Across the board, Vietnamese food is cheap, delicious and .
. . not for the faint-hearted. Large Vietnamese cities have vast selections of
food stalls and curbside restaurants where Vietnamese people can be seen
eating, drinking, yelling and turfing their chicken bones into the street until
late into the night.
In time you'll discover what Vietnamese food you like and
what Vietnamese food makes your stomach turn.
One of the things which foreigners tend to go mad on to
start with is Vietnamese fruit.
Vietnam is a land in which you can buy fruit twice the size
of a football or with spikes that make it look like a nasty projectile.
However, if you think of yourself as a culinary adventurer, your top priority
should be trying:
(a) jackfruit (Vietnamese "mít"): the flesh of
which is bright yellow and tastes a bit like bubblegum.
(b) custard apple ("mãng cầu"): Custard apples
come in two types. The larger variety is native to Thailand and sour in taste,
the smaller variety is Vietnamese and sweet. Expect to get your fingers covered
in sugary goo when operating a custard apple.
(c) Mangoes ("xoài") also come in different
varieties. The sweet, yellow type known in the West are cheap and plentiful.
You should also try the hard green variety, which are tangy and eaten
with the skin on.
(d) Vietnamese grapefruits ("bưởi") are three
times the size of the acid arrangement common in Australia and the US. Whether
they pack as much vitamin C is a moot point, but they're certainly gentler on
the tongue.
(e) durian ("sầu riêng"). The prince of Vietnamese
fruits. Or the terrorist, if you like. In its natural condition, a durian is a
lumpy object, anything from the size of a basketball to a car tyre, with
dangerous-looking bristles and a thick, woody skin you need a machete to prize
apart. The fleshy part you can eat makes up about 2% of a durian's weight. And plenty
of Westerners find it hard to stomach. This is because, from a Western point of
view, durian, well . . . it stinks. Meaning it has a much stronger smell than
Westerners are used to expect from a fruit. The texture of durian is also the
kind of thing designed to make young girls scream - imagine fresh Camembert,
but add an underlying hint of . . . stringyness. . . Words elude me at this
point. But helpful Vietnamese minders didn't elude me when I was trying durian
during my first trip to Vietnam. In the raw, durian was too much for me the first
time. And the second time. Then my Vietnamese landlady had the idea of putting
my third batch of durian in the freezer. An hour later it came out looking, and
tasting, like an icecream. From that point, I signed up to a life with durian.
To my amazement, and my landlady's gratification, I was suddenly able to eat
durian in its full, unfrozen, horror-movie . . . glumpiness.
At the heart of Westerners' eating experiences in Vietnam would have to be the various types of noodle soup. They're also the favourite lunch-time fodder of a lot of Vietnamese; most types of noodle soup are cheap, widely available and served by the side of the road. Quality varies a lot and special knowledge of out-of-the-way places serving especially good variants is a standard topic of Vietnamese conversation. Guidebooks aren't going to help you find the best places; and while the internet might have some useful tips, local Vietnamese are your best source of information.
Be warned about asking the locals about their favourite places
though. Because most curbside eateries are small and very low-key, most
Vietnamese don't actually know the names or addresses of their preferred phở
venues. So if the venue is up some stairs, down an alley and round a corner,
then you're just going to have to ask them to take you there.
In descending order of fame, the major types of noodle soup
you should try to sample while in Vietnam are:
(a) phở - generally served with sliced beef, or beef offal if you're feeling courageous. I'm guessing you've had phở before in the West.
I'm also guessing you are unaware that what is sold under the title "phở"
in the West would not be regarded by most Vietnamese as proper phở. Phở in
Vietnam, like all the major soup-types, has to come with a set suite of
vegetable matter - in the case of phở with Vietnamese coriander, basil, bean
sprouts and a little sweet-smelling leaf with no name. In fact, proper phở has
to come with lavish quantities of these four substances which you, the eater, mix
and match as you see fit.
The reason phở in the West is not strictly phở is because
the four essential phở greens are not in regular supply in Australia or the US.
