Late-summer kiln-baked bamboo shoots, a gift coaxed from the earth

Photos/Zeng Xiaomei

Autumn has arrived, and soon there will be no more bamboo shoots to eat! It really makes me sad.

When I was little, I did not understand that food comes in seasons. Wrapped in a scarf, I would still go pester Ma for bamboo shoots to eat, asking her all year round: "Are there bamboo shoots to eat today?" In summer, Ma would fix bamboo shoots for me every day; in winter, Ma would say: "There are no bamboo shoots today, and even if there were, they would not taste good!" Eventually, after she had raised me a bit older and I could tell the four seasons apart, I learned to wait until I heard the cicadas before pestering Ma for bamboo shoots. But the bamboo shoots at the market are not delicious every day.

Any food is at its best fresh and in season; no matter how you cook it, it tastes wonderful.

The freshest of all is to grow some in your own vegetable garden and cook them right after picking. That truly is a delicacy on earth. So when Pa and Ma plant vegetables, whatever the children love to eat, they must find a way to grow it. Ma says it like this: "You have all grown up and run off elsewhere, but for the sake of something good to eat, every so often you still come to the garden to look for us." And that is true. It is always summer when I overcome every obstacle to go to the garden and find Pa and Ma.

This summer was the same. What is more, this summer my second sister said: "Let us go to the garden and do a kiln bake!" Kiln bake - have you ever eaten it? This was my first time eating a field kiln bake, and I tell you, it was so delicious it went right off the charts!

In the fallow rice paddy that had been scorched by the blazing sun for quite a while, the soil had split from dryness, and clumps of earth that could be pulled off were everywhere. My younger brother and Pa stepped up; the job of digging the pit and building the kiln belongs to the men, while the women wash and sort the ingredients.

The best things for a kiln bake are nothing other than a whole chicken or a whole fish. These are stuffed full of garlic grown in the garden and become garlic chicken or garlic fish. And the vegetables from the garden best suited to a kiln bake are exactly those that already grow in the soil, sweet potato and taro-yam and the like, but I do not care for any of those. The king of summer is the bamboo shoot, and bamboo shoots are treasures that grow in the soil too. After eating so much bamboo shoot soup, stir-fried bamboo shoot slices, and chilled sliced bamboo shoots all summer long, it was just right that at the end of summer we would kiln-bake bamboo shoots too!

The bamboo shoots were hunted out from the soil of the bamboo grove, then cut free with a crescent moon knife, taking only the shoots that were just right to eat. Once harvested and rinsed clean, they could go into the aluminum foil bag for the kiln bake, then be wrapped in wet newspaper and left waiting to be buried in the earth again.

Once the ingredients were sorted, my younger brother had also finished digging the pit, and the whole family built the kiln together, digging up clods of earth, carrying clods of earth, stacking clods of earth, building a genuine earthen kiln in one corner of the field.

Then Pa cast aside the city-style fire starter my second sister had prepared and used the surplus dry rice straw left after the rice harvest as tinder, plus some wood brought from who knows where, and just like that began burning the earthen kiln in the rice paddy. It was also at this moment, when the fire burned bright and the soil began to turn red, that the earth's natural fragrance came along with it. So the soil is this fragrant, like the sweetness of flowers. For the first time I felt that being a farmer's daughter is so blessed, just for this smell of earth I had never smelled before!

And even more rare was the time the whole family spent like this, breathing in the scent of the soil, waiting for the kiln to heat, and chatting a little.

When the kiln had burned red enough, which was also when the wood had turned to charcoal, the food could go in. Once the food was in place, the kiln was crushed down, crack crack crack, letting the soil smother the food, and the more solidly it was smothered the better.

Then came more waiting. The longer the wait, the softer and more thoroughly stewed the food became, and the richer its aroma. Just like people: the more they go through and the longer they endure, the more brilliantly their lives can bloom.

Only when the daylight had gradually dimmed did we take a flashlight to open the kiln, and the piping-hot feast, clinging with the fragrance of soil and firewood, was ready to be eaten. The bamboo shoots could be peeled open and bitten into in big mouthfuls, and in the mouth there was the fine texture of something freshly harvested and the most natural fragrance of the earth. It is a flavor no restaurant anywhere can find.

Truly, being a farmer's daughter is so blessed.

Besides the freshness of the ingredients themselves and the solid smother-cooking, what makes a kiln bake most one of a kind is that it uses soil from cultivated land, still holding a little leftover rice chaff, and the natural fragrance of wood to give the food a natural aroma that cannot be sought and cannot be met by chance.

And this delicacy is a luxurious meal for us as farmers' children. Pa says that soil used for a kiln bake can no longer be farmed, because the soil's nutrients have all been cleaned away by the high heat, and vegetables will not grow well in it either. So this blessing comes from the luxurious use of the land. It is an extra gift that farmers beg from Mother Soil - a delicacy hidden away by Mother Soil.

Only land that has truly been farmed will have the delicacy treasured by Mother Soil. It is the best reward Mother Soil leaves for farmers.