“There were many things we never knew when we were young,” remarked my younger sister, C, just the other day while we were busy preparing dishes for lunch in my house.
She went on to cite the making of simple old fashioned ice-cream as an example. Without any prompting from me, she recalled the simple ice cream we used to enjoy when we were young. Today’s equivalent of yesterday’s ice cream would be the Ice Cream Potong sold at many modern supermarkets.
“It is actually not that hard to make our own ice cream. But when we were young, we did not know that it was relatively easy to make our own ice cream,” she said. As I listened to her, I remembered the big refrigerator that we had which contained only bottles of soft drinks.
When C and I and our other siblings were young, we lived on the first floor of a shophouse. On the ground floor was an ice cream palour which made all types of ice cream. The ice cream palour was popular not only with my siblings but all the children in our neighbourhood.
When I was growing up, I only ate moderate amounts of ice cream. C, who is six years younger than I am, must have enjoyed a lot of ice cream for her to remember so much the ice cream of yesterday.
From ice cream, my sister went on to talk about the dishes my late grandmother used to cook for us. That morning, C had bought three bundles of wild ferns, popularly known as “Paku Ikan” among the Malays. She suggested we boil the ferns and eat them with “sambal belacan”, an dispensable chili condiment in Malaysian cuisine. That, to me, was a new way of enjoying the wild ferns.
I usually prepare the “Paku Ikan” the way my late grandmother did – by boiling them with a bit water and adding anchovies, chillies, a bit of belacan (dried shrimps), salt and some seasonings. I have also tasted at a Thai restaurant in Kuching Thai-style salad made from “Paku Ikan”. This dish is tasty but tedious to make because it requires many ingredients.
C also told me that our late grandmother was a hardworking lady. As soon as she knew that we were descending on her kampung house during the school holidays, she would be running here and there, looking for wild ferns and other exotic food. She knew how much her grandchilden, born and bred in the town, would relish the jungle food she churned up.
Indeed, as C pointed out, when we were young, there were many things we did not know. I, for one, took my grandmother for granted. I never thought that one day, she would not be there anymore to welcome us with wild ferns and other exotic food. I never thought that one day, she would die and just disappear from this world. I also never thought of jotting down her lovely recipes.
Some relatives thought my late grandmother was fierce but she never raised her voice or got angry with me. She did, however, beat my elder sister for going into a nearby jungle with friends during a flood.
I admire young people who think far into the future and plan well for it. When I was young, there were many things I did not know. I did not know it was good to renovate my backyard as well if I was renovating my front porch. Now, decades later, I regret I did not know this. The costs of workmanship and materials have gone up a lot and I find out now it is not cheap to renovate anything at all.
When I was young, i should have planned my finances well so that I can relax when i retire. When I was young, I should have been more adventurous and visited as many countries as I can. When I was young, there were indeed many things I did not know. I know some of these things now.
