The Scent That Led Me Back to the Fishpond

This morning, I harvested a couple of tender tips from my green Malabar spinach.

I did not need scissors. I held a stem between my thumb and finger and pinched. It yielded easily—a quiet little snap that told me the shoot was young enough for the kitchen.

Then came the smell.

It was green, earthy and strangely familiar. For a moment, I was no longer standing beside my balcony garden in Singapore. That scent had opened a door, and through it I found myself back in Pangasinan, beside the fishponds of my childhood.

I remembered a plant we called balangbang.

The vegetable beside the water

Balangbang grew along the sides of fishponds, close enough for some of its leaves to touch the water. It was not planted in neat rows. Nobody had to prepare a garden bed for it, buy a packet of seeds or draw up a feeding schedule.

It simply grew where land and water met.

Its young green growth could be gathered and brought home. The tender portions were made into atsara—not quite the cold cucumber pickle that the word “pickle” may suggest to Western readers, but a distinctly local preparation.

The balangbang was sautéed with onion and garlic. Strong local vinegar supplied a bold sourness that made the mouth come alive. Ginger or chili could be added for heat. The result was sharp, savoury and spicy: a humble vegetable transformed into something memorable.

It tasted very good with rice. More importantly, it tasted of home.

Only many years later did I learn that our balangbang was likely the mangrove leather fern, commonly known elsewhere in the Philippines as pagaypay, palaypay, lagolo or pakong-laut. It is probably Acrostichum aureum, a fern naturally associated with mangroves, tidal streams, brackish wetlands and fishpond margins.

The scientific name was never necessary when we were children. We knew where the plant grew, which parts were tender and how they were prepared. That was knowledge of another kind—passed from one household to another and from one generation to the next.

Two plants, one remembered scent

Malabar spinach and balangbang are not close botanical relatives.

Malabar spinach, Basella alba, is a fleshy tropical vine. It climbs eagerly, producing soft stems and thick green leaves. Balangbang is a fern whose long fronds rise from wet ground near ponds, streams and mangrove areas.

One reaches upward by twining around a support. The other rises from the muddy edges of the water.

Yet the young growth of one reminded me immediately of the other.

Perhaps it was the fresh scent released when I pinched the Malabar stem. Perhaps it was the tenderness of the shoot in my hand. Memory does not always return through photographs or carefully preserved objects. Sometimes it travels through an aroma so ordinary that we do not realize we have carried it for decades.

One small harvest was enough to bring back a fishpond, a familiar vegetable and the flavours of a family meal.

Different places at the table

Although the aroma connected them in my memory, I prefer to prepare the two vegetables differently.

For Malabar spinach, simplicity is enough. I like the tender tips steamed, allowing their mild green flavour and soft texture to remain recognizable. They can also be used as a garnish or added near the end of cooking a mung bean dish. The leaves soften readily, while their natural mucilage lends a gentle body to the broth.

Balangbang belonged to another preparation. Its character came alive with onion, garlic, vinegar and heat. That was the atsara I remembered—bright, sour and assertive.

The plants may meet in memory, but each deserves its own place in the kitchen.

Nourishment without grand claims

Malabar spinach is valued as a leafy vegetable that provides fibre and a variety of micronutrients and plant compounds. Depending on growing conditions and preparation, its leaves can contribute carotenoids, vitamin C, folate, calcium and iron to the diet.

Far less detailed nutritional information is readily available for balangbang. We do know that the tender young shoots of Acrostichum aureum have traditionally been eaten as a vegetable in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. That traditional use is important, but it is better not to turn a cherished local food into another exaggerated “superfood.”

Neither plant needs extravagant health promises to earn its place at the table.

Their value lies in something both simpler and greater: they are fresh vegetables, gathered young and prepared as part of a varied local diet. One now grows in a pot on my balcony. The other once grew freely beside the fishponds.

When the landscape was the marketplace

Looking back, I realize how unusual that childhood food environment was.

At the time, it did not seem unusual at all.

Vegetables could be gathered from the edges of fishponds. Freshwater fish came from ponds and rivers. Other food came from the sea. The community lived within reach of several natural food sources, each shaped by a different kind of water.

The river offered one abundance. The fishpond offered another. Beyond them, the sea supplied its own.

Food did not always begin in a shop, wrapped in plastic and marked with a price. It could begin with someone walking beside the water, noticing which shoots were tender. It could arrive with a neighbour’s catch, a family harvest or something gathered from land that everyone knew how to read.

The resources may have seemed endless then. Of course, no natural resource is truly without limit. Rivers can become polluted. Fishponds can disappear. Wetlands can be filled, and useful plants can vanish when the places supporting them are changed.

But the feeling of abundance was real.

It came not only from how much food was available, but from how much the community knew. People recognized edible plants. They understood the seasons and the waters. They knew what could be gathered, what should be left to grow and how each ingredient could be prepared.

Abundance was partly a gift of the landscape—and partly a gift of shared knowledge.

What younger generations may not recognize

To younger readers, a vegetable growing unattended beside a fishpond may sound like a novelty. Food today is more likely to be encountered first on a supermarket shelf, in a restaurant or through a photograph on a screen.

That convenience has its advantages. But something can also be lost when food becomes separated from its place of origin.

A local name such as balangbang contains more than the identity of a plant. It holds a habitat, a cooking method, a flavour and a community memory. When the name disappears, an entire chain of knowledge may begin to disappear with it.

Older readers may recognize this feeling. Perhaps their remembered plant had another name. Perhaps it grew beside a rice field, along a riverbank, behind a house or on the edge of a forest. Perhaps its scent can still return them to a particular kitchen and to people who are no longer seated there.

The details differ, but the journey is the same.

A balcony vine and a bridge to home

My Malabar spinach grows far from those Pangasinan fishponds. It lives in a pot, trained around a support on a high-rise balcony. I water it, guide its vines and decide which tender tips to harvest.

It is not balangbang. It will not become balangbang even if I prepare it with the same vinegar, onion and garlic.

But on this particular morning, it became a bridge.

The tender stem yielded beneath my thumb. Its scent rose into the air, and suddenly distance and time seemed smaller. The balcony opened onto a remembered fishpond. A present-day harvest found its way into a childhood kitchen.

That is one of the quiet gifts of growing food.

A plant nourishes us when we eat it. Sometimes, before it even reaches the cooking pot, it nourishes something else: our connection to a place, a people and a way of life we once thought would always be there.

All it took was a pair of tender green tips—and one familiar scent.