That doesn't mean you can't have a jolly phở experience in Melbourne or San Diego.
It does mean though that if your phở is served with lettuce then, in strict
Vietnamese terms, you're offending against good culinary custom.
(b) bún bò Huế = beef noodles, Huế-style. This one again
comes with a special complement of greens. Chili oil is an essential
ingredient. Plus various kinds of meaty chunks laced with pepper and garlic. As
you know from yesterday's lesson, Huế, where this dish hails from, is pretty much
smack in the middle of Central Vietnam. Today's lesson, and I want you to
memorize it for your own health and safety, is this: Central Vietnamese like
most of the things they eat cruelly hot.
(c) hủ tiếu = a Chinese invention whose most widespread
variant comes with pork and prawns. Technical note: Be prepared when you order
pork in a soup in Vietnam. It'll sometimes come in the form of a large pork
knuckle with all the fat still on. For Vietnamese, this is actually the prize
portion, so don't start whining . . .
(d) mì quảng = another Central Vietnamese dish, served with
flat rice noodles and a large, savoury biscuit which you break up and mix into
your soup. Mì quảng is technically what's known as a dry soup; it's basically
noodles, meat, biscuit, seafood and watercress sitting in a shallow puddle of
broth. Munch slowly on a raw green chilli while you're consuming your mì quảng
and you'll have the locals fooled in no time. (Technical note: Green chillis in
Vietnam are not that hot.)
(e) bún mắm (salty pork and fish noodle soup), bánh canh cua
(crab, pork and flat noodle soup), bún riêu (crab, tomato and tofu noodle soup).
My crummy translations don't really capture what these three dishes are. Bún mắm
comes in a sharp, dark broth with a range of seafood additives that depends on
the inspiration of the cook. The best bún canh cua comes with meat derived from
the claws of actual crabs, as well as a delicious oily breadstick invented in
Hanoi during the days when Vietnam was a French colony. Bún riêu comes with a
stinky prawn paste you'll hear more about later. (The Vietnamese swear it is
essential to a proper bún riêu experience.) Be careful about eating the
cheapest versions, because they're sometimes laced with flavour enhancers that
make Westerners break out in spots. (As much as the locals complain about
subtle poisons flowing over the border from China, the middle-aged Vietnamese
ladies who sell bún riêu sometimes make avid use of them. . .)
Most importantly, when in Vietnam at no stage drink water that
hasn't been boiled or come from a bottle and don't drink anything with ice in
it. This last rule takes some sticking to, because Vietnamese waiters will
continually try to serve you iced tea, iced coffee and beer with ice (that's
the way Vietnamese drink these things). Adding to your temptations, there are a
large range of delicious iced drinks: smoothies, exotic fruit juices and
various slightly hairy vegetable juices. If you think you know what you're
doing, add ice to your diet slowly - one glass of iced tea a day for a week or
two. Don't drink tap water, even if you've been in-country for years.
Vietnamese tap water is well known to make Western and Vietnamese bowels move very
fast.
As well as worrying about nasty Chinese chemicals, it's also
worth asking yourself whether you should worry about getting seriously sick eating Vietnamese food,
given that a lot of it is sold in the street, or in dingy locations by the side
of the street.
The answer is that you shouldn't worry any more than you
would eating on the street in any other place in the world. Of course, eating
street-food in Vietnam involves taking a risk. But then I'm guessing you didn't
come to Vietnam eat dinner made by people with Masters Degrees in
Occupational Health and Safety.
Common sense (and most GPs) would suggest that if you take a
few precautions you should avoid the worst kinds of stomach bug. If a Vietnamese
street eatery looks dirty (not just
sad and weatherbeaten) then - don't go in there. If there are plenty of locals
gulping away inside then - do go in there. If you're served any kind of meat
that hasn't been cooked all the way through, then ask them to throw it on the
grill again. If you're feeling really game, try out the expression "chưa
chín" ("not cooked through").
*
For a more sophisticated appreciation of Vietnamese food,
there are various cultural and historical issues to get your head around.
