Rainy day meal

It has been raining steadily for the past few days. The hot weather suddenly turned chilly. At noon, when I was hungry, the unmistakable aroma of fish stewed in soy sauce wafted from the kitchen of my neighbor's house, making me suddenly remember the meals on rainy days in the past. It has been decades, but the difficult times still appear before my eyes as if they were yesterday.

The rain after the hot days of late autumn not only cools the body but also brings many benefits. The vegetable garden in front of the house has been green and lush after a few rains. It is not like the previous days when we watered the well in the morning and in the afternoon until the water ran dry but the vegetables were still stunted and could not grow. When it rains, plants and animals are happy. Frogs and toads have a chance to come out to bathe in the rain and look for food...

We kids were excited to go out in the rain to catch frogs and perch. In the residential area, in addition to the vegetable fields that provided daily meals for families, there was also sugarcane everywhere. When it rained, the sugarcane fields were where perch followed the water upstream. With just a basket or bare hands, we could catch fish. Back then, there were countless fish, we caught batch after batch, and every time it rained, they would still come up in groups, groups…

Late autumn was also the harvest season, and each baby perch was plump and budding. There were so many fish that we could fill our baskets in a flash. All of us kids were skinny, dark, and soaked, but we were all excited about the “spoils of war”. The whole neighborhood was filled with laughter. Having seen our parents do it so much, the kids were very skilled. The fish we caught were brought home, poured into a large pot, added a handful of salt, covered, and shaken evenly. When there was no more rattling noise, we took them to the water tank to cut them. After cutting the fish, we washed them, put them in the pot, marinated them with soy sauce, and left them there.

The next step is to put on a raincoat and go to the garden to pick vegetables. The garden of young sweet potato leaves is green, I just pick the tops and leaves until the basket is full. I also pick ginger to stew with the fish. I wash the ginger, crush the root, chop the stem and leaves and put them all in the pot to stew with the fish. The fish stewed with ginger sauce is fragrant, goes very well with rice. After finishing the fish, I scrape up some ginger sauce crumbs and it goes down a few bowls of rice. The elders say that if you have fish, blame the rice.

Sweet potato leaves cooked in soup with soy sauce also become a memorable dish. The dish is simple but has the sweet taste of the countryside. Just boil water, add a little soy sauce to taste, then put the vegetables in and boil again for a while until cooked. The cooked vegetables still retain their green color, do not mushy, and are sweet without MSG.

Finding food on rainy days is not difficult, but the hardest part is lighting the stove. Back then, there were no gas or electric stoves like today, so families used firewood and trash to cook. During difficult times, every family used the same fuel, so finding firewood and trash was not easy. Especially during periods of heavy rain and wind, cooking rice was even harder.

Using everything that can be cooked, but sugarcane leaves are probably the hardest thing to cook in the world. On dry sunny days, they burn very quickly, but there is no coal. When the rice is dry, burning too little will make the rice undercooked, but burning too much will burn the rice black. The worst thing is on rainy and windy days, when it is so humid that you can light it until your eyes are wide open but it still won't burn. On days when we had to cook rice with sugarcane leaves, our parents would always complain that "it's raw above and burnt below, and all around is soggy".

No matter what, we had to manage to finish cooking the meal. Many days, when we finished cooking, we were drenched in sweat, our hands, feet and faces were as black as if we had crawled out of a furnace… The meal was served, and the whole family gathered happily. The weather was cool and there was braised fish, so the pot of rice was quickly emptied. Our stomachs were full, but our mouths were still hungry.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had such rustic dishes. The fish stew now only uses pre-made seasoning packets, so the taste is not the same as before… Today it’s raining, and I suddenly miss the simple meals of my childhood. There’s no smoke from the kitchen, but my eyes are stinging as if I just finished cooking a pot of rice with a bunch of wet sugarcane leaves.

Xuan Hoa

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