Many people are also concerned that this is just a temporary trend, not sustainable... Or there is also public concern about the impact on agricultural crops in the West. But perhaps, that concern is "a bit far-fetched" when recently in the mangosteen ripening season, there are still many sellers, with large quantities and stable prices. Because such "trend-catching" times are nothing compared to the annual planting area and fruit yield of gardeners in the Southern region.
Calm down and think, the Southern region in general, the Mekong Delta in particular, is the capital of fruits and vegetables and also the "cradle" of cuisine from the flowers and leaves of the homeland. A hundred years ago, on the dining table of the Southern people, there were countless types of flowers: wild cotton, water lily, so dua cotton... and even types of leaves that seemed to be wild grass such as water chives, sarsaparilla, cold rice, burnt rice, cat loi, cassava shoots, peach shoots (peach/cashew upside down), choai shoots, trumpet coc shoots... These types of flowers and leaves were not born to be food, nor to be specialties, but all due to the exploration, discovery, and experience of people. It was not only "adaptation", or the circumstance of "heaven gives birth to elephants, heaven gives birth to grass", but also the creativity in the culinary culture of the South. Apparently, hundreds of years ago, our grandparents also knew how to "catch the trend" and passed on to their descendants skillful ways of eating such as water chives, water spinach dipped in fish sauce; lotus flowers eaten with fish sauce or sour mangrove fruit with raw fish sauce, green bananas eaten with steamed fish sauce... All of these create the delicacies of the South, a unique way of eating and enjoying cuisine.
Returning to the current culinary “trends” of young people, perhaps there is no need to worry too much if it is not offensive and does not harm health. Cuisine is a constant, borderless creativity. Who knows, thanks to that, the list of Southern culinary specialties will be supplemented with “strange yet familiar” dishes. Besides, this novelty and timeliness also creates a unique tourism product for visitors, with each season having its own food!
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