My love of broad beans started in childhood years. In my earliest memory my grandmother fed road beans to me when I was just a baby girl living with my grandparents in a village in Shaoxing. In Shaoxing, broad beans are called the arhat beans because they look somewhat like the image of an arhat in Buddhism. These beans were the most favorite between-meal nibbles in the years when I was a kid.

Also in my memory of childhood years, we kids stole broad beans from vegetable gardens of our families in turn. Broad beans in days after the Qingming Festival are sweet, tender and succulent. We took the beans out of their fuzzy pods and threw them into the mouth and chewed the juicy beans like a glutton.

When I was a kid, my father always bought broad beans when they were first available in the local produce market no matter how exorbitant they were. These broad beans were cooked in water without taking the pods off. This is my father’s favorite recipe. My mother gives us a different broad bean treat. Her recipe is for broad-bean rice. Ingredients in her recipe are diced ham, broad beans, and glutinous rice. Over the past decades, I have enjoyed the treat every year. My daughter in Shanghai and my sister’s daughter in Beijing come back to visit us in the spring time every year. I know in my heart they also come for the broad-bean rice my mother prepares after the Qingming Festival when broad beans are available.

In Shaoxing, there are many ways to turn broad beans into delicious dishes. When broad beans are fresh and tender and succulent, they can be directly cooked in plain water, they can be an ingredient in egg soup, steamed with bacon, or cooked with amaranth. Dehydrated broad beans can be rehydrated and let shoots come out. Such broad beans can be cooked with pickled vegetables. Dried broad beans can also be turned into between-meal edibles. In the 1970s, an age of economic shortages, broad beans were the best thing for us. My mother, a teacher who knows how to cook, has recipes for preparing broad beans in sand or in hot edible oil. I remember being awed by her brief lectures on the way she prepares such delicious snack food.

Deep-fried broad beans are a most time-consuming delicacy. My father likes it best. Naturally my mother gives me a detailed lecture on how to deep-fry broad beans. Dehydrated broad beans must be steeped in water until they become so soft that one can use a kitchen knife to give each bean a cut. The cut must not be too deep or too shallow. The cut must be about two-thirds into a bean so that after deep fried, the husk can be easily removed. When deep fried, broad beans can, due to the cut, open like flowers. That is why deep-fried broad beans are called “orchid beans” in Shaoxing. The deep-fried broad beans my mother prepares are delicious and crispy. A bowl of deep-fried broad beans is a must at our family reunion dinner on the eve of the Spring Festival. My father goes so far as to state that it is the broad beans that make the dinner complete.

In my teenage years, broad beans were the best between-meal edible at the time when the national economy was struggling hard for growth. Nowadays, there are all kinds of snack food. However, broad beans remain as our family’s favorite, for they are part of our memories, our love for each other, our sense of happiness and togetherness.