Taste of Homeland: Eating Sweet Potatoes and Gossiping About Old Stories

You are a teacher in Que Son (Da Nang), one day you sent out a dish of sweet potato chips. You said that now in the countryside, many cooperatives, production and business households, startups... have chosen sweet potato chips as an OCOP product, sending them to be sold in supermarkets and convenience stores across the country, sometimes even abroad.

A rustic dish, for poor families in the past, now thanks to the new countryside, "a step up in life".

Remember, in the midland areas of Quang Nam such as Thang Binh, Que Son, Hiep Duc... in the past, in addition to rice, cassava, peanuts..., an indispensable agricultural product was potatoes. In particular, Tra Doa potatoes in the eastern region of Thang Binh have entered the subconscious of the people with the songs: " Quang Nam has Phu Bong silk/ Tra Doa potatoes, Thu Bon river", "First is Viet An girls/ Second is Tra Doa sweet potatoes"...

Sweet potatoes are dipped in jackfruit leaves and guava leaves from the home garden, fragrant with memories.

Photo: Anh Quan

Sweet potatoes, a "famine-relief" agricultural product that makes people choke and get sick of eating them all the time, are processed by the people of Quang into many dishes to change their taste: in addition to boiled potatoes, baked potatoes, and sweet potatoes, which are stored as long-term food, people also make dried potatoes, bamboo shoot potatoes, soft sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Dried sweet potatoes are fresh sweet potatoes cut into slices and dried, bamboo shoot potatoes are cut into square pieces and dried, soft sweet potatoes are yellow-fleshed sweet potatoes cooked, sliced, dried in the sun for a few days, and fresh sweet potatoes are cooked and then rubbed on a basket into small round seeds, dried, and called sweet potatoes. The fine seeds are for eating, the large seeds with shells are used to feed livestock and poultry... The best sweet potatoes are made from the soft, crumbly Trui Sa variety.

There are five or seven ways to eat sweet potato, depending on the economic conditions of each family. Poor families take sweet potato out into a bowl, pour in warm water, called "sú", wait for it to expand, add a little salt or fish sauce and eat. Or dry sweet potato mixed with salt, scoop it up with a spoon or jackfruit leaf and eat. Families with better conditions mix dry sweet potato with sugar - such as crushed sugar, liquid sugar, granulated sugar..., or with crushed roasted peanuts and a little salt. Sweet potato eaten this way has a very delicious aroma!

Nowadays, people mix sweet potato with powdered sugar, caramelized sugar, mold it into cakes, put it in boxes to sell in markets, supermarkets or "export" it by "illegal" way for people far from home to enjoy the taste of their homeland...

Eat to "gossip" about the poor childhood days, that's all it takes all day...

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/huong-vi-que-huong-an-khoai-cha-tam-chuyen-cu-185250705234459716.htm