Tet comes and I miss the smoke of my hometown

Mom said, even someone with many years of experience in tending the fire cannot cook a pot of firewood rice without... burnt rice. Burnt rice is a guarantee of the deliciousness of firewood-cooked rice.

Meals cooked on a wood stove are also very fragrant, especially the aroma of the burnt rice stuck to the bottom of the pot - Illustration: MINH PHUC

My childhood passed peacefully with the smoke of the countryside. In the 1980s, the outskirts of Saigon were still a swampy place, the landscape was no different from the West with its crisscrossing rivers and canals: vast fields, rows of green water coconut trees along the riverbanks.

In my neighborhood, when the electric wires were just stretched along the roadside, the houses in the fields only dared to use rechargeable batteries, and could only light a tiny light bulb, so they had to be frugal, mostly using oil lamps. Those bulbs had to be reserved for gatherings, anniversaries, and Tet holidays. The lights were like that, and cooking was purely on firewood stoves, rice husks, sugarcane husks, dry coconut shells, and straw after the harvest...

Any farming family would definitely have a very large yard to dry rice. Any gardening family would have a very long kitchen behind the house to neatly stack several piles of firewood from dry branches in the garden.

My family is a farmer so we have a large yard, not paved with tiles, just a very flexible, compacted soil from the riverbed, smooth and flat over time, like plaster. I love my yard very much. Because there, Tet is present first and most clearly, every year.

At the beginning of December, my father started going to the garden, gathering coconut leaves, dried mango branches, and cajuput trees, then cutting them into even pieces and spreading them out in the yard to dry. The December sun was so harsh that in just a few days, the firewood in the yard was completely dry. At this time, my father carefully stacked them into a long, straight pile of firewood behind the porch.

Neighbors are on the same page, everyone’s drying yard is filled with all kinds of firewood. Those who can afford it will buy several carts of firewood from nearby wood farms: jackfruit firewood, cajuput firewood, pine firewood...

The firewood pile looks simple but sometimes it is a measure of the completeness of the man - the pillar of the house. When visiting a house, the aunts will definitely look at the firewood pile to know whether the husband loves his wife and children or not. Women keep the fire in the home. But men are the ones who bring the fire home.

On normal days, the firewood pile can be a little sloppy. But for Tet, it must be neat, full, and tidy. From that pile of firewood, there are banh tet cakes, pots of braised pork, bowls of bitter melon soup, and pots of fragrant bamboo shoot stews to make Tet complete.

Early in the morning on the first day of every year, the whole family gathers around a pile of firewood, dry leaves, and straw to warm their hands in the cold weather of the first day of the year, starting the story of the new year in a warm way.

The wisps of smoke that pass through the fingers before dissipating also leave behind a very strange aroma. It carries a bit of the spiciness of eucalyptus leaves or lemongrass leaves, a bit of the heat of dried lemon leaves; along with the crisp crackling sound of guava firewood, cork firewood...

Meals cooked on a wood stove are also very fragrant, especially the aroma of the burnt rice stuck to the bottom of the pot. Mom said that even someone with many years of experience in tending the fire cannot cook a pot of wood stove rice without... burnt rice. Burnt rice is a guarantee of the deliciousness of wood stove rice.

I still remember the lingering smell of smoke from the kitchen on the ivory white rice grains of the Tet meal tray. The smell that now, in this crowded city, I wish I could put a pot of rice on the stove, cook it with a few pieces of firewood taken from my father's firewood pile to smell the fragrant smell of the rice and smoke, but that is no longer possible...

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/tet-ve-nho-soi-khoi-que-20241229112213417.htm