ormerly a village and now a district of the Changzhou city in Jiangsu province, my hometown Jintan is a blessed place embracing a limpid lake and backed by a verdant mountain. The little garlic pancake, among the many folk snacks in Jintan, is a unique spring delicacy highly enjoyed by locals and even tourists. Technically named rocambole, little garlic is a kind of sand leek with a tiny bulb at the end of its stalk that carries a pungent onion-like flavor, making it a popular ingredient for seasoning.

Little garlic often buds in early March when its tender shoots slowly poke out of the soil, stretching their slender bodies to herald the spring. Digging and collecting little garlic is a challenging but fructifying task that demands great care and patience. Generally, little garlic can be found growing with thriving vitality in bamboo groves in the mountain. My parents used to take me to the hillside overgrown with verdant sand leek. A novice like me easily took fright at those tangled thistle vines or bugs lurking hither and thither. My parents, however, dashed around vigorously in the wilderness without scruple. Instead of yanking on the stalk of little garlic and pull out its deep root, my family always instructed me to cut only the upper stem part and leave the bulb buried in the soil for its future luxuriance.

Then comes the process of making the pancakes. The collected little garlic are cut and stirred into puree before mixed with rice flour and beaten eggs to produce several smooth, green pieces of dough. And the moment I finish these flat, palm-sized pies tinted with the tender green and light yellow of spring, a mixture of pride and exhilaration surges over my heart. After the dough pieces are fried in the pan for three minutes or so, a rich aroma of the grass, rice, garlic stuffing wafts around the kitchen and tickles my taste buds. This is the familiar smell in my childhood drifting from the vender’s basket on my way home from school, particularly from little garlic pancakes with crisp, greenish skins and tender filling. Then all the daytime fatigue at school were wiped away with my taste of one.

The little garlic pancake typical of the traditional flavor offers me some insights into the reciprocity between man and nature. My parents often said that the little garlic pancake in the old days when they had barely enough material resources, was a rare, tasty snack that each kid might dream of, or sometimes given from their parents as a reward for good grades at school. Today, we younger people are much better off in a prosperous society and have varieties of domestic and foreign cuisines to choose from. However, many of us are still obsessed with the taste of our hometown. For me, the little garlic pancake can link my heart with the place where my dream began. In spring when I wander along broad avenues or through winding lanes of a strange city, old memories will always flood back to me, to my soul in great solitude. Yet the warm, familiar scent of a little garlic pancake, with the invigorating air it carries, can always soothe my nerves and raise my spirit, motivating me to carry on and embrace the future with passion and love.

This is one of the featured essays collected in "The Flavor of Hometown" held by School of English Studies (SES) in Shanghai International Studies University（SISU）. The author, Gao Chufan, is a graduate student of SES. The supervisor, Li Mei, is a lecturer of English at SISU. Her research areas are English-Chinese contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis and language teaching.