The Lunar New Year comes again in the eternal rotation of heaven and earth. Yes, Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and then Spring, but why do people’s hearts flutter when the traditional Tet of the nation comes to the door? It’s because people’s bodies and minds suddenly wake up with nostalgia, but the old taste of so many Tet has passed.
It seems contradictory that the Lunar New Year marks the transition between the old year and the new year (according to the lunar calendar), bringing a new spring, new hopes and new beliefs. However, it is also an opportunity for people to find beautiful and beautiful memories of the Tet holidays of many old years.
People’s hearts yearn for a Tet space filled with sweet cold, spreading thousands of silver strands of drizzle, causing all to sink in silence to bring out the fragrance of agarwood, the puffing sound of ardent wood fire. Cook a pot of banh chung, and the smell of delicious dishes is being hurriedly prepared for the Tet tray.
Strange. People’s hearts should have followed the new cycle to be happy with the new New Year, with life-long trips throughout the New Year, pampering themselves in luxury resorts, eating and drinking Michelin-starred things, laughing. Talk about trendy stories like Gen Y, Gen Z.
That change is inevitable especially in the context that the world has been flattened, when the boundaries of doors, bamboo ramps, borders have been penetrated by invisible electronic waves. It is so intense that it forces people to doubt the value of the Lunar New Year, even demanding a merger with the New Year.
However, the need to live in the taste of the old New Year is still very strong, like the intense vitality hidden in the bare trunks, just waiting for a spring rain is the green buds of the world. Tet still has to be a happy reunion, glued by the eternal glue that is a Tet tray with delicious dishes from thousands of years old.
A historical past to celebrate Tet Tet long can’t be easily converted into play Tet. And no matter how the evolution of the kitchen, the dining table, and the dishes, the structural composition of the Tet tray has changed, but its role and value remain the same. Thuy is Red thread seamlessly connect every stomach, every piece of calculation, every corner of the soul of each person in the family realm.
Therefore, every time the Lunar New Year approaches, the dedicated women diligently perform their duties by preparing a well-thought-out Tet, with the essence gathered in the Tet tray to celebrate the New Year. worshiping ancestors during the three days of Tet, so that the whole family can be happy with delicious dishes that only Tet can have, and to pass the fire on to the next generation.
Entering December, no matter how busy the minds of Hanoi women are, they have to spend a lot of time preparing for Tet dishes. It is very important, because there is no feast, it is not Tet, because hunger all year round but full for three days of Tet.
Looking at the Tet tray, outsiders can guess the prosperity and happiness of each family, the cleverness of the grandmother. The Tet tray also represents the wish for a full, prosperous and peaceful new year. Ever since I could observe, I have seen my mother and grandmother as well as millions of other women who had to prepare the dishes in the Tet tray meticulously and carefully months in advance.
Perhaps, the young class now will shake their heads in shock when they hear about the Tet dishes that need to be prepared in the same amount of time. Why does it take so much effort, when just picking up the phone, an entire restaurant is placed on the dining table. But still like that, for example, the traditional and indispensable drop ball soup.
Ball drop soup is one of the four main soup bowls that are always present in the trays of important occasions such as death anniversary, cult and especially in the Lunar New Year. These four “four immortals” soups include: Ball – Fin – Bamboo shoot – vermicelli. Particularly, the bowl of vermicelli soup can be replaced with a bowl of curry or cooked squid with vermicelli.
The name of the soup ball evokes curiosity, but the original origin is also very simple. Balls are made from boiled pork skin, then dried and roasted with sand to inflate the bubbles on the skin. This piece of ball is inherently light, so when cooking soup, it often floats, looking like a piece of bubble dropped on the surface of the soup.
Now, drop ball soup is still indispensable in the Tet feast, but it is a derivative ball soup called mixed ball soup. But that’s really a mixed ball soup because the bowl of soup includes balls, fried quail eggs, raw ham, sprouts, shrimp, fresh mushrooms, carrots, kohlrabi… whatever it is, cook it. That bowl of ball soup was tasteless and sloppy, far from the old bowl of sloppy soup.
Why such arbitrary derivation? The increasingly fast flow of society also contributes to the responsibility, along with the meticulousness and diligence of the cook also disappearing. Because the drop ball soup is very sophisticated, it takes a lot of work from the preparation of ingredients, as well as the processing and presentation.
Remember the old days, my grandmother prepared the New Year’s ball soup months in advance. Pork skin must be cooked with tenderloin skin, which means that the hair must be made with boiling water, not shaved raw like now. The cooked pork loin has been cleaned of hair and must be boiled until it is fully cooked, then remove the fat from the skin with a knife, then clip both ends to two bamboo sticks and then dry in the sun.
When the skin is dry, take a large pan and roast the sand until it is very hot, then put the skin in and roast until the skin explodes into a ball. The whole pig only has the loin skin to make the standard ball because when roasting, the new ball blooms evenly and is spongy, white, and the shoulder or plum skin, when roasted, the seeds are sprayed without a ball.
The ball that wants to become a raw material for cooking ball soup must be washed, soaked in water to wash rice until soft, then lightly squeezed with ginger juice and white wine to make it white and fragrant. Only then will the balls be washed for the last time and then cut the diamond-shaped pieces to cook soup or let the big pieces roll to make ball rolls.
