【Wang Zengqi | Wild Vegetables from My Hometown】Louhao

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The novel \"Stories of Danao\": \"At the beginning of spring, when the water warms up, many purple-red reed sprouts and gray-green mugwort emerge on the sandbars, and soon the area turns lush green.\" ”I added a note at the bottom of the page: “Louhao is a wild herb that grows by waterways; it has a thickness similar to that of a pen barrel, with nodes, and produces narrow leaves. When it is about two inches tall, it is called ‘Louhao taizi’, and when stir-fried with meat, it has a very pleasant aroma.” ……”Perilla, as stated in dictionaries, has the pronunciation \"Lou\"; it is a type of herb, specifically white perilla. I don’t think perilla is actually a type of herb – when it is broken off, it doesn’t have the scent typical of herbs, but rather has a scent similar to that of aquatic plants. Su Dongpo’s poem reads: “Artemisia covers the ground while reed sprouts are short.” By mentioning both artemisia and reed sprouts together, it is indicated that they are plants found by waterways; these are what my hometown calls “artemisia shoots”. “In my hometown, the character for “lou” is not pronounced as “lou”, but rather as “Lü”. It seems that perilla is always stir-fried with lean pork; there doesn’t seem to be a vegetarian version. When I was a child, I really loved eating stir-fried water shield sprouts. There was a plate of stir-fried shepherd’s purse sprouts on the table, which made me very excited and increased my appetite. In addition to its pleasant aroma, the sprouts of Perilla frutescens are also very crisp, making a cracking sound when chewed. I have occasionally eaten shepherd’s purse and goji berries when I was in other places; I haven’t eaten the shoots of sweet flag since I left home at the age of 19, and I miss them very much. Last year, someone from my hometown drove to Beijing on business, and my siblings asked them to bring back a plastic bag full of shepherd’s purse sprouts; due to delays on the road, they were already spoiled by the time they arrived in Beijing. I picked some that weren’t too bad, fried them up, and it was still pretty decent.