A coastal salty delicacy: simple methods that preserve the fresh flavor
The Philosophy of Living Off the Sea
When it comes to Tainan, the specialty snacks and dishes that use seafood as their main ingredient not only fill the stomachs of locals and supply the calories needed for a day's work, but their distinctive flavors and cooking methods also tease the taste buds of visitors from elsewhere, drawing people to come in search of their reputation. Oyster omelet (o-a-tsian), shrimp crackers, shrimp rolls, fish noodles, oyster omelet, fish thick soup, eel noodles with tomato sauce, milkfish congee, and so on, are already specialty dishes that the public can readily name and specifically seek out to taste.
Last year, by a stroke of fate, I traveled through the area of the historical Daofeng Inner Sea and Taijiang Inner Sea. Through the oral accounts of elders from various places, I discovered that from Beimen in the north to Xishu and Wanli in the south, along this roughly 64-km stretch of coastal land, even though the people lived near the sea to one another, they were constrained by factors such as terrain, water sources, and economic policy, and thus possessed different food memories.
The elders I visited ranged in age from 75 to 99. They always shared with me their daily dietary experiences from birth onward, including the period of Japanese colonial rule and the postwar era. Broadly speaking, the coastal areas north of the Yanshui River were mostly reclaimed tidal land, lacking water sources and difficult for developing agriculture, yet suitable for fish pond farming, so aquaculture culture flourished; while Anping and the South District, because they were close to Anping Port and Sindah Port, compared with other areas, more often ate fresh catches from the nearby sea.
The Link Between Diet, Industry, and Rural Villages
In the scorching summer, traveling along Provincial Highway 17 to visit nearby villages, one often sees scenes of roadside vendors or households drying milkfish under the sun. Milkfish is an ingredient that local residents can commonly obtain. It can be simmered into congee or cooked into thin noodles, providing a source of the calories needed for daily meals and for getting through work, and it was also a delicacy placed on banquet tables during wartime as a substitute for expensive fish. From records in historical sources such as ancient poems, newspapers, and literati diaries, fish ponds and salt fields had been important local industries since the Qing dynasty, driving economic development and creating the prosperous scenes of Taiwan's early salt industry and aquaculture industry. But with land development and the rise of industry and commerce, the humanistic atmosphere of former days gradually faded, leaving behind declining farming and fishing villages, as well as the elderly people living there.
Visiting these village settlements, the elders always spoke in fluent Taiwanese, telling me, a young person, the "old-time words" that were hard to understand because of generational differences and different life backgrounds. They also sighed over the hardships of past life, reminiscing about those youthful years of striving bare-handed. The environment they relied on for survival, along with industrial relocation and the fixed impressions they had formed from their past work experience in farming and fishing, forced their next generation to rush about in various places, seeking suitable room for development. Except in recent years, under the influence of the broader environment, the profits from the aquaculture industry could rival working away from home; few young people are willing to return to their hometowns to cultivate deeply, and elderly care in rural villages has also become a social problem urgently in need of solution.
From the policy perspective, over the past twenty years, the government has placed increasing importance on hardware construction and industrial development in remote areas, which in turn awakened the public to focus on tracing and constructing cultural history. The rise of cultural tourism and rural micro-travel has allowed local foods and the oral histories of elders to be preserved and recorded. Local memory, skills, and flavors convey a strong sense of nostalgia and human warmth, and also give old rural villages new life.
Original text here
Text by Wu Ting-yu
Photos by Wu Ting-yu
Edited by Huang Chun-hao