Probably the most important of them is the Vietnamese (Chinese-Vietnamese) idea
of the five essential flavours and the various
alignments and contrasts between them.
According to the Vietnamese, food can be variously sweet,
salty, sour, spicy or bitter (bland is sometimes added to the list as a kind of
anti-flavour).
Food is also hot or cold in a sense which has nothing to do
with temperature or the amount of chili-like substances it contains: hot or
cold, that is, according to the subjective effect it has on your body's
thermostat.
The main reason the theory of the five flavours is important
is because technically the ideal of Vietnamese cooking is culinary balance.
Sweet and sour are designated as
opposite flavours and so for the sake of balance they can, and in some
situations should, be combined in the same dish. The most obvious
example of the idea in action are the sweet and sour dishes you'll find
throughout the menu at your local Chinese restaurant in the West. You'll
see some
more unusual examples in Vietnam. After a big meal in the home, for
instance,
the Vietnamese will usually serve two or three kinds of fruit. Guava,
grapefruit and the green, nutty variety of mango will be served with a
little dish of salt and spice for you to dip into - to offset the
effect of the
sweetness/blandness with something from the salty/spicy end of the
flavour spectrum.
The wider historical point about Vietnamese cookery is that
it has overwhelmingly humble origins. Vietnamese cuisine is to Chinese cuisine
as Italian cuisine is to French; the basic ingredients and dishes are peasant
numbers that are easy enough to make with simple equipment. Of course, in Hanoi
as much as Rome, there are many levels of culinary complexity and a wide range
of elaborate dishes, some native, some imported, that require extensive
preparations and all sorts of exotic ingredients. But Vietnamese food, in the
main, has its origins in the countryside and on the streets of big cities. It
didn't filter down into middle class homes from the kitchens of emperors or
princes.
The other major factor that sets Vietnamese food apart from
Chinese food is the place it finds for three classic Western substances:
coffee, bread and (sweet, flour-based) cake. All three were initially brought
to Vietnam by the French, who ran the country as a colony for about a hundred
years from roughly the middle of the Nineteenth Century. And as painful as French colonialism was for most Vietnamese
at the time, there are few who would argue that cafés, patisseries and the sorts of things
that are sold in them weren't a positive influence on Vietnamese life.
In China there were only teahouses. (Now of course there are
Starbucks as well.) But from the beginning of the Twentieth Century, thanks to
the French, the Vietnamese had a real café culture, with everything that
implies - not just a place to drink coffee, but quite a lot of the artistic,
intellectual and political ferment that had been know to take place over coffee
in the golden age of the Western café.
For some reason I am yet to discover, the Vietnamese didn't take to wine, cheese or chocolate the way they took to coffee and croissants in the days of French rule. The wine that is grown in Vietnam to this day, in the hills around Đà Lạt, is, well, ok for getting drunk, but not something that is going to give joy to sophisticated palates.
*
There's no way of preparing Western visitors for a hearty in-country experience of Vietnamese food without mentioning some of the dishes that are not for the faint-hearted. We are talking here about chicken feet, rat meat, snake-meat and, of course, dog meat, plus two widely consumed substances that it's hard to think of an English name for: mắm tôm (a thick purple shrimp sauce) and hột vịt lộn (fertilized duck egg).
The first thing to note about these half-dozen gory items is
that, with the exception of chicken feet, plenty of Vietnamese shy away from
eating them too. If you're offered them, there's no shame in saying no, though
obviously try not to gag if they're being eaten by others at your table.
On chicken feet: these are considered by the Vietnamese to
be the best bit of the chicken, definitely what they're willing to pay most for.
The commonest way they're cooked is salted then grilled. The commonest way
they're eaten is - all the gristly bits get chewed and swallowed eagerly. Bones
and claws get tossed onto the floor beneath the table.
My basic advice, when it comes to gory Vietnamese cuisine, would
be - if you want to bring a smile to Vietnamese faces, try one or two of the
above-mentioned items. If you want to hear Vietnamese declaring that you're
"almost Vietnamese already" then - try all of them. And if you want
to scandalize your aunty or impress your Western friends with what a
hairy-chested culinary adventurer you are then - try dog-meat. Go on, I dare you.
