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Bringing a traditional dish from the street corners of Vietnam to fancy New York dinner parties by way of a contemporary cookbook when recipes might emanate from old women who spend all week cooking to make a few dollars, is a compelling but challenging process. I write on my acknowledgement page of all the Vietnamese cooks who unknowingly helped me with the book.
It is 5:30 A.M. and I know this even as my head presses persistently into the pillow because the front desk has just pierced my sleep with the shrill sound of my morning wake-up call. Apparently I ordered the call, or rather Ms. Anh ordered it for me. If you want to see traditional breakfast dishes being prepared, as she had told me the night before, we have to be at the market by 6 A.M. Today, Ms. Anh is chauffeur as well as translator. I hop on the back of her motorbike and we turn out of Nha Trang's stylish Ana Mandara resort. I've never seen the thoroughfare that runs along the shore so busy, while on the beach itself there's a long row of bicycles, their owners taking a dip before the sun gets too hot.
First stop at the market's food court is the stall selling bun bo, a soupy, spicy noodle dish I'm already familiar with from previous visits to Hue. But now I'm learning that the hot mau--the little red seeds which apparently come from a tree but one for which we cannot find an English name--are added after the pork hocks have been boiling over gas for three hours. The cook adds that it takes four hours over charcoal. She explains that lemongrass is added only to boiling water. Next banh ram which I immediately decide is too complicated for a recipe book and then we go over to the woman cooking bun rieu, which does pique my interest. I'm drawing the shape of the crab cake in my notepad and writing "crab pounded with onion, pepper and salt." I watch as hot mau liquid is added to the pork broth. I add hot mau to my shopping list.
The find of the morning is banh can (also known as banh khot). Some days later I find out from Dieu Ho (a Viet Kieu born close to the southern Cambodian border and now executive chef at the New World Saigon Hotel), that banh can is one of his favorite dishes but that it is extremely hard to find in Ho Chi Minh City. Sure enough, I don't find this dish again, anywhere in Vietnam. Ground rice is mixed with water to form a thin batter which is then poured into a specially molded ceramic dish which looks like my grandmother's egg-poacher or a dish for serving snails. The tiny pancakes are cooked over charcoal for less than one minute. A dish of those'10 pieces'costs me 100 dong. If I want to add an egg to my batter, make that 1200 dong. I order both variations but actually prefer the plain batter'as does the six-year old girl to my left who also clearly loves the sourness of green mango as much as I do. We add a little spring onion fried with salt and pork fat to our bowls. But this one, I'm thinking, cannot go in the book, either. Where on earth would we find those ceramic dishes outside Vietnam? Would there possibly be an alternative?
My friend Aline Ho, one of the opening team at Ana Mandara, has asked me to bring back some xoi for breakfast, the glutinous rice breakfast dish for which we share a passion and have even been known to eat for lunch. I buy two portions; one, a version steamed with red beans and a second, with whole peanuts, wrapped individually in banana leaf packets by a girl who says she's 14. She doesn't know how long it takes to cook xoi because her mother made it. She is simply selling it. On the way back to the hotel, we stop at a stall selling com tam on a street corner. This dish, steamed rice topped with various bits of pork and pork skin, pickled water spinach and other preserves, does not appeal to me at this hour in the morning, nor to many non-Vietnamese, I conclude. This won't make it into the book.
Over an espresso back at the hotel, Aline agrees that the xoi is a very good one and we discuss how it is being sold more and more in ugly polystyrene boxes, and how, just like banh khot, it is not so easy to find on the street these days. We recall a time two years before, when we were visiting Nha Trang together during research for my food/culture study project. We had gotten up at 6:30 A.M. on a Monday morning'an hour that was starting to sound positively lazy'and motorbiked out to the Cham Temple. Not for sightseeing but to get to a spot from where we could observe the frenetic pace of the morning's catch coming in. I'll never forget the size of the tuna, nor the expertise with which they were dragged up the banks and then filleted. Such an experience of the morning realities of a fishing village is, to me, worth ten Cham temples.
