Thanh Vinh eel porridge

(Baonghean) -Every time food connoisseurs come to Vinh City, they look for eel porridge. For those who have been away from home for a long time, eel porridge is considered a “culinary culture” on par with the aromatic bitterness of green tea, the sweet and nutty allure of sweet potatoes buried in rice husks, and the tomato sauce that is forever ingrained in Nghe An poetry!

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Now, all 20 wards and communes of Vinh City have eel porridge shops, but gourmets often meet at the Quan Bau intersection in the morning, and in the evening or at midnight, they gather next to the Provincial Post Office guesthouse. It is the stomach that knows how to find a delicious eel porridge shop thanks to a clear head and a skillful tongue. Many passersby easily forget the name of the shop owner, forget the place where the shop is located, but the aftertaste of Thanh Vinh eel porridge, which has reached the level of culinary art, remains forever in people's hearts, forever with time. I intentionally do not mention the names of the shops ranked among the hundreds of eel porridge shops spread throughout Vinh City, because doing so would make one feel too proud and the other too contemptuous. So it is better to let the "god" remember and come to his "servant" by himself, because "money has eyes". The ancients were like that, but today it is even more so with the choice of what they need. Just know that in the competition on the "eel porridge front", there are many winners and many unsuccessful people. Usually each restaurant sells 5-7 kilos of eel per day, very few restaurants reach the record of 20-30 kilos. The “high-class” restaurants serve intermittently, only three or four hours in the morning or evening because “if our children have rice to eat, let others have a bowl of porridge”.

The eel catching talent in my hometown Nghe An has also become a legend. To catch eels, one must distinguish eel caves from crab caves and snake caves, and must identify the correct eel membrane before reaching out to catch them (the membrane is the color of the water film in front of the cave mouth). Eel membranes are clear, crab membranes are murky, snake membranes are sometimes murky, sometimes clear. With their eel hunting experience, the workers let the crab houses “go on bail”, and let the young eels enjoy “suspended sentences”, they only sentence eels the size of their little fingers or larger, they are so “professional” that they can guess the weight of the eel in the cave by looking at the membrane. When they locate the membrane, they press hard with their feet at the end of the eel cave and immediately jump out to escape, but with the middle finger, index finger, and ring finger of their calloused hands, they create a “trident” position to tightly grip the eel’s neck and “pull” the eel up easily, easier than pulling up cassava from sandy soil in the rain. Eel hunting has also become a curse, thousands of bomb craters in my hometown have become lakes, ponds, and holes for eels to breed. Strangely, snails, frogs, shrimps, and crabs are easily extinct because of countless types of chemical fertilizers, but only eels "don't mind getting their heads dirty" and keep reproducing, keep growing to create a never-ending source of income for farmers.

It is said that once, poet Phung Quan from Hanoi was "recruited" to work for a long time at Dong Hieu Farm, Nghia Dan District. At that time, the bell pond was also collectively owned and no one dared to touch it without the order of the farm leader. However, poet Phung Quan still had a way to exploit the potential of heaven and earth to improve the frugal meals. Poet Phung Quan mixed mud with buffalo dung, spread the mixture in a 5-10 cm thick bamboo basket and then dried it in the sun. The poet also invented a lid that looked like the mouth of a basket. At night, the poet ordered someone to put the "salvation weapon" in the pond, and before dawn, the basket was full of eels weighing nearly several dozen kilos. Phung Quan's poetic talent and eel-trapping talent were equal. When he was a secretary, he found inspiration in poetry thanks to his eel-trapping talent.

After a delicious meal, I took out a 200,000 VND bill to pay for 10 bowls of eel porridge for the whole group. My friends were surprised: Why is it so cheap? "One skill is mastered, one's life is honored", the saying of the ancients is true for all times, especially true for the excellent eel porridge conductors of Nghe An, especially in the sunny and windy Thanh Vinh.

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