I was talking about Foochow cuisine in my post the other day about how it was notorious for being bland and more of quantity over quality. Well, I do not think it is a Foochow thing but I reckon that Chinese people in general would want to have soup alongside all the other dishes during their meals. My father’s a true-blue Foochow and he, for one, would insist on that…and if I may digress a bit, he would always grumble about how silly westerners are – having their soup first in a full-course meal with a bun thrown in for good measure. He is of the opinion that after drinking all that soup down and when the bread expands in it, one would be too full to eat anything else.
Anyway, to get back to our discussion about soup, because of the aforementioned reason, my mum would have soup all the time. It could be something very simple – cangkuk manis or kangkong boiled with a couple of cloves of garlic and salt and msg added according to taste. I did not mind the cangkuk manis owing to the sweetness of the vegetable but I would not think I would want to cook either of these this way. There were other vegetable soups with meat or bones in them but we being kids, anything with vegetables would not be on our list of favourites. To this day, I would very much prefer the tauhu kee (bean curd stick) soup or the piansip skin soup…or the fish balls with tung hoon (glass noodles) or the lightly-fried taukwa (firm bean curd cake) stuffed with minced meat soup and every kid’s favourite – the sweet corn soup.
We did enjoy this though…
On days when there was no soup or we had finished it all up over lunch and there wasn’t any for dinner, my mum would make Bovril soup. That is very easy to make – just a spoonful of Bovril with a pinch of msg…
…add hot/boiling water and there you have it! A bowl of nice Bovril soup! As a matter of fact, to this day, I still make this soup to go with our meals sometimes and Melissa quite enjoys it. Way back then, we also had soup made with Marmite sometimes (depending on what we had in the house to eat with our porridge) and it was also quite nice.
I can also recall how once in a while, my mum would cook mee sua…
…and serve it in Bovril soup and I used to enjoy it very much. Well, which kid doesn’t enjoy noodles, you tell me…and during our time, anything like that would be a real treat to behold. We kids were not as fortunate as those today – they probably would scoff at something like this, I wouldn’t be surprised…
Normally, I would have it plain but since I had some spring onions in the fridge, I decided to chop a bit to garnish my bowl of Bovril noodles and I also had some leftover stewed beef, so I added that as well…
But personally, if I were to cook Bovril mee sua today, I would much rather have the dry version…
– the same way as I would cook Bovril kampua/noodles. I think this tastes a lot nicer…and I certainly would love it more.
So tell me, what do you people do with your Bovril other than eating it with porridge? Care to share?
...STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! 