My xoi is only half eaten'I've already had one breakfast, after all'and an hour later I'm observing in the hotel kitchen where the staff is preparing a buffet lunch for a party of a hundred people. How to prevent Vietnamese salads from going soggy is a lesson well worth learning. Ms. Anh, the hotel's English tutor, is trying to get translations of some of the herbs I've seen in the cold store. I have been trying to work out how many different kinds of mint and basil there are in Vietnam, not to mention the herb that seems to smell of both at the same time. I have lunch at a restaurant along the beach where clearly the only thing to eat is the morning's catch'I order grilled tuna with a delicious crispy topping of lemon grass, chili, spring onion and coriander. And probably ginger, I note. The afternoon is spent making notes on a zillion pieces of paper which are continually cross-referenced until 5:30 P.M. when I'm again Ms. Anh's pillion passenger. The first course of the evening is nem nuong, grilled pork on skewers, and then we try the banh canh we had seen that morning. We spend a long time chatting with the older woman making mi quang, turmeric noodles in soup with all kinds of other ingredients including quail egg. Back to the hotel for 30 minutes on the treadmill before a perfectly chilled bottle of Muscadet and a thankfully low-key but none the less instructive dinner of hot and sour fish soup followed by banana blossom salad. Both will go in the book I decide. Banana blossom is entirely delicious: how had I lived without it?
I am, of course, as I write this, looking back in notebooks to find out what precisely I tried on May 2, 1997, which was the first day of my research for Cafe Vietnam. In those notebooks, every ingredient of every dish I see or taste is painstakingly listed together with an approximation from the street cook of how much might be added''a little bit' or 'not much' or 'a handful.' Very useful! These early stages of recipes of street dishes are annotated with my own jottings. "Too many beansprouts?" or "not enough tamarind" and "which cut of pork?" are typical as I struck out in the hope that Vietnamese food would soon reside in my soul as if I had been born to the cuisine--I hoped I would soon just "know" if a dish was right or not, and that in particular my pho bo broth would come to taste as it did in my favorite pho shop in Ho Chi Minh City.
This was probably my tenth visit to Vietnam in seven years, several of which were made while I had researched previously. So I already knew my way around the country and its customs and was familiar with street eating. But this time I not only had to taste the lemon grass, I also had to work out how to cut it, when to add it and how much to use. I had to notice the shape of the noodle and the size of the pork patty; to learn about the clarity of a broth and the quality of the fish sauce.
Logistical problems arose at almost every turn; I continually asked questions of myself and questions were asked of me. You can't buy fresh straw mushrooms in London, so would tinned ones do? If chicken and onion salad is traditionally made with chicken skin, is it unauthentic to use lean meat? How big is a rice bowl? I found myself writing apparent absurdities, substituting banana leaf for aluminum foil if the former was not available--hoping that foil sounds like the modern-day equivalent. Or writing "optional"beside rau om, the defining herb in hot and sour fish soup, because I so resisted deleting one of Vietnam's most traditional soups from my book for the sake of a single herb.
The conception was less problematic. Vietnamese cuisine lends itself beautifully to a "street food" cookbook because it remains simple and unsophisticated, and most eating is literally done on the street. Today, a handful of Viet Kieu are beginning to upgrade and experiment with the cuisine, whether in presentation or in new juxtapositions. But when a country is at war it does not spend time worrying about the grade of rice at the market, whether to have stuffed squid or steamed crab for lunch, whether to serve dinner on a white plate or in a patterned bowl.
Even today, as the country stabilizes and moves slowly toward slightly higher living standards, most Vietnamese eat steamed rice with green vegetables and a little fish for lunch and dinner. To eat more elaborately also takes a great deal of time. A friend from a relatively prosperous Ho Chi Minh City family said her mother spends at least four hours per day between the market and the kitchen, preparing food for the family. Not many people these days have that kind of time, wherever they live. One Sunday I went to her home to watch lunch being prepared. This was a special lunch in my honor comprising dishes I was keen to have demonstrated. We started at the market soon after 8 A.M. and sat down for lunch at 1:30 P.M.'and that was with three of us sharing in the rinsing, the chopping, the rolling and the wrapping.
I actually believe that Vietnamese cooking is quite straightforward, though that is of course not the same thing as fast. For the westerner, there is something comforting in seeing familiar looking pots and pans around the kitchen. The odd wok appears, but most cooking is done slowly over charcoal rather than fast over a fierce heat in the Cantonese style. Although we cannot be sure that the copious use of fresh lettuce leaves and herbs is of direct French influence, we can be sure that the addition of dill to fish congