One man’s weed is another man’s prized food: 03 (莧菜 / 苋菜 / xiàn cài / amaranthus)

 

I first went to the French farm at Easter 1996, then every summer until 1999/2000, before picking up the visits again annually from 2006.

    After the first few visits, I started to notice a plant growing wild all over the French countryside where the farm is (which is Gers in the south-west), that looks very similar to 莧菜 / 苋菜 / xiàn cài, which my grandma used to grow in her kitchen garden on her coconut plantation.  

    I don’t remember it being commonly sold in the vegetable markets in Singapore during the 60s.

    The 莧菜 my grandma cultivated would be allowed to grow and grow as we picked and picked the leaves — up the plant, until we couldn’t get much foliage for a stir fry (leaves too small).  Then, we’d pull up the whole plant, about 2’/3’ tall at that stage, keeping the root.  We’d clean off the soil, then cut the whole thing into sections of about 1.5” length.   Stir fry, add a bit of light soya sauce, turn down the heat, and simmer.  A totally different experience altogether from eating the leaves:  taste-wise, texture-wise.  And nothing thrown out at all.

    The difference is: the French one has lots of seeds, which the farm mistress lets her hens, roosters and turkeys pick at when they’re allowed out of their pen at the end of the day to scrabble around.  The leaves are much smaller, so that one can’t get much foliage out of each plant for a stir fry.  I did try, though, to do a stir fry with chopped-up garlic one day — similar in taste, but I didn’t manage to get too much to make a proper dish portion, and also in case it was not safe.

    When I took my second sister to the farm one summer, she too asked me, “Is this plant what Grandma used to have in her kitchen garden?”

    I did ask the farm mistress what it was.  She said, “Just a weed,” shrugging her shoulders.

    With every visit, I thought what a shame she’d let her backyard supply of this delicious green leafy veg go to seed.  So much joy could be had out of it as a stir fry ingredient, with chopped-up garlic thrown in.

    I’ve since located it online:  it is amaranth, but not as a food item on the Western dinner table.  Instead, it is a bit of a popular indoor plant / greenhouse item with its cascading clusters of red seeds, so it’s a display plant rather than for eating.  (Here's a generalisation:  being practical and much more realistic and down to earth, the Chinese tend to look at plants first as a food item.  This could be due to the history of food shortages from droughts and other reasons.)

    Googling it has netted this:  

Quote

Amaranthus cruentus is a flowering plant species that is native from Central Mexico to Nicaragua. It yields a nutritious staple amaranth grain, being one of three Amaranthus species cultivated as a grain source, the other two being Amaranthus hypochondriacus and Amaranthus caudatus. 

Unquote

    So, it looks like the version I’d seen on/around the French farm is the seedy cousin of Grandma’s leafy, kitchen garden version.  It’s the version prized for its grain, instead of being left to get too old purely because the French do not think of it as human food.  Still, the farm mistress did dismiss it as “weed”.

One man’s weed is another man’s prized food: 02 (薺菜 / 荠菜 / jì cài / Shepherd's purse)

 

A mainland Chinese student, who was on the M.A. Bilingual Translation course I was teaching in the late 90s, was clearing out her room, and gave me a whole stack of a Chinese equivalent of Reader’s Digest.

    In it was a short article by a mainland Chinese couple who’d gone to Germany for their study abroad.

    They were out walking in the woods one day with a German couple, when they saw a plant they thought they recognised as 薺菜 / 荠菜 / jì cài.  When they asked their German friends what it was, they were told, “It’s just a weed.”

    Later, the Chinese couple went back to that spot and picked a load of the “weed”, cooked it and confirmed that it was indeed what they thought it was.  

    They then invited the German friends over for dinner a few days later, and served up the “weed”:  as a stir fry, and in the filling of home-made dumplings.  When asked for their opinion, the Germans said it was delicious.  The Chinese couple then said, “This is what you called ‘a weed’ the other day when we asked you.”

    薺菜 / 荠菜 / jì cài is shepherd’s purse in English, with the Latin name of Capsella bursa-pastoris.  

    It is also widely considered a weed here in the UK (by non-foragers), but there are deep frozen, commercially packaged dumplings with specifically 薺菜 filling that are sold in Chinese supermarkets over here.  

    So, what’s a weed to some is, for others, money-making, dumpling-filling material, not just used in home cooking (in order to save money).

One man’s weed is another man’s prized food: 01 (柿子 shìzi / Persimmon / kaki / Sharon fruit)

 

The title of this series is my own wording for a common enough saying, with variations like “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.  

    The version in my (S.E. Chinese) dialect of Teochew is:  “When you desire something, it is betel nut.  When you don’t, it is weed.”

