Watermelon Crisp: A Sweet-and-Sour Crunchy Coastal Delicacy

Because of work requirements, for an entire year last year, I returned to a growing environment both familiar and strange - the salt zone and the Taijiang inner sea, searching for the food memories of this land. In the past, regarding this salty land, I could only rely on my family's accounts, as well as the scenes of returning home during festivals to worship, to construct a fragmentary impression; yet as for its inner meaning, I still felt somewhat unfamiliar, especially the part about "eating."

It was only through fieldwork and visits to the elders that I learned that in the past, in the barren southwestern coastal region of Taiwan, China, even eating a bowl of white rice was a rare pleasure for people. The elders in their eighties and nineties, using the Taiwanese they were most fluent in, told me how hard life used to be: "Back in our early days, there wasn't really anything to eat, nothing at all! How could anyone be as fortunate as you are now." Of the 10 people interviewed, about 8 used this sentence as their opening remark, and then began to recount in detail their past lives of hardship, as well as the philosophy of "relying on the sea, eating from the sea."

The coastal taste of Tainan, watermelon mian and milkfish

Using dried sweet potato shreds as the staple food was the norm, occasionally mixed with a little white rice; vegetables and fruit were also scarce, with the more common ones being wild vegetables, melons, beans and native fruits; chicken and pork were even more so delicacies that could only be placed on the dining table during festivals, while what was usually eaten was mostly small fish hawked by vendors, or the thin meat obtained through wartime rationing. In an era without refrigerators, considering the preservation of food, cooking methods were mostly pickling and boiling. Precisely because there was so little to eat, nothing edible was ever missed, and thus a good flavor unique to the local area was nurtured. The watermelon mian (watermelon nian) to be introduced today is exactly this flavor.

As for the raw material of watermelon mian, one account says young melons are used, and I have also heard elders say it is made from the white layer between the watermelon rind and the flesh. Regardless of the source, its method is mostly salt pickling, left for several days before eating. The common way of cooking it is mostly boiling it together with milkfish, and this dish has become a common delicacy in coastal restaurants in Tainan - "watermelon mian milkfish soup."

After cooking, watermelon mian has a sourness with a salty note. Some people think it tastes just like pickled melon, but the flavor seems not quite the same. Watermelon mian has the effect of removing fishiness and enhancing flavor, and after being cooked together with fish, it makes the fish soup taste especially refreshing and appetite-stimulating.

Original text here
Text by Wu Ting-yu
Photos by Wu Ting-yu, provided by the Taijiang National Park Headquarters
Edited by Huang Chun-hao