Grandma's Red Hern Chai Soup

Another dish with lots of garlic. I just love this soup. Eating it brings back a lot of memories of my childhood and my loving maternal grandma.


 

The red bayam is a good vegetable for Foochows. Traditionally the Chinese elders believe that it is very rich in iron. Whenever women have given birth to babies in the olden days, they would plant a lot of this vegetable and consume it as a soup or as a stir fry. It is also very good for anaemic girls.

Today this vegetable is  a well sought after restaurant dish especially in good Chinese Cantonese restaurants.

Red Bayam/hern chai was also one of  my maternal grandmother's favourite soups - she believed that so much nourishment can be derived from eating the soup.

A favourite way of cooking the vegetable is to add some dried chien mien (yellow noodles) into the soup, to bulk it up. Whenever my grandmother came to visit us, my sister would cycle to the end of Tiong Hua road to buy freshly dried yellow noodles for this dish. Grandma would also like to bring back some of the chien mien gang for my uncle's family in Nang Chong. That would be for a very hearty Foochow breakfast.

Casual visitors arriving unannounced to visit my grandmother down river, would be given a good treat when nothing else could be offered - my grandmother would ask a grand daughter to pick some good red hern chai from the garden and a quick easy dish could be prepared. Hern Chai Hoong Ngang (rice sticks), with ikan bilis stock ,was also a very popular village dish.

Botanically, amaranth belongs to the family of Amaranthaceae, in the genus; Amaranthus. Scientific name: A. dubius.