The whole issue of dog-meat is actually a pretty good
indicator of where you're at with various wider cultural, ethical and
psychological issues related to being in a place that is wildly different from
the West, so in many ways it's worth talking about with a degree of
seriousness. But first things first - the taste. The present writer openly
admits to having eaten dog-meat and, what's more, having developed a bit of a
taste for it. And what he'd say about it, on the basis of his various tastings,
is that, while the taste is quite strong and gamey, it's not that different from beef.
In
fact, if you fed 100 Westerners a slice of dog without
telling them what it was, then my guess is that 95% of them would down
the dog
without giving it a second thought - which, if it's true, would go to
show that Westerners' aversion to dog-meat really is cultural (or, let's
say,
psychosomatic), not some sort of physical reaction to the taste, as some
people claim.
Here's the big question: where does the Western horror at this particular Vietnamese custom actually
come from? If you flinch at eating dog-meat because you've heard horror stories
about kids' pets being stolen or about Vietnamese dogs being bred, caged and
slaughtered in cruel ways, then, let's be clear, that's not an argument against
eating dog-meat in Vietnam, it's an argument against eating all meat in Vietnam; the horror stories that are true apply to pigs and
buffalo and battery hens as much as dogs, because Vietnamese laws relating to the
humane slaughter of animals for meat are not rigorously enforced. A degree of
cruelty is, if not widespread, then widely tolerated.
Before working out where the practice of eating dog-meat
fits into your cultural/culinary matrix, it's worth thinking a bit about where
it fits into the overall Vietnamese matrix. Dog-meat, be it noted, is a Northern Vietnamese specialty, which
means that less Southerners tend to eat it, and most of those who do agree that only
Northern Vietnamese know how to cook it really well.
Serious Vietnamese Buddhists won't eat dog-meat because they
see an underlying spiritual affinity between man and dog. And Vietnamese women
eat dog-meat much less than Vietnamese men because eating dog is generally a
pretty raucous affair that goes with heavy drinking and lots of drunken
hollering and those are the sorts of things Vietnamese women tend to avoid like
the plague.
Modern, middle-class Vietnamese increasingly won't eat
dog-meat either, and they teach their kids to abhor it for numerous reasons:
partly because of the inhumane ways dogs are caught and caged; partly because,
as time goes by, they and their kids are keeping more and more dogs as pets
(and mollycoddling a lot of them half to death in the process); in part, I
would guess, because they see eating dog-meat less as an inherited North
Vietnamese custom and more as a bad drunken habit they want to be seen to have
risen above.
That
makes the average Vietnamese reasons for not eating
dog-meat actually quite similar to average Western motives for not
eating it; what it comes down to is a certain instinctive, semi-moral,
semi-sentimental something about the special bond between man and
canine. This
makes debates about dog-meat in Vietnam quite similar in structure and
tone to
debates in the West about vegetarianism (or indeed smoking), with the
anti-dog-meat lobby basing themselves on lofty, if vague, ideals and
occasionally sounding as if their main aim is to forbid less educated
people
from spontaneously enjoying things which they themselves no longer find
enjoyable on principle.
One myth about dog-meat in Vietnam can however be put to bed
straight up. No Vietnamese would ever try to pass off dog-meat as
beef, so you don't need to worry about eating dog against your wishes.
Dog-meat and rat-meat are more expensive, and more difficult to procure, than
beef, so anyone who tried such a nasty trick would be doing himself out of
a dollar, not you.
Vegetables, however, are commonly made to look, and taste,
like meat for completely respectable reasons in Vietnam. One of the extremely artful
ways that Buddhist cooking developed down the centuries was in creating pretend meat dishes - possibly for
Vietnam's long line of Buddhist kings, who found the vegetarian side of their
Buddhist vows a little hard to stick to.
Let's put it this way: the results, when the vegetarian
version of a meat dish actually tastes
better than the meaty version, are another thing that
will expand your culinary repertoire, or give your sense of the meaning of food
a nice little tweak.
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