What I Miss About Home
It has been eight weeks since I came to Santa Barbara. As a student from Canon, where people there are well known as gourmets in China, I can only categorize the food here as food for survival, not for life enjoyment. Sometimes, I could get some joys from the sporadic clams in the soup, or a similar taste from a unknown dish. But overall, my tongue seems to lose its job in the daily life, and my stomach is always growling for not getting enough energy or enough good food. I try to meet the needs of my stomach, but then I fail to meet the needs of my purse (food is sometimes too expensive to enjoy). I miss the food in my home city very much, which has less strong-flavored spices and more original flavors of the ingredient itself.
In Canton, we usually use salt, sugar, and chicken essence powder to cook in order to keep the ingredient’s original taste. These seasonings work as some math symbols in the equation of cooking. Salt is the plus sign; when you add some salt, the fragrance of the ingredient will bomb out with the heat. Sugar is the division sign; we add some sugar in seafood or vegetables to soften the bitter or fishy taste, and enrich the flavor. Chicken essence powder is the magic multiplication sign; we only add it when we deal with vegetables because we believe that vegetables taste better if we cook them with meat (lard is the best oil for vegetables, which has a strong flavor of meat).
Regarding the ingredients, we only choose the seasonal vegetables. The elderly tell us that unseasonal vegetables would somewhat be toxic since they are grown under artificial cultivation. We never think about the credibility of this saying, but the flavor proves that the elderly are always right. The unseasonal vegetables are often bitter, or hard to chew, and in dark green compared to others in fresh, vividly green. If there are local products selling, we would prefer to buy the local ones. Unlike U.S., local products are much cheaper than the transported ones when they are in season. Although the local vegetables are not in a good shape, you can tell that they look like what they should be, not made by an artificial force. Worth mentioning, in the spring, one of the vegetable, which we call it “caixin”, has the best flavor among other times. The vendor will always advocate it to you by saying that the taste of “caixin” is sweeter than your first love. Indeed, after boiling with some slices of ginger and salt, the “caixin” has a kind of sweetness owned specifically by the spring vegetables. This is the charm of seasonal and local vegetables, but in U.S., the vegetables are either raw or poorly cooked. To me, they are wasting the food because they fail to make the food as attractive as the food should be.
Moreover, chefs here like to use spices. However, spices are only used when the food is nearly rotten or not fresh in my home city, especially when it comes to fish. The best fish dish uses only slices of ginger and spring onions, with special fish soy sauce, no more seasoning. If the fish dish uses other strong flavor seasoning, we will assume that the fish is not fresh or already dead before cooking. And we can tell if the fish is dead or alive before cooking after the first bite (this is what my tongue’s job). The dining commons love to use spices in cooking. It hurts my tongue and hurts my stomach, making them unable to taste the original fresh flavor, and feel uncomfortable to process the spices.
Ah. I am hungry now after reminding myself of the traditional Cantonese cooking.
