Small black seeds, and what they remember
When I was a girl there was a drink sold near the school gate with tiny seeds floating in it, swollen soft and held in sweet water like little planets. Basil seeds, hạt é. I had not thought about them in years, and then one morning I stirred chia into a jar of milk, watched the seeds bloom into the same soft galaxy, and stood in my kitchen in England suddenly nine years old.
The jar of Elan organic chia seeds has lived on the counter since, next to the rice, refilled twice now. Chia is not hạt é, a cousin rather than a sibling, but the kinship is close enough that my spoon knew what to do before I did.
Some things I have learned from living with the jar, in no particular order:
- They taste of nearly nothing. This is their best quality. They go into porridge, into yogurt, into Thành's morning smoothie, and nothing about the flavour announces them.
- Overnight is the trick. Three spoonfuls in a small jar of milk before bed, a little honey, and by morning it is pudding. Nấm calls it frog's eggs and eats it anyway, which I consider the highest possible endorsement from a four-year-old.
- Do not eat them dry by the spoonful. They drink many times their weight in liquid, and they will do that drinking somewhere, so let it be in the jar and not in your throat. Give them their water first.
- The bag is a sensible size. Small enough to finish while it is fresh. One reviewer made exactly this point and I nodded at my phone.
- A spoonful thickens a too-thin soup or a fruit compote without anyone noticing, a trick I use more often than I admit.
The reviews sit at four and seven tenths stars across some ten thousand people, most of them saying gentle versions of the same thing. Fresh, clean, they gel well, they vanish into whatever you already eat. Nobody is excited, exactly. It is not an exciting food. It is a quiet worker, and the ratings read like a good reference letter for one.
What the label says, for those who read labels: organic, raw, nothing added, and full of the fibre and omega fats that make them worth the cupboard space. What the label does not say is that a jar of seeds can hold a school gate, a paper cup, a country you carried with you. That part comes free.
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