Home-cooked rice
Treating a guest to a surprise visit sometimes only requires a simple meal: a plate of boiled vegetables, a bowl of clam and water spinach soup, a few hastily fried fish, and just enough fish sauce to make a proper lunch. Setting the table can be exhausting, as the cook has to juggle work responsibilities with a quick trip to the market to buy ingredients. Lunch, therefore, often feels rushed.
Yet you couldn't stop eating the three-course meal. You said the food tasted good because you were in your friend's warm home. The kitchen buzzed with stories of friends reuniting after a long time. Even the clumsiness of the husband helping his wife, in your eyes, became a sign of a happy and peaceful life.
Approaching 40, you still haven't had the chance to sit down with your spouse for a simple home-cooked meal. The dream of clinking dishes in a cozy home is gradually fading with time.
Travels, encounters, successes and failures at work, occupy all the time and space of this petite friend. She says that sometimes it's a blessing, to keep her mind from dwelling on the dream of being an ordinary person.
I sat watching you slowly pick up a boiled vegetable and dip it in chili fish sauce – a sauce with the aroma of fermented anchovies from the coastal region of Quang Nam, savoring the spicy and salty flavors as you ate. You're from the South, accustomed to sweet dishes. My host, from Central Vietnam, prefers rich, spicy flavors. Yet, the meal was... "absolutely delicious," you said.
Lunch with you passed quickly because we had to go to work. But the lingering taste will probably follow you everywhere. I know this because you occasionally text me: "I miss home-cooked meals."
"Home-cooked meals" seems to be a phrase typically reserved for close family members to remind each other of. But my friend, a successful woman with a respectable social standing, who sometimes just longs to text someone about "eating home-cooked meals," chose the phrase "home" to recall an experience with her friends.
Starting from the dinner table
In Vietnamese culture, dishes served at family meals are typically arranged on a tray. Instead of using the word "meal," Vietnamese people refer to it as "mâm cơm" (meal tray).
Traditionally, the dinner table has been round. Folk beliefs suggest that the circle symbolizes wholeness and completeness, representing togetherness and abundance. With just the right amount of food arranged on a round table, family members gather around the meal. Stories are told slowly and calmly, without haste or urgency.
"A circle has no beginning and no end, just like traditional values that continue from generation to generation. At a round dinner table, no one is left out in the conversations."
"A small table, just enough to hold a few bowls and plates, enough for family members to listen to each other, enough for hands to reach out and pick up delicious food for each other without being clumsy, enough for conversations around the table to be free from shouting, arguing, or unpleasantness" - I read this in an advertisement for... fish sauce.
The reason the content creator for the dipping sauce brand chose a home-cooked meal to start their advertisement is because this dipping sauce is always placed in the center of the meal.
I found myself pondering, our ancestors used to say that the sky is round and the earth is square, and the traditional round meal table, perhaps, is a deeper meaning about life? That all the "ingredients" of human life will eventually converge within this circle.
It all begins at the family dinner table, from watching a child hold chopsticks to an adult, each time sitting with loved ones with a meal in the middle, the human self suddenly returns to its most primal form - the truest version of oneself when surrounded by family.
Then, the traditional "home-cooked meals" of the past gradually became less frequent in Vietnamese families. Even then, "home-cooked meals" were sometimes eaten at restaurants due to work circumstances. Or, a family meal served on a rainy afternoon might be missing a pair of chopsticks or a bowl. Mother would scoop a full bowl, murmuring about the last meal...
Source: https://baoquangnam.vn/bat-dia-tinh-than-3142659.html
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