Salt and oil (盐和油)

We did not eat stir-fried dishes because we could not afford cooking oil. Occasionally, when we had guests, my parents would use some lard saved from Lunar New Year to stir fry some eggs or vegetables. Dumplings were usually only served to guests, or on holidays like Lunar New Year, the Red Lantern Festival, or the Moon Festival.

We had a narrow-necked bottle used to contain some precious sesame oil. A few drops of sesame oil each time were all we were allowed to season the pickled salty vegetables that we ate every day.

Sesame oil made everything taste good, but it was so precious and expensive that people would only use it a few drops at a time to try to conserve it for as long as possible. It sounds funny now, but people from my village would often longingly wish to be able to gulp sesame oil one day! My mom would tell us about one of my uncles, my dad’s oldest brother, who said his dream was to one day afford to drink sesame oil, directly from the bottle. If he could just do so, he’d die with no regrets! Sadly, he died of stomach cancer in his early seventies, never realizing his dream.

One afternoon, when I was about six or seven years old, I was alone taking care of my younger brother in the house when he said he was hungry. I prepared a piece of cornbread for him, and put some home-made black soybean paste on it. I went to add a few drops of sesame oil to make it savory for him.

However, my untrained little hand started shaking, and the drops became a small stream of oil. I stared in horror at the sight of precious sesame oil wasted on the dirt floor! I remember being afraid but prepared to be scolded by mom after she came home from working in the field. Instead, mom did not blame me at all; rather she quietly cleaned up the floor and cooked dinner for us.

In those days, salt was so expensive. When I was little, I used to think it was quite far from the ocean. But in fact, it is only about sixty miles from the nearest shore, about an hour drive these days. There were salt factories there and salt was quite cheap there, but then we still had no money to buy regular salt.

But we still had plenty of salt. Lots of homemade salt. In my hometown, there were lots of fields with layers of shining salt in them. Some parts of the land were barren and did not grow regular plants. You could clearly see salt oozing from the soil. I think many many years ago, my hometown was part of the ocean.

You would gather the soil, take it home, put it in a big container, and add a lot of water. You’d then get rid of the soil and let the water dry under the sun. Gradually, you could see small flakes of salt floating in the water as the water evaporated. Now I know it took the form of flakes and not crystals because it was not pure, and had a lot of other kinds of salts like nitrates. It is kind of poisonous if you eat too much of it. It tasted kind of bitter.

For a long time, I thought all salt tasted bitter.