 

    The betel nut tree looks like a very young or undernourished coconut tree, with clusters of betel nut which also look like under-developed coconut.  Betel nut is chewed with slaked lime and betel leaves for stimulant and narcotic effects.  A common practice in the Singapore of my childhood days, and in the Taiwan of 1975–76 when I was working there.

    What has prompted this blog are cutaway and background shots of a fully-loaded, leafless persimmon tree in a YouTube video of a DIY undertaking that I recently dipped into. 

 

    Other names for the persimmon fruit are kaki (from the Japanese) and Sharon fruit (from Israel), just to name two, more commonly known ones in the market over here in the UK.

    The persimmon fruit matures in late autumn and can stay on the tree until winter.  

    I’d grown up in Singapore eating bright orange (skin and flesh) fresh persimmon (in season only), and dried persimmon (柿餅 / 柿饼 / shì bǐng / "persimmon pancake", flattened and coated with icing sugar), both imported from China (I think), so I never saw the tree.  

    The price an impatient child in my childhood days paid for not waiting until the fresh fruit had ripened properly was to have his/her tongue fur up.  (Googling the effect tells me it’s from the tannin, although I didn’t know what it was at the time, just that it must've been the sap from the unripened flesh.)  Not a nice sensation, and one that is a strong deterrent to stealing a bite before time.

    My next encounter with the fruit was in Taipei in 1975 when I was working there for Conoco Taiwan.  I had just emerged from watching a matinée in the cinema area one day, and saw a man with two traditional Chinese wooden buckets, one on each end of his shoulder pole.  Floating in the brine in the buckets were light yellow / pale orange halves, which he said were persimmon.  Fully ripened persimmon has jelly consistency flesh; those light yellow / pale orange halves in his buckets definitely looked hard and crunchy.  I decided to try one, even though I didn’t think one could eat unripened persimmon.  No furring, and not bad, though not as sweet as the fully ripened version.

    My third encounter was in Japan, where I’d stayed for six weeks into early autumn.  I was walking along a back route to Machida train station one late afternoon when a bright orange blob fell from one of the trees lining the path, straight past the front of my face onto the ground in front of me.  Splat!  It was a ripened kaki fruit that had detached itself from the branch above.  I looked up and saw that the whole path was lined by leafless trees, about the height of small-medium apple trees (about 8’–10’), all be-decked with bright orange baubles, like Christmas trees.

    After I was made redundant in 2011, I spent my first winter on the French farm.  (I usually went in the summer when there was plenty of work to do, picking mainly tomatoes and making preserves for the winter.)  

    I’d gone into the village (St Jean le Comtal in Gers, which is about a mile away from the farm) one day with the mistress of the farm, and not being able to speak French, I was waiting for her outside while she was catching up with the locals inside the village hall.  

    Pacing up and down the village street, I saw bright orange baubles on the ground:  one here, one there.  They looked like persimmons!  Looking up, I saw a tree by this two-storey house, reaching up to the roof, so it was about 20’ tall.  A completely leafless tree, be-decked with bright orange baubles of almost uniform size.  The ground of the garden was littered with persimmons.  

    Why were they just left lying on the ground?  I later asked the farm mistress.  She said they were inedible.

    I took a couple back to the farm and tried them.  Yep, persimmons all right, but not terribly sweet.  Maybe needed to be left on one side for a while to ripen.  

    I wish I’d gone back the following days to pick them up off the ground.  I never went back to the French farm after that, so that opportunity is now lost forever.

(Singapore 1960s / Taiwan 1975 / Japan 1993 / France 2011)

The missing link (London)

 

I’ve got to the point in my life as a septuagenarian where I’m surrounded by people of my age (plus/minus a few years).

    This means that I also keep finding my brain constantly being challenged by conversational exchanges with strange logic or missing links.

Example 1:  

Susan (not her real name) brought up the subject of Gavin (not his real name) who, by a few accounts, is a difficult person.  They go to the same social club once a month, but are on nodding terms only.

    Susan said Gavin had had a go at the hotel staff at breakfast on a tour the social club had organised, just because they’d run out of eggs, saying, “He could’ve just put in a request for them to go and make some more.  Why throw a wobbly over such a small thing?”  

    I said, “I understand he’s divorced.  Maybe that’s why he’s divorced — difficult to live with.”  

    Susan then said, “But his wife still buys him the furniture for his flat!!”  

    I was surprised that she’d know so much about his private life, “How do you know that?  Did he tell you?  Do you know him well enough for him to tell you such things?”

    It turned out to be a different divorced man — one who lives in the same block as Susan.

Example 2:  

Mrs Lee (not her real name) lives in Cornwall but was visiting her son in London for a month.

    In her second week in London, I went to visit her on a Monday, and started to tell that I’d chanced upon some reduced-price fruit and veg at Supermarket X (a chain with branches all over the country), “Oh, by the way, last Saturday, I went past Supermarket X.  There were apples…” and she finished off the sentence for me, “…reduced to 69p.”  I was surprised, but carried on, “And pears…”, and she chipped in, “...reduced to 89p.”  Oh!  

