Mother said mustn’t eat green vegetables (Singapore)

 

When I was in my teens, some distant relative’s wife died of cancer, leaving him with two young children: a girl of about eight, and a boy of about six.

    He was away a lot, working on construction projects in Malaysia, so he couldn’t look after them.  It was decided that the siblings should be split up, maybe so as not to burden kind relatives with two children at once.  The boy was sent off to some relative on the mother’s side.  My grandma took the girl in on her coconut plantation.

    One of the things I noticed about the girl right from the start was that she’d refuse to eat green vegetables.

    A bit of cultural background here.  In all my years of growing up in Singapore, I’d never heard of children having trouble eating their greens, not in the way I’ve heard about British children doing it.

    British children, from what I’d read, never liked eating their vegetables because the traditional British way of cooking them was to “boil them to death” (according to an expression that cropped up regularly in the literature I’d come across on the subject), so we hear of British children typically hating Brussels sprouts and cabbage, for example.

 

    The Chinese way of cooking vegetables is most commonly stir-frying them, so they’re not overcooked, they stay fresh and crunchy (not boiled to almost a mush), with the flavour retained.  If children out East don’t like their veg, it generally would be them being fussy (like the younger me about coriander and spring onion, which I’d call “smelly veg”).

    With this in mind, this orphaned girl refusing to eat ALL greens was a bit puzzling.

    I tried to get to the bottom of it, as I didn’t think she should exclude greens from her diet altogether.  I went through the list of possibilities:  was it the way it was cooked, or the sauce used (soya sauce, bean paste, chilli sauce, etc.)?  She couldn’t give a satisfactory answer.

    In the end, she said, “My mother told us not to eat anything that’s green.”

    That was even more puzzling:  how could a woman tell her children not to eat green vegetables?  I couldn’t check with the mother in this case, of course.

    After a while, the penny dropped:  in my dialect (Teochew / 潮州 Cháozhōu, a S.E. Chinese dialect), the word for “green” (the colour) sounds exactly the same as the word for “raw” (uncooked).

    The Chinese are not big on raw vegetables (e.g., salads that feature much more prominently in the Western diet).  I grew up hearing grown-ups saying, "I’m not a horse or a cow!"

    It could be partly due to health concerns, rather like the Chinese not drinking water straight out of the tap, they need to boil it first to make sure it’s safe.  (Just my own theory.)

    So, I put it to the girl:  “I think your mother meant raw rather than green colour veg.”

    Once this interpretation was introduced into her head, the barriers came down, and she ate all her greens after that.

(Singapore, 1960s)

Why are Brussels sprouts so hated by so many?

I don’t remember children in my childhood days in Singapore being so fussy about eating their greens.  It seems to be a big and fairly universal problem here in Britain, if not the whole of the Western world.

The Brits are traditionally known for boiling their veg to death.  One reads stories about cabbage cooked until a pulp, leaving the house reeking of cabbage for weeks.  No wonder the Brits hate the cruciferous family of veg.  They are very nutritious, yet are avoided whenever possible, it seems.  

It is, therefore, the presentation that’s at fault — in this case, over-cooking it, not flavouring it except with water and salt.  (To be fair, the Brits have come a long way since with their attitude to cooking, to the point where Britain has built up quite a reputation for its gastronomy.)

It’s almost unheard of in Chinese cooking to just boil their veg, never mind boil it to death.

It’s so easy to be a vegetarian in Singapore — out East as a whole region, actually.  

One can just have three basic staple flavouring ingredients for a stir-fry: soya sauce, garlic, red chilli.  

There’s a wide range of green leafy veg in the market.  Just stir-fry any of those with the three ingredients, and each one will come out tasting delicious — and different, purely on the basis of their own flavour.  Hardly any work at all.

Just to name a few off the top of my head: 

* Indian spinach (the stalks are reddish at the base) 

* Chinese mustard leaves (commonly served in a Chinese restaurant) 

* amaranth

* sweet potato leaves 

* pak choi

* mange tout (/snow peas) 

* runner beans

They all taste different from each other, so there’s no need to wrack one’s brain for different — let alone elaborate — cooking methods (unless one likes to experiment).  Just use soya sauce, garlic, and red chilli.  Pak choi is very bland, so it doesn’t even need garlic or red chilli.

Brussels sprouts can be quartered and stir-fried the same way.  One can vary it by adding dried mushrooms — the dark brown of the mushroom in combination with the dark green of the sprouts makes a visually attractive dish without having to do little presentation tricks like drizzling some arty sauce around it on the plate or topping it with a carved vegetable rose.  Just stir-fry and serve.  

Oh yes, forgot about the contribution of the garlic and red chilli:  white/cream of the garlic, red of the chilli.  That’s four colours in one dish without needing to have a creative streak.  (That’s why I like it, as I’m not arty at all…)