Wild vegetable field in Vietnam, take the opportunity to pick a handful of wild vegetables, hook a few dozen crabs to cook a delicious bowl of soup

Now every time I return to my hometown and see the houses, ponds, rivers, and fields, I feel a sadness rising in my heart at the change.

Not because of natural changes such as the tree canopy becoming wider, the house becoming more ancient, the flowers in the garden becoming more colorful... but because of devastation caused by human destruction.

Just half a century ago, every evening the whole village was bustling with the sound of birds gathering in their nests. Just like in the morning when we woke up, every garden and along the banks of the pond was filled with the sound of birds.

Then the seasons of locusts flying all over the fields, then the harvest nights, the water bugs seeing the lights flying back in droves on the porch, then the first rainy nights of summer, frogs croaking like drums all over the fields near and far, tilapia in the water in rows longer than the cars at rush hour in Hanoi, then somewhere along the edge of the lagoon wafting the fragrant scent of civets...

And after every rain, wild plants on river mounds, field mounds, around the banks of marshes, ponds, along the roadsides, in the corners of gardens, along the walls of houses... grow wildly. There are dreams where I see plants growing and covering me and birds and insects landing on me.

But in just a few years, the magnificent and splendid nature in which I lived has left me. I have nightmares again, lying on hot rocks and the sky above me is like an unplastered ceiling. In my grief for that world of chlorophyll and animals and insects, I remember the wild vegetable seasons of my village.

Every time I think back to the nature of those distant years, I see around me growing lushly and filled with emotion are sweet potato leaves, bean leaves, malabar spinach, vông leaves, strawberry leaves, fig leaves, bong cach, bay leaves, guava buds, bamboo shoots, chili leaves, purslane, spinach, water spinach, watercress, sour tamarind, wild wormwood, mugwort, white Vietnamese coriander, red Vietnamese coriander, white jasmine, coin leaves, young rice buds, young rice shells, banana stems, banana roots, banana flowers, papaya pulp, water spinach, potato leaves, squash tops, young squash leaves, squash buds, squash tips, young squash leaves, ginseng, spotted potato stems, cassava leaves, mugwort, figs, turmeric leaves, galangal leaves, lotus roots, lotus shoots, lotus stems, lotus buds...

Sweet potato shoots.

All I have just mentioned are the things I used to eat during my childhood years when I lived in my village that I still remember now. Usually, on the working day, the farmers would take a break to pick a handful of wild vegetables and catch a few dozen crabs, and at noon they would have a delicious bowl of soup.

Whenever someone in the family had trouble sleeping, my mother would pick and crush the leaves of the vông tree and cook them with mussels or crabs. The vông leaves are rich and sweet. Vông leaf soup, like mulberry leaf soup, is truly a sedative. Everyone knows about the mulberry tree, but not many people know about the vông tree.

The vông tree is a rather large tree. The vông fruit is like a rice fruit but larger and longer. Some places also call it the cotton tree because when the fruit is ripe, the four segments of the shell split like a rice fruit and inside is enough for a tight handful of cotton. When the wind blows, the vông tree's cotton flies all over the village.

One of the vegetables that goes very well with crab soup is Malabar spinach. Malabar spinach grows in the fields in flooded rice fields.

The shape of the Malabar spinach plant is similar to the tamarind tree. The deeper the water in the field, the longer the Malabar spinach grows. Wash the Malabar spinach, cut it into two finger-length pieces, dip it in soy sauce and eat it with crab soup cooked with fermented rice. You can eat a whole basket of vegetables without getting bored. My village grows a lot of vông trees, so the women often use the flowers of the trees to stuff pillows.

In every village there are wild fig trees. Birds eat ripe figs and excrete them. In the excrement there are still fig seeds, so young fig trees grow. Figs love water so they often grow near ponds and marshes.

Figs are often used for salting, boiling, and stewing fish. The men in the village pick fig leaves when eating salad. But when women give birth, their families pick and blanch fig leaves for them to eat to produce milk. When sows give birth and lack milk, people also pick fig leaves for the pigs to eat. There are sticky figs and regular figs. Sticky figs are softer and sweeter.

