Random thoughts about eggplant

The last day of the year is full of delicious and sweet dishes, but I don't know why I keep thinking about eggplant in my daily meals. Not only me, many diners in luxury restaurants, when ordering, loudly say "Please give me a bowl of crispy eggplant". That's right, eggplant is not the first choice when starting a meal, but it is the "highlight", the final destination, when the meal ends, each person has a bowl of rice and soup with eggplant, standing up and still has a salty aftertaste...

Pickled eggplant - a dish that lasted for days and days in a difficult time, a time long ago, when many Vietnamese families had nothing to eat with rice, only salty eggplant and boiled pickled cucumber water. Sometimes, rice was mixed with noodles, dried potatoes, or cassava. Eggplant was considered meat at that time. My grandmother and mother created eggplant "meat" dishes such as stir-fried eggplant, braised eggplant. After the eggplant had become salty, spicy, and bitter for a long time, she took each eggplant, cut it in half, washed it with well water, and drained it. She took a little bit of lard in a jar (at that time, lard was as rare as MSG), put it in a pan and stir-fried it with the eggplant, added a little sugar, some lemon leaves, and shredded chili. So the whole family had a feast of "eggplant meat", salty, fatty, and crispy. When the fat was still glistening in the mouth, the neighbors thought the house had meat! Sometimes the family bought fish sauce, so she put the eggplant in to braise with the fish sauce. The fish sauce is salty, the eggplant is even saltier, but when you eat it, the eggplant absorbs the fish and honey, the saltiness lingers on your tongue, you bite it little by little, and before you know it, the bowl of rice is gone.

Salted eggplant is probably the easiest dish to make and most palatable to many people. After getting tired of braised dishes, stir-fried dishes, and other delicacies, the pure salty taste and indescribable crunchiness of eggplant make the meal more flavorful. Eggplant eaten with crab soup, vegetable soup, and boiled spinach water is a favorite dish of many people. The funny story is that on the first meal with her husband's family, the daughter-in-law picked up an eggplant and took a bite, and the eggplant seeds flew into her mother-in-law's face. But her mother-in-law was not angry, but felt sorry for her because she chose eggplant as the first dish. Moreover, the eggplant she bit made a crunchy sound, like a firecracker exploding.

Folklore also quotes Kieu: "The more sharp Kieu is, the more salty it is. In terms of saltiness, eggplant is saltier", sounds very interesting!

I don't know why in folk songs there is also a passage about eggplant that is taken from the story of Kieu: "Praise you for being the son-in-law of Chuong Dai. In one year, you eat twelve jars of eggplant. Wherever the well is, take me to it. Or I will die with the jar of eggplant in your house." Only then do we know that eggplant is not only delicious but also like a red string of fate, lasting the couple's love, passionately taking care of each other. My girlfriend is very knowledgeable: delicious food is not about being elaborate and expensive, but about whether the person you love likes to eat it or not! On a Spring day, I'm talking about eggplant to remember more about the days of "egg sauce", the days of "Tao khang phu the bat kha ha duong". "Tao khang" means broken rice and bran. Husband and wife from the time they were in poverty, eating bran and broken rice together, then when they became rich, they could not give up...

Pearl