That is understandable because nowadays every house has gas stoves, electric stoves, bright pots and pans, few people use straw stoves, wood stoves, pot soot, black soot like we did in the past. Our generation was born when life was still difficult, the hard work is still deeply imprinted in our memories. And the fragrant smell of straw smoke in the soot-filled kitchen of the past is probably why it lingers in my sense of smell, refusing to disappear. Like this afternoon, the green smoke rising from a small garden by the roadside also made me feel nauseous, I had to immediately inhale that spicy scent. The thin green smoke threads weaving through the tree canopy took me back to the small village of the past, when the measure of each family's prosperity was based on the size of the straw in the yard or the basket containing rice in the chamber.
When I was a child, I was familiar with kitchen smoke, to be exact, straw smoke because at that time firewood was very rare, only rich families could afford to buy firewood.
Cooking rice, boiling water or cooking bran for pigs is also done with straw. Sometimes, the water is not boiled properly and has a smoky smell, the white rice pot has a yellow corner and some ash flies in, this is very normal, no one is bothered by it. Farmers are very happy to have straw or stubble to boil because they have to save some for the buffalo to eat to gain strength to pull the plow.
When the harvest season came, all of us children knew how to dry the straw, and in the afternoon we would clean it up before the sun set. After the harvest season, there was always a tall stack of straw in the yard, which provided us with an ideal place to hide and seek. In my imagination, it looked exactly like a giant mushroom, with a roof to protect us from the rain and sun, and to shelter our chicks.
It takes a lot of skill to be asked to climb up and pick up the straw. A beautiful straw is a round, balanced straw. The person who picks up the straw for burning also needs to know how to do it, and must pull it evenly all around to avoid the straw from tilting and falling over. The roof of the straw is sometimes like a warm house, we often snuggle in there to play trading and hide and seek. There is nothing happier than finding a whole nest of pink eggs from a hen laying eggs lying round and round at the foot of that velvety straw.
On rainy days, the straw outside the tree gets wet and it is difficult to light a fire, so the kitchen is always full of smoke. The smoke strands are drowned by the rain and cannot fly high, so they just hang on the roof tiles and linger in the air, dyeing the small kitchen a thick blue. Some days, the smoke in the kitchen is so thick that I can reach out and pick up pieces.
Ignoring the stinging and red eyes and noses as if we had just been unjustly scolded, we happily cupped our hands to trap the smoke, ran quickly to the yard and then enjoyed watching the thin wisps of smoke pass through our fingers, curling and gradually dissipating into the air. The familiar nursery rhyme about smoke, we knew it by heart since we were little, I think I knew it even before I could read, every time I saw green straw smoke in the small kitchen, I would scream with all my might because I believed that doing so would automatically make the smoke go away and not make my eyes sting:
Smoky, smokey
Go over there and eat rice with fish.
Come here and hit your head with a rock…
The smoke from the kitchen is especially impressive to me when the weather starts to get cold, the space is dry and not as hot as in the summer. The color of the smoke is white, thin, fragrant and light. It is even more fragrant when the laughing fire makes the dry leaves in my yard crackle. In the winter kitchen, I often sit by the stove, watching the enchanting dance of the fire dancing at the bottom of the pot while waiting for something to be cooked on the stove or a root buried in the hot coals.
Potatoes, corn, cassava, cassava, rice, or a piece of sugar cane can be put into the grill. The cold will make the fire brighter and more radiant. A straw fire burns very slowly but with little coal it will burn out quickly, so whatever you cook you have to sit there and watch over it and not run away to play.
While waiting for the food to cook, one of my favorite pastimes was picking up the popcorn kernels that were born when the remaining rice grains in the straw popped and popped to eat to ease my impatience. The popcorn kernels appeared suddenly like a white flower, if I didn’t quickly use a stick to poke them out, they could be burned black by the fire.
The dry straw in the cold winter also often gave us children another treasure: tightly woven straw sticks. The smoke from those sticks would keep the fire burning warm amidst the seemingly extinguished ashes. And the hands covered in fragrant smoke would be less cold thanks to the fragile smoke in those sacred straw sticks.
Along with the smoke, the smell of boiling rice, the smell of dishes being cooked in the pot, the smell of things being grilled in the coals or the smell of fat grasshoppers every season are the eternal scents that never fade in my memory. I also often think of the guava tree I used to climb in the afternoons when the kitchen smoke began to seep through the tiled roof and find the tiny, unseasonable ripe fruits left on the branches. Sitting on the tree, I would guess what my mother was cooking in the kitchen, watching the thin, soft smoke curling in the air and imagining it was the flowing ao dai of a fairy about to fly up to the sky.
There, I could let my thoughts drift away forever with the smoke drifting in the afternoon wind until it merged with the smoke-colored clouds in the sky. I always sat like that waiting for my mother to cook rice while munching on guava and “looking around” to see which house in the neighborhood had not yet lit the stove, this was told to me by the smoke drifting from each kitchen roof. Looking at the smoke, my eyes still had to look out to the road to the next village, where my “fascist” sister would come home from school. If I saw that familiar figure, I would immediately get down and go sweep the house, sweep the yard or wash the dishes.
Only when everything is done can I rest assured and climb up the guava branch to count the smoke rising from the neighbor's kitchen, and guess whose house is steaming fish sauce, braising fish, cooking pickled vegetables, or grilling salty dried anchovies on hot coals that make my nose tingle.
Sometimes, I often think that smoke makes grilled food taste better. Many dishes are now grilled with air fryers or expensive ovens, and even divination cannot find the special aroma of smoke. But now, with the crowded population, kitchen smoke is no longer suitable for bright and modern spaces. In fact, smoke even makes the alarm go off, reminding people of a not-so-vague worry.
Knowing that, this afternoon in the blue smoke drifting along a quiet garden, I suddenly miss a warm kitchen with the fragrant smell of old straw smoke. Seeing my shirt, my hair and my hands still smelling of smoke, seeing myself in a poor neighborhood, every afternoon I count the smoke drifting on the tiled roof. Counting the smoke to know whether the owner of each small kitchen has come home to cook dinner or not, because seeing the smoke is seeing the warmth of each house. Without smoke, the poor kitchens would be so sad.
Source: https://daidoanket.vn/van-vuong-khoi-bep-10287967.html
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