I recently watched a documentary made by CBS about fig trees in Africa and they call the fig the queen of the forest. The children in my village often wander around the banks of ponds and marshes looking for ripe figs.

Whenever you hear a lot of starlings calling in a direction, go to that direction because there are ripe figs. The starlings are the ones who let the children know that guavas, figs and some other fruits have started to ripen.

We picked figs and split them in half, blew out the mosquitoes inside, and ate them. At that time, no one could explain to us why figs were so sealed that mosquitoes could get in and live inside them. Only later, when I watched a science fiction movie, did I understand.

There is a fruit that looks like a fig, it is the Ngải fruit. Very few people know how to eat Ngải fruit because it is astringent and has a lot of sap. My grandmother used to pick Ngải leaves to ferment when making soy sauce. I have eaten Ngải fruit that my father cooked with soft-shelled turtle.

In the past, soft-shell turtles were abundant in ponds and marshes for many years. Occasionally, people caught soft-shell turtles when they came up to lay eggs on the banks of ponds and marshes. Nowadays, even divination cannot find soft-shell turtles in the countryside. Ngải fruit is also stewed with loach, eel or catfish.

Every time he cooked the Ngai fruit, my father would take the Ngai fruit from the previous afternoon, split it in half, and soak it in rice water to remove the resin. Figs can be eaten raw, but no one can eat raw Ngai fruit. However, when cooked with soft-shell turtle or stewed with loach or eel, the delicious taste of Ngai fruit is unmatched by any other type of fig.

In the past, in the pond in my village, there was a raft of white and red coriander. The white coriander was eaten raw and used to make fish soup with fermented rice. But the red coriander was boiled by my grandmother and squeezed out to make soy sauce. Nowadays, I don't see any red coriander. For a long time, my villagers have not seen anyone raising rafts of red or white coriander in the pond.

Water lily.

The hedges of Chinese clematis have almost disappeared in the countryside. Chinese clematis is a folk medicine that is used a lot by the villagers. When people have a cold, they pound the Chinese clematis tops and mix them with kerosene to treat the wind. Some people stir-fry the Chinese clematis tops until they are very hot to treat the wind for the sick person. In the pot of water for steaming people with colds, there must always be a handful of Chinese clematis.

If I had a headache, I would pick a handful of Chinese clematis and place it on my forehead, tie it tightly with a towel, and then go to work and sleep. Back then, there was no Western medicine like there is now. But I think that treating illnesses with traditional herbs like this will never cause side effects like when we use too much Western medicine.

In addition to being used as a folk medicine, Chinese knotweed is also a dish. When stewing fish, my grandmother often put a handful of Chinese knotweed at the bottom of the pot. Chinese knotweed removes the fishy smell and adds flavor to the stewed fish.

Sometimes, my grandmother picked the boiled Chinese knotweed and squeezed out the soy sauce. The men in my village would eat carp or crucian carp salad with a handful of Chinese knotweed tops. And especially, dog sausage without Chinese knotweed and guava leaves would not be as delicious as a dog sausage that you must try at least once in your life.

I asked many of my friends if they had ever eaten stir-fried papaya pulp, and almost everyone shook their heads. But I ate it regularly when I was in the village. When an old papaya tree stopped bearing fruit or encountered a male papaya tree that had difficulty bearing fruit and the fruit was very small and tasteless, my mother would cut down that papaya tree.

My mother peeled off the outer skin to get the inner part of the tree, chopped it, soaked it in salt water, washed it and dried it, then wrapped it in dried banana leaves and put it in a small pot hanging on the kitchen shelf. When eating, she put the dried papaya pulp in rice water to soften it, washed it and then stir-fried it with fat or chicken or duck giblets. The papaya pulp prepared like this is crispy, delicious and unlike anything else.

In many traditional Vietnamese villages, kapok trees are planted. My village has two rows of ancient kapok trees on both sides of the road from the main gate to the village entrance. During the flowering season, from afar it looks like there is a big fire in the sky. It is also the festival of starlings from the peaceful limestone mountains flying back to suck nectar from the kapok flowers.