Balloon soup is indispensable without shrimp. My grandmother usually buys a few fish, clamps it on a chopstick, splits it in half to dry it on the terrace, peels it off and stores it separately. Shrimps are stored separately in sealed glass jars. The dried shrimp is moldy right away, just throw it away. Shiitake mushrooms are also bought from a month of drying and storing. And then there’s a bunch of other little things.
Then, the bowl of soup dropped in the New Year’s tray through her hand was as bright as a miniature Spring painting. Bright yellow omelette, pink sausage, white tenderloin, ivory-white kohlrabi, bright red carrots, light yellow shade like small boats, green peas, dark brown shiitake, red and pink shrimp, green scented leaves. And above all, the broth is shiny and sweet with bone broth and dried shrimp, lightly fragrant with ginger, shrimp, meat, and shiitake.
Even though the ingredients are popular, but containing the emotional nature of the woman carrying the family, that bowl of soup also shows the creativity and sophistication of Hanoi, which is now because of the fast pace of life, so people have little time to take care of a dish and for the whole family.
The grandmother’s fire gradually spread to other women in the family, with the main event being Tet. I still remember the scene of her pacing back and forth, commanding her daughters-in-law to make the year-end meal tray on the afternoon of the 30th. At that time, looking out from the kitchen window, the Turtle Tower was already blurred behind the light drizzle.
The daughters-in-law, including my mother, are being sent by her to make a stir-fry with almonds. Her voice is light but sharp, only one person has to cut the chicken heart evenly, the other person cuts the legs a bit thick, another person brings the ginger and wine ball to clean and then chop the filling.
The atmosphere of making Tet is as fun as Tet. The brides cut, cut, peel, and pick up their hands in the fragrant smell of fried rice. The children crowded around the place where the eldest uncle-in-law was peeling peanuts to make almonds. Uncle laughed and then pinched each of them a few roasted peanuts on the lapel, each of them laughed with their eyes… For decades, those images are still visible when they close their eyes, as if it was just yesterday. .
The almond stir fry is so creative. In the past, there was no refrigerator to store food, there were many tables, every house had to eat five or three chickens. A lot of chicken should also have a lot of chicken hearts. Chicken hearts cooked with vermicelli are also delicious but are rarely brought to the offering tray because they are afraid that the tangled noodles will confuse the elderly. Spirituality is like that, but actually because after the offering is complete, the vermicelli is swollen, so eating is very boring.
In addition, the making of the Tet feast also leaves a lot of leftovers (heads of kohlrabi, carrots, peas) from pickles or trimming decorative flowers. So the fried almond dish was born to solve the above problems even though the almonds were only faked with roasted peanuts because back then there were no almonds available like now.
Chicken intestines, chopped feet, fragrant onions and stir-fried separately, season to taste. Fresh peas stir quickly until the peas are ripe, but the peas still retain their green color. Roast peanuts until golden, put the shell in oil until the peanuts are golden and then mix everything well and scoop out onto a plate.
The plate of almonds is very beautiful: green peas, pink carrots, ivory-white kohlrabi, white peas, light yellow liver pieces, dark purple blood pieces, light purple gizzard pieces. What a brilliant spring flavor. That’s it, the fried almond dish was originally just a leftover, scarred tail, but thanks to the mind of the brave Hanoi women, it became a special dish on the Tet tray.
That is the meaning of the Tet tray, of the traditional Lunar New Year that we always want to keep no matter how the times change. Hanoi women like us still try to keep that fire of tradition, still trying to cook a bowl of ball soup with the correct size that she taught me for that reason.
In the center of the tray is a plate of green banh chung with square dong leaves emitting the aroma of glutinous rice, skull pepper stuck in the lean meat fibers pulled up. Next to it is a plate of boiled yellow chicken meat arranged in the shape of a tortoise shell, sprinkled with inviting strands of lime leaves.
Then there is the plate of frozen meat that is as clear as a cool jelly, the plate of braised meat in dark brown with a glimmer of fat, the plate of braised black carp with galangal for 12 hours, with the bones, served with banh chung very well, the plate of fried spring rolls is as small as a spicy finger, very tasty to eat, crispy, and fragrant in a bowl of mild sour sauce. And indispensable is the plate of salted onions as beautiful as jade lying next to the plate of patterned spring rolls or the plate of pink silk rolls…
I remember, my grandmother’s eyes were slightly dimmed as she looked at each dish, at the whole Tet tray, at the daughters-in-law and daughters who were contemplating the final stages. The satisfaction radiating in her eyes caused the wrinkled skin to tighten like a reflection. After that, she told my mother to go up to the house to invite the eldest uncle to bring a tray of rice and place it on the altar so that he could invite his ancestors to come home for Tet.
In the smell of hot food, in the scent of incense flying from the house above, I feel like she is young again, like going back to the time when she was also a daughter-in-law who was taught by her mother-in-law or her husband’s grandmother how to cook Tet dinner. . The wheel of time kept spinning, until now, my grandmother, grandfather and father were on the list of invited me to celebrate Tet with my grandchildren after preparing the year-end table.
That is the meaning of the Tet tray, of the traditional Lunar New Year that we always want to keep no matter how the times change. Hanoi women like us still try to keep that fire of tradition, still trying to cook a bowl of ball soup with the correct size that she taught me for that reason.
But no matter what, the fact that Hanoians in particular or Vietnamese people are still dedicated to making Tet dishes, even if some dishes have derivatives and additions, it is still a good thing because it still tries to keep the old spirit. And thanks to those things, we appreciate the old taste of Tet even more, just through the bowl of ball soup!
Le Hai An