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Food memories vary across generations, but for veteran Cantonese opera virtuoso and screen actor Law Kar-ying, the most unforgettable culinary experience revolves around the humble winter melon.
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While commonly regarded as an ordinary, everyday gourd, the vegetable holds deep emotional significance for Law, who credits his late mother with turning an overwhelming childhood surplus into an array of ingenious dishes that reflected her culinary talent and maternal devotion.
Bumper harvest in Fanling inspires a mother's kitchen ingenuity
Speaking with Let’s Eat, Headline Daily’s Saturday food section and sister publication of The Standard, Law reflected on his early upbringing in the rural area of Ping Che in Fanling. Law recalled that his family tended several farm plots to cultivate produce for commercial sale.
During one particular growing season, the fields yielded an extraordinary bumper crop of winter melons, producing an abundance of high-quality produce with tender, velvety textures.
However, the sheer volume of produce across local markets depressed wholesale prices, making commercial distribution financially unviable.
The family decided to keep the harvest for their own consumption, leaving piles of elongated and round gourds stacked at the front entrance of their home. As a young boy, Law often looked at the sea of harvested melons wondering how his household could ever finish them before they spoiled.
Transforming an overwhelming surplus into culinary variety
Faced with a mountain of identical produce, Law's mother demonstrated exceptional resourcefulness to prevent mealtime monotony.
She began by preparing elaborate double-boiled winter melon bowls, carving out the melons and steaming them filled with rich broth, tender chicken, pork, and freshly plucked night-blooming fragrant flowers grown in their own garden.
Recognizing that even the finest banquet dishes could lose their novelty if eaten repeatedly, she regularly altered her techniques. She would scrape out the melon flesh, mash it into a smooth puree, and simmer it into a hearty soup alongside savory chicken broth and minced pork before later serving the diced vegetable into clear broths.
She also explored steamed preparations, notably combining sliced winter melon with pungent fermented bean curd to create distinctive flavor profiles that Law remembers fondly decades later.
Cherishing memories of an irreplaceable maternal touch
Among the wide variety of inventive recipes, Law highlighted one simple preparation as perhaps the most remarkable: a minimalist broth brewed purely from winter melon without a single drop of cooking oil or a pinch of salt. He noted that the broth offered an unadulterated, soothing essence of the vegetable that allowed its natural sweetness to shine through.
Law, who affectionately addressed his mother with a regional familial term, expressed lasting sorrow that her signature cooking was lost forever after her passing, remarking that while the ingredients remain commonplace, the warmth and skill behind her culinary creations can never be replicated.
Let’s Eat, which appears every Saturday, explores the city's dynamic dining landscape, culinary traditions, and weekend lifestyle culture.