We kids spent all day lounging under the kapok trees. We used a strong piece of bamboo to throw hard at the kapok tree to make the kapok buds fall down. The kapok buds are the kapok flower buds. The kapok buds are delicious. But the young kapok fruits are a delicacy.

We can eat our fill of rice. The young rice is crispy, sweet and a little sticky. Adults dip the young rice in salt and chili to drink wine. The young rice is chopped very small and mixed with roasted red shrimp and sesame to make a salad that even big restaurants today cannot have. But the young rice is stir-fried with buffalo meat and Vietnamese coriander, my friend, it is strangely delicious.

Those dishes were really delicious, not because of hunger that day. Just like many rustic dishes from the countryside that have now entered a prominent position on the menus of big restaurants in the city.

Mixed vegetables.

Like young rice fruit, young gáo fruit is also often used as a salad vegetable. Young gáo fruit is crunchy and has a sour taste mixed with a sweet aftertaste.

My village has three large ponds. And in those ponds grows a whole world of water lilies, water chestnuts and lotuses. After one or two rains in early summer, water lilies grow like a dense forest on the surface of the ponds. I think water lilies are related to lotus plants, but lotus buds are called "co" while water lily buds are called "cu" (water chestnut buds). Our ancestors were truly great linguists.

But later language researchers did not find anyone studying the origin of the names of many plants, animals, insects, and objects. During the water lily season, we went to pick water lily shoots. The bundles of water lily shoots were long, white-green, and so young that they would break if gently bent.

Water lily buds are used for dipping in soy sauce or cooking with mussel and crab soup. But cooking with crab soup that is so delicious that everyone who eats it has to rank it among the best soups must be cooked with water lily buds. When the water lily buds have just sprouted, pick them and cook them with crab soup.

When cooking lotus buds, people split them in half and drop them into the pot of soup. Just let it boil vigorously. Crab soup cooked with lotus buds seems sweeter than cooked with other vegetables. Because when eating raw lotus buds with soy sauce, they are crispy and very sweet.

There is a flower bud that I am not sure what kind it is. I only heard my grandmother say that it is a water fern bud. Water fern bud looks like water hyacinth bud or also known as water hyacinth. Water fern bud usually lives in ponds or ditches.

My grandmother often picked water hyacinth buds to boil. They were very sweet, although a little itchy. Perhaps they were a type of water hyacinth. Sometimes I vaguely imagined how our ancestors discovered such wild vegetables.

The elders saw beautiful buds of the Do o flower, so they picked them and brought them to their noses to smell. They found the smell of the Do o flower to be as pleasant as that of a healthy plant, so they tried it. They found it cool and sweet, so they picked them and boiled them to try. The first time they boiled them too much, and when they ate them, the Do o flower buds felt crushed and strong. So the next time they just blanched them and they felt crispy and sweet. So Do o or similar plants became dishes.

I once asked my mother how she knew what she cooked was edible. She said that if it smelled good and tasted sweet or sour, it was edible. Thinking back, eating was a great lesson for life.

And at this moment, I was once again immersed in a dream: a dream of waking up one morning and seeing fields of watercress, watercress, mulberry, fig, watercress, bay leaf, chili, purslane, watercress, watercress, watercress, sour tamarind, watercress, mugwort, white coriander, red coriander, white jasmine, coin grass, young rice buds, young cotton, polyscias fruticosa, spotted potato, cassava, wormwood, fig, turmeric leaves, galangal leaves, lotus roots, lotus shoots, water lily buds, water lily buds... growing lushly.

I will turn into a tiny boy and start my journey through those chlorophyll forests to be immersed in the purple lotus forests blooming all over the universe, to be excited and scared by a giant civet like a prehistoric dinosaur, to hear the flapping of wings of a swarm of harvest locusts overhead, to walk in the intoxicating fragrance of the blooming rau khuc season...

That dream pained me because it was a reality nearly half a century ago and nearly half a century later it has become a human disappointment.

Source: https://danviet.vn/canh-dong-rau-dai-o-viet-nam-tranh-thu-hai-nam-rau-dai-moc-vai-chuc-con-cua-nau-bat-canh-ngon-20241107102950382.htm