"Plain rice from my mother's womb" and the meaning of the family meal.

Vietnamese home-cooked meals place the emphasis on "rice," highlighting the fragrant, sticky rice grain.

A typical home-cooked meal usually features a variety of savory dishes, stir-fries, and soups, all intended to be eaten with rice. It's rare for a single dish to be the main course while rice is secondary, unless it's a casual meal.

In Vietnamese culture, a meal seems to be about satisfying hunger and feeling full. "Rice as plain as mother's own flesh" – a memorable saying still passed down in our country. Speaking of plain rice, this is the most common type of rice, made from non-glutinous rice. Unlike sticky rice, which is very chewy and flavorful, non-glutinous rice has a pleasant, slightly sweet aroma. Sticky rice can be used to make glutinous rice, or mixed with non-glutinous rice for a few days as a snack, or mixed with non-glutinous rice for a different taste; almost no one eats sticky rice year-round like non-glutinous rice.

There are many types of white rice. There's fragrant white rice, Northern fragrant rice, Thai-hybrid white rice, Japanese-hybrid white rice… and so on. Lately, many people have started favoring a healthier lifestyle with brown rice (which is white rice that hasn't been hulled).

When cooking rice, each family has different eating habits. According to many studies, the further up into the mountains or into the countryside, the more people tend to cook rice that is drier and has looser grains. Soft, watery rice is more common in bustling urban life.

Dry, sticky rice grains are often paired with elaborately cooked dishes like braised fish, sun-dried fish, braised pork, etc., making them very appetizing. Softer, plumper rice grains, on the other hand, are more suitable for quick-cooking dishes such as stir-fries, soups, stews, and steamed dishes.

A bowl of fish sauce to dip together.

It's hard to find a "shared dipping sauce" culture as natural and distinctive as Vietnam's. Even when sharing a meal, in other countries, each person usually has their own bowl of dipping sauce to prevent dipping into someone else's. In Vietnam, placing the bowl of fish sauce in the center of the table symbolizes connection among all those eating. The bowl of fish sauce is the focal point, drawing people's attention.

No matter how abundant and delicious the food on the table may be, many people still have the habit of dipping their rice in a little chili fish sauce to enhance the flavor of this "masterpiece." The fish sauce must be a carefully fermented, high-quality sauce, with added fresh chili, and sometimes even lemon, kumquat, ginger, or garlic depending on the dish. A bowl of hot rice, freshly scooped from the pot, eaten with meat and vegetables dipped in the fish sauce, explodes with a pungent, spicy flavor.

Fish sauce is the perfect dipping sauce for boiled vegetables, boiled pork belly, steamed eggs with runny yolks, and fragrant steamed fish with ginger… A bowl of fish sauce is a condiment, a part of Vietnamese culture, and the final brushstroke on the canvas of a traditional Vietnamese family meal.

Where there's salt, there must be soup; the chicken clucks, the lime leaves...

While dinner in other cultures is predictable and follows specific standards, it's difficult to find this at our own dinner table.

You can enjoy dinner in America with a serving of fried chicken, soda, and a beef burger, or a plate of English-style fish and chips, or, for something more elaborate, a dinner of mushroom soup, steak, and fine wine in France. You can also order a Japanese-style rice and soup set with dishes that are almost always served together, such as rice, miso soup, pickled vegetables, and a plate of grilled fish, or a Korean rice set including rice, kimchi stew, and many side dishes (pan-chan).

In other words, you can easily imagine what you'll be eating today. Or guess what you'll be eating when you're eating Western, Chinese, Japanese, or Indian food... But when you sit down at a meal cooked by your mother, it's very difficult to guess, out of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dishes, what she will serve you.

It could be a bowl of crab soup served with crispy pickled eggplant and stir-fried shrimp with lime leaves, or it could be crispy fried tilapia dipped in fragrant garlic and chili fish sauce, served with a plate of boiled water spinach and broth infused with a few sour starfruit. Mother's skill and ingenuity in keeping home meals fresh and delicious is something that none of us, as children, can ever predict before stepping into the kitchen.

No matter how creatively it is prepared, home-cooked meals always maintain certain traditions. For example, a meal must always include a savory dish – the main course to eat with rice, a soup to balance the saltiness, a vegetable dish for added fiber, or a visually appealing stir-fried dish for the man of the house to enjoy with his drinks.

Not only are the traditions on the dinner table preserved, but each dish is also cooked according to its own rules. For example, a plate of boiled chicken must have lime leaves, beef must be served with garlic, or "the grunt pig must buy onions for me"... these have become quality cooking recipes passed down orally from grandmother to granddaughter, and from mother to daughter.

While fresh, heartfelt meals prepared daily might seem inherently creative, they are actually meals that adhere strictly to the elaborate rules and regulations passed down from our ancestors. Home-cooked meals can be prepared according to individual family preferences, but few venture far beyond the age-old traditions of soup, seasoning, and stir-fries.

To conclude our sharing about home-cooked meals, Travellive hopes that through this article, readers will be reminded of memories of family meals, of the familiar dishes that our grandmothers and mothers used to raise us all.

Ha Chuu