Strangely, I have been away from home for a long time but the taste of my hometown dishes is always deeply in my memory. The dishes of my hometown bear the mark of hard work, simplicity, the smell of burning fields, the love of people, the scent of the land always lingers in my childhood until now.
-Illustration: LE DUY
Growing up in the countryside, my memories are associated with simple things. Back then, when life was difficult, daily meals consisted mainly of vegetables from the home garden. Depending on the season, my grandmother's garden always had available vegetables such as water spinach, Malabar spinach, squash... Especially in the summer, there was a trellis of squash blooming bright yellow flowers in a small yard.
We often played under the squash trellis, watching my grandmother chewing betel as if seeing a fairy tale scene not too far away. The peaceful countryside afternoon. We could faintly hear the lullaby intertwined with the creaking of the hammock. The scent of the homeland was precious, permeating the blue smoke of the afternoon. The vastness of the storks was evident in the vast, sunny fields.
In my hometown, in the summer, crab soup is a familiar dish. We often catch crabs when we roam the village fields. The fields at that time had not been contaminated with chemicals. In the summer, the water is as hot as steam, the crabs come to the surface of the fields, crawling around. Sometimes they hide in holes along the edge of the fields, you just need to put your hand in to catch them right away but you have to be careful to avoid being pinched by the crabs. Every time we go to the fields to catch crabs, the village children carry baskets in their hands, their faces are covered in mud but they always laugh loudly in the fields in the windy afternoon.
Field crabs can be cooked with many kinds of vegetables. They are delicious when cooked with Malabar spinach, Malabar spinach or squash. My grandmother cooks crab soup very elaborately. She meticulously cleans each crab, peels off the shell, peels off the apron, then crushes it and adds water to filter. She says that filtering crabs must be done carefully until the water does not contain crab residue. I often help my grandmother get crab fat. Looking at the bowl of golden crab fat, I can imagine a pot of sweet, fragrant crab soup on a summer afternoon. Sometimes, looking at my grandmother's increasingly gray hair, I feel sad and tearful, afraid that one day... the white clouds will return to the sky.
I like my grandmother to cook crab soup with squash. She often tells me to pick some flower buds to make the soup more fragrant and colorful. After filtering the crab broth, boil until the crab meat floats to the top, then add the squash and flower buds. When cooking crab soup with squash, you have to cook it on high heat so that when the squash is just cooked, it still retains its green color and is not too soft when eaten, which is delicious. Crab soup is usually eaten with eggplant, my grandmother adds a little dried shrimp to make it more flavorful.
After the hardships of everyday life, the whole family gathered around a pot of crab soup, eating and praising its deliciousness. At times like that, my grandmother smiled warmly. Perhaps, the more mature I become, the more I miss the old flavors. In the city, every time I look into the distance, I am deeply reminded of the flavor of my hometown. The warm home-cooked meal of the past is like a halo of memories. There, there is a family with all its members; there is love that extends the memories; there is the scent of squash and eggplant mixed in the crab soup that cools the scorching summer.
In today's fast-paced life, sometimes we are caught up in the hustle and bustle of work, and sometimes we have to rush our meals. Not only my family, but perhaps many other families also choose to eat simply, quickly, and save time.
But deep down, I still crave, still miss those home-cooked meals, the taste of crab soup back then... I miss the days when I was a child living with my grandmother, meticulously making crabs with her... my grandmother cooked simple, plain dishes that were so delicious, I can't forget them.
An Khanh
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