    She provided the reduced prices for the next two items as well, so I said, “HOW ON EARTH do you know that?”  She said, “Of course!  I live next to Supermarket X!!”  

    Huh??!!  

    I said, “But you live in Cornwall, I’m talking about the branch in north London!  And I only went there last Saturday — you’ve been in London for over a week, so how do you know their price reductions last Saturday, which is just two days ago?  You’ve been housebound since your arrival in London, and there’s no Supermarket X branch near here.”  

    It turned out that she’d seen their advert (for the latest reductions) on TV.  The reason she’d given, however, was that she knew about the price reductions “of course”, because she lives “next to Supermarket X”.

Example 3:  

Sally (not her real name) and I were talking about the Chinese community centre where she goes to for lunch once a week.  I asked about the new cook:  what he’s like, how his cooking compares to that of the last one who’d retired.  We carried on a bit, reminiscing about the previous cook who was such a nice and kind man.  

Sally then said, without there being a gap in the conversation, “Adam got kicked out!”

Adam (not his real name) used to be a volunteer as a kitchen hand at that Chinese community centre.  Sally keeps in touch with him, so she knows his latest movements (him doing part-time work as a cleaner, e.g.) and developments (not working at the community centre anymore).

I said, “But I thought he’d left because of his bad back??!!  What did he do to get kicked out??”

It turned out that Sally was referring to Adam losing his rented flat.

Example 4:

Alice (not her real name) had asked me to track down a particular item (X) at a particular supermarket chain.

    Every time I have delivered her fruit and veg, which I buy for her as she can’t carry them because her legs are not strong enough, she wants me to text her when I reach home.

    Last week, I sent a text, upon arriving home, to say I’d got home, adding in a new paragraph that I couldn’t find the item X she’d wanted me to buy at that supermarket chain.

    Her reply came back with, “Excellent!”

    Now, is that excellent that I’d got home in one piece, or excellent that I’d failed to find item X??  Has to be the former, but surely one doesn’t provide one answer to a text that mentions two different matters, or one does a reference (like they do with the Subject line in an email, or in the old fashioned way, “With reference to…”), which can be simplified to, e.g.,

    Got home:  excellent!

    Can’t find item X:  oh, never mind.

    This is what I do when I reply to texts: do a summary heading so that the recipient knows what I’m talking about.  Saves a lot of bewilderment (even “What’s wrong with my brain??!!”).  Saves to-ing and fro-ing clarifying.

    I’m getting very worried about my reaching that stage…

    Am I gaslighting myself??!

(London, 2024)

Never off duty: 02 (London)

 

Going home nearly 10pm from doing an early evening massage, I had to change buses at the broadway three bus stops from my house, so decided to drop in at the supermarket there.  This is the way I tend to shop, to save time:  en route home, go in, grab what I want, and leave (after paying, of course).

    Didn’t find what I wanted, but saw some Brussels sprouts reduced in price, to 24p for 500g — because it was closing time, which is when they’d reduce the price for some items which had not sold like hot cakes.  This is another way I tend to shop:  buy whatever’s going cheaper that day (and share them with friends who need to watch their purse strings).

    Went to the cigarette and lottery ticket counter at the far end on one side of the supermarket, because that’s usually the quiet corner.  The young man there, early 20s(??) and from North Africa (I think), was very welcoming, giving me a big smile (compared to the dour, inept and rude service I got from the Chinese young woman at the Chinese supermarket in Chinatown a week earlier, which had left me angry for a long time and swearing never to go back there).

    When I put down the three bags of Brussels sprouts on the counter, the young man said, “24p x 3.  Now how much would that be?”

    It looked like it was not easy for him to work out 24 x 3 in a jiffy.  He could’ve used the till to do it for him, but he could’ve been just engaging an old lady in a social conversation at closing time, which is a quiet time, not necessarily because he was no good at maths.  

    Without thinking, I went straight into teaching gear, to show him a quick method:  “25 x 3 = 75; take away 3 = 72.”

    His face was a right picture:  his eyebrows shot up, and there was a look of enlightenment in his eyes.  It was obvious no one had shown him this quick shortcut at mental arithmetic before.  I was so happy that I was able to show him another way of doing what might’ve taken a longer time to arrive at the sum total.

    After I’d paid, I said to him, “It’s very cold outside tonight, but your smile and your cheerful service have made it warmer for me!”  Another look of surprise, and another happy beam on his face.  I was doubly happy that I was able to end his working day with a beam of sunshine for him.  

    What a difference a bit of friendliness makes (unlike what happened with that horrible woman at the Chinese supermarket).

(London, 2024)