Cabbage fritters make winter wonderful too: the story of Fourth Sister in Penghu
The first time I ate cabbage fritters was at the opening of Sister Hong's art exhibition. Before that day, Sister Hong had always hoped that the refreshments served at the opening tea party could be old-time Penghu dishes, because the theme of the exhibition was her hometown, Penghu, and the land. She especially hoped that vegetables grown in Penghu's soil could be made into refreshments and, on the occasion of her exhibition opening, that her friends could taste them.
I was one of those ”friends.” Because I had only been in Penghu for one year, there were many foods I had never eaten, especially old-time flavors, which normally are nowhere to be seen. Cabbage fritters, for instance, I had never even heard of! So she overcame every obstacle and appealed to the exhibition's organizer, Huxi Township Office, to replace the bread-shop cakes and pastries commonly seen at opening tea parties with dishes made by the community kitchen; and she persuaded Fourth Sister, who actually had other commitments that day and could not attend, to make her specialty cabbage fritters, this dish she had always longed for, whether you call it a dish, a snack, or a treat.
Because what it fries up into is: little balls!
To my surprise, the shape of the cabbage fritters was like little round balls, so cute, so stunning, and so wonderful!
A winter dream delicacy, one that neither adults nor children can resist reaching out for…
The most abundant vegetable in Penghu in winter is cabbage. Many people grow it. The old-time way to eat it is stir-fried with crushed peanuts, and whatever cannot be eaten is made into pickled cabbage for storage. The more ”labor-intensive” approach is this dish of cabbage balls. After all, you have to chop the cabbage, wait for it to release water and squeeze that out, mix it into flour and stir, and then use a whole pot of oil to fry them one by one. To achieve a crispy-outside, soft-inside texture truly requires skill in controlling the heat.
In households with many children, in an era when there were hardly any snacks, people used whatever ingredients they had, and what dishes could be conjured up depended on whoever was doing the cooking. Frying more vegetable balls served several purposes: first, to coax the children and give them something to nibble on; second, to satisfy the adults' occasional craving for a snack; and of course they could also serve perfectly well as a dish in a main meal, both to go with rice and to fill you up.
People today would surely think nothing of it. Balls are nothing rare, and vegetables are even more commonplace. If you want fried food, salt-and-pepper chicken is everywhere on the streets. As long as you spend a little money, there is almost nothing you cannot buy. The array of delicacies is so vast you do not know where to start, and shops always keep coming up with new items that make people gasp in amazement. A cabbage ball like this, I am afraid, is something no one has seen. Even if it were put on a menu, people would probably show little interest.
Who would have known that only a few decades ago, in Penghu in winter, little golden balls like these made so many people perfectly content and gave them such a hearty feast! Today, we still have the chance to eat them, and through that to experience a spirit of cherishing what one has, coming from an era when materials were not abundant, with a kind of beauty passed on through these little cabbage balls.
I think that this kind of beauty is love.
Fourth Sister inherited this craft from her mother. It was a dish her mother made because she loved her children; now Fourth Sister loves her sisters and her children, so she keeps making a dish like this, letting her sisters relive the memory and letting the children be satisfied.
This is the story of the cabbage fritters. I do not know what kind of luck it was that let me eat them! Perhaps I pretended to be a child, and so was loved too. I actually really want to use a single chopstick to skewer three balls and eat them that way!