Plain rice of Vietnamese people

I used to say that Vietnamese people all eat plain rice, not Vietnamese people eat ordinary rice. That statement is a bit exaggerated, but to emphasize that plain rice is something that has been closely associated with Vietnamese people for thousands of generations.
From the moment the child has just had a baby tooth, mothers have taught their children to eat regular rice. At first, the rice is a bit mushy, a little soft for the child to chew easily. In some places, at a time that was not too far away, there was a habit of serving rice to children. Because eating crushed rice is pale and not delicious, women and sisters chew dry rice normally with fish meat, when the rice is almost pureed, feed that piece of rice to their children and sisters. Now when young people see this, they think that it is unhygienic and unsightly, but that habit has existed for a long time and has only recently been eliminated.

That habit is also very close to nature and animals. This is how pigeons, storks, herons, and many other birds raise their young. The mother bird looks for food and temporarily swallows it into the kite, when she returns to the nest, she sees the baby birds’ beaks wide open and chirping, and then feeds them one by one. The image is very beautiful and rich in motherly love. There have been many realistic, touching photos and videos recording those scenes. At this point, I remember a very impressive passage of writer Mo Yan in his greatest novel: “Treasures of life”. In that novel, there was a mother with many children living in a time of famine, when she worked in a food processing factory, she secretly swallowed the corn kernels to fill her stomach, then when she got home, she stuck her hand out and vomited. in and out of a basin of water. Wash the corn and then the mother cooks for the children to eat so they don’t starve to death! It’s normal for Vietnamese mothers to feed their children rice for a long time, and I am the child who has grown up from those fresh pieces of rice. Rice with Vietnamese people is of course the most important food, like bread with Europeans and Americans. People eat boring rice all their life and never get bored. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are simply called “eating rice” because the most important and most important ingredient in meals is rice. Vegetables, meat, and fish are side dishes or sometimes sticky rice is present on the occasion of the New Year’s anniversary, it is called eating for fun, changing meals. To be able to eat rice for Vietnamese people means being healthy and feeling normal. If you can’t eat rice, it means you are sick or your body has abnormal symptoms. In the past, when someone was sick, people used to ask: “Have you eaten yet?”. The answer is that if you can eat rice, everything is better, the patient gradually gets better. Cooking is one of the most important skills that signals a child’s growth. In the past, every house cooked rice with a wood stove or more expensively with a charcoal stove. Cooking skills include measuring the rice in the jar, how many bowls, cows (tubes) of rice are enough for the family to eat, that is not counting the filling of cassava, potatoes or other things. Measure out the rice and put it in a bamboo basket to wash it clean. The rice washing operation involves stirring the rice in a bowl of water to remove the grains, gravel, husks or fat weevils that live parasitically in the rice, leaving the rice a little whiter. Put the rice in the pot, you also need to measure the water level so that it is just enough. Because less water, the rice is dry, more water, the rice is mushy. Children often dip their index fingers into the rice cooker to calculate the water level according to their mother’s instructions. Put the rice cooker on the fire or charcoal stove and adjust the heat to the right degree. If the fire is too low, the rice will take a long time to boil, the rice grains will swell up into small mountains in the pot, the rice will be bland and bursting. If the fire is too big, especially when it’s boiling, the rice will burn. When the rice is completely boiled, use chopsticks to stir it once so that the water and rice are evenly mixed and cooked easily. When the rice cooker is boiling, open the lid to prevent the water from overflowing and watching the bubbles rise is very eye-catching. When the water dries up, these boils leave small suckers like squirrel holes in the mud. Rice is a rather special processed food, seventy percent of the rice is cooked when the water is boiling, the remaining thirty percent is cooked by the heat when brewing. When the rice cooker runs out of water, take out some firewood to cook the rice. Charcoal to rhyme must also be enough, too much, the rice will be burned, but too little will be raw. When the child can cook a