Soup As Our Love Language

On the Summer solstice, I cooked a humble pot of winter melon soup. There were shredded dried scallops, dices of shrimp, pork and squishy soft winter melon in the soup, as well as Chinese violets that some of which blended in with other ingredients and some floated. I casually took a photo of the soup and posted it on Instagram. A few messages, from people I knew and I didn’t, flew in, saying how long they hadn’t had this soup, how much they missed their moms and how much they missed home. I then learnt that every household had its own tweaks in the recipe of this ordinary winter melon soup. One common trait was that it gave a flavour of home.

Growing up I always had soup on our dining table. Most of the time it was some Cantonese soup cooked for long and slow in a giant clay pot. I drank them, helped prepare them and learnt from them the recipes and healing properties of different crude drugs. Other times we had quick and simple soups like those cooked with tomato, potato and beef, summer wax gourd, sliced pork and salted duck egg, and sweet cream corn and fish maw. During festivities, it must be chicken soup cooked with a variety of dried seafood. I liked them all. To me, a proper dinner always includes a bowl of hot soup.

“There is soup for you.” Whenever I came home late, I would always find this note on the dining table.

Then I became the one who cooked after leaving home for my grownup life. There was a time when I was constantly on the go, and eating out was often the only option. One time when I returned from a work trip, in the middle of the night, with my weariness and jet lag, at the only restaurant that stayed open, I ordered dumplings and soup which had some sort of meatballs.  I returned home, took a bite and had a sip. They didn’t taste good. I felt particularly lonely and pitiful at that moment. I missed home, and the simple but delicious food there. I couldn’t stand it anymore and started to prepare simple food in batches for myself. A tray of dumplings or a big pot of stews, portioned out and stored in the freezer. Different kinds of stock, portioned out, also kept in the freezer. When I came home late, I would make an egg drop soup with chicken stock; when I caught a cold, I would add celery, carrots and a chicken breast into my vegetable stock, together with a hefty load of freshly ground black pepper. I think taking care of oneself is a kind of self-love too. Then, there came dashi on my home cooking journey. Basically, it is stock made of kelp and bonito flakes, which is pretty easy to make. Using dashi packets, however, is utterly fuss-free. Brands with over a century of history inherits the traditional dashi flavour through their shokunin spirit, and has constantly improved. In addition to the original dashi, there are also vegetable, mushroom, and kelp flavour dashi to match for different recipes.

What I use most is the original dashi. In a pot of water, put the dashi packet in, gently move it back and forth with chopsticks to let the aroma of roasted ago (flying fish), smoked bonito flakes, round herring, kelp and soy sauce release into the liquid. In 3 minutes, over medium heat, you will have a pot of golden broth which I would pour by the rim into a bowl of rice, and top it with whatever ingredients I have. A meal with soup and rice, it’s so simple yet satisfying and comforting.

To be honest, anything soupy is soothing to me. Now I am so used to making comforting meals for one with dashi – udon in soup seasoned with sugar and soy, mini vegetable hotpot in winter, soba dipped in chilled dashi in summer and so on. But there are times I want to share my cooking with others, or I should say, I want to share the kind of love in homecooked food and soup with people I care about. I would ask my close neighbours to come over for dinner or I would bring soup over to friends living alone in the same neighbourhood, because I know how “come have soup” can bring warmth to people. Sometimes, friends share what kind of soup they had at home, and I am constantly amazed by the differences in the soups we have despite that we live in the same place. It’s not easy to replicate the flavour of home, I know, but now I have learnt to create my profile of homey flavour in my own way, and share it with those I love and create our own memory of flavours.

A Bit of Everything Rice in Dashi

Dashi Ingredients:
Kayanoya Original Dashi Packet 1 Packet
Water 400ml

Soy-marinated Salmon Roe Ingredients
Kayanoya Original Dashi Packet 1 Packet (Using 1 teaspoon of the dashi powder)
Sake 30ml
MIrin 30ml
Water 30ml
Soy Sauce 1 teaspoon
Salmon Roe 100g

Other Ingredients:
Cooked Rice 1 bowl
Soft  Boil Egg ½ piece
Sanma Tsukudani 1 piece

Steps:

1. Wash and drain the salmon roe. Repeat the process until the water draining from the wash is no longer milky.
2. Pour the sake and mirin into a saucepan and cook to evaporate the alcohol.  Add water and sauce. Tear open the dashi packet, take 1 teaspoon of the dashi powder and mix well with the sauce. Bring the sauce to a boil, turn off the heat and let cool.
3. Mix the salmon roe with the soy dashi. Refrigerate overnight.
4. Pour 400ml of water into a saucepan and put a dashi packet in it. With a chopstick, gently move the packet back and forth until the water turns pale yellow.
5. Bring the liquid to a boil over medium heat. Cook for 2-3 minutes until the dashi turns golden. Take the dashi packet out.
6. Place the rice, egg, sanma and salmon roe into a large bowl. Pour the dashi into the bowl and enjoy it while it is hot.

Kayanoya dashi soup stock powder is available at city’super stores and online store. Please follow Kayanoya Hong Kong to get more information or recipes about the Kayanoya products.

Jo Liu

It’s raining outside, crisp and bleak. Three chubby sparrows took shelter on my balcony and I gave them the baguette bits left on my breakfast plate but they flew away. I stayed in, played Damien Rice on vinyl and made apple crumble. Repeat.

Instagram: foodialoguehk