Taste of home

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.

Taste of home

-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. Seasonal food was always available in my grandmother's garden, from water spinach, Malabar spinach, squash... Especially in the summer, there was a trellis of squash blooming bright yellow flowers in the small yard.

We often played under the squash trellis, watching our grandmother chewing betel as if seeing a fairy tale sky 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, permeated in the blue smoke of the afternoon. The vast, sunny fields were filled with storks.

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 was as hot as steam, the crabs came to the surface of the fields, crawling around. Sometimes they hid in holes along the edge of the fields, you just need to reach in and catch them, but you have to be careful to avoid being pinched by the crabs. Every time we went to the fields to catch crabs, the village children carried baskets in their hands, their faces were covered in mud, but they always laughed 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 filters the water. 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 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 fly away.

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 it until the crab meat floats to the top, then add the squash and flower buds. Cooking crab soup with squash must be done on high heat so that when the squash is just cooked, it still retains its green color, and when eaten, it is not too soft, 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, Grandma smiled warmly. Perhaps, the more mature we become, the more we miss the old flavors. In the city, every time we look into the distance, we are deeply imbued with the flavors of our homeland. The warm home-cooked meals of the past are like a halo of memories. There, there is a family with all its members; there is love that lasts for a long time; 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 the hometown meals, miss the taste of crab soup back then... I miss the childhood days at my grandmother's house, meticulously making crabs with her... my grandmother cooked simple, ordinary dishes but they were so delicious, I can't forget them.

An Khanh

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