pot of rice that is not dry and not crushed, it is considered to have met the requirements. The skill of cooking rice is not done once or twice, but must be practiced, observed and experienced. If careless, subjective, it is easy to lead to the situation: Above live, below, and all sides are squishy! People also often ask each other’s children with the question: What does your son know how to do? Yes, I already know how to cook. “Know how to cook rice” is a very proud phrase and the children of the old days, both boys and girls, had to learn to cook rice. Cooking rice with a cast iron pot, a wood stove, is more fragrant and delicious. When the rice is cooked, remove the trays and bowls, the whole family sits around. As soon as the rice cooker is opened, the heat rises up like smoke, use bamboo chopsticks to beat the rice evenly and then pour it into each bowl for everyone. The person sitting at the top of the pot is usually the parent, when the children grow up, the oldest sibling takes that position instead of the parents. The person sitting at the top of the pot is very important because it is important to regulate the amount of rice for the whole family and divide it appropriately (basically, the rice is too little and sometimes a lot of cassava is stuffed to eat to fullness). The sentence: “Eat the pot, sit and watch the direction” also arose from this fact. If there is a father in the house who likes to eat burnt rice, the person who cooks the rice needs to perform a few more steps. In order to have a golden and crispy array of burnt rice, it is necessary to cook rice in a cast iron pot because cast iron is a good heat-retaining thing and is often molded thickly, cooking rice is very convenient. In order to have a delicious fire, when the rice is cooked, it is necessary to keep the amount of charcoal a little more incubated and maintain it for a longer time. The process of creating a fire is an art because sometimes the pieces are too thin, too young or burnt black, as well as having to choose the right type of rice. It is a genuine traditional burnt rice, not like the type of burnt rice that is made by machine, puffed and fried like now. Of course, the pleasure of having a crispy layer of burnt rice for dessert is only available in wood stoves and charcoal stoves. Now, cooking rice is so easy, there is a rice cooker, just put rice and water in the pot, plug in the power, press the button and you’re done. The rice cooker has been calculated and programmed, no need to open the lid to see if the rice is boiling or cooked. When the cooking process is complete, the rice cooker will signal and eat like that. A grain of rice that is treasured by a sun and two dew to work does not leave anything behind. The rice that is not eaten is called cold rice and can be roasted the next morning for the whole family to make breakfast. Fried rice requires eggs, a little bit of fat, a little onion, and fish sauce and is also the most popular breakfast gift of hard times. Now, fried rice has entered the restaurant as a familiar delicacy because very few people roast rice at home. If not roasted, then the cold rice will be the seat for the next meal, when the rice cooker runs out of water to suck the hole, pour the cold rice on top and steam it. If you do not want to do this, the excess rice can be dried in the sun, put in a sealed jar to save as dry food, when used, add a little sugar and fat to turn into a crispy, sweet snack to eat when you are sad. . Even if the rice is completely stale, people do not throw it away, it is used to raise batches, a very typical sour and sour condiment in Vietnamese cuisine, the taste is softer and more characteristic than vinegar. In the old days, almost every house had a batch pot in the corner of the kitchen, now many people cook sour dishes without giving them a batch as if the dish has lost a significant part. Although ordinary rice is common, it goes well with almost all other dishes. The poor eat rice with sesame salt, peanut salt, salted eggplant, crab soup. Even with a bowl of white rice, just sprinkle a little fish sauce and mix well enough to warm the stomach of the poor. More than that, eat rice with braised fish, spring rolls, spring rolls, soup, braised meat. If you have a bowl of plain rice in your stomach, you will be sure, working all day without worrying, thinking about other things. That’s why there’s a saying: “If you’re hungry, you’ll want sticky rice / If you’re full of rice, then stop all the way”. Sticky rice is the main food, the most important foundation in Vietnamese meals. People eat rice every day, so familiar that it is not necessary to remember when it came from and how to cook rice. Like that for thousands of generations, rice has become a close and indispensable friend of Vietnamese people. And isn’t the grain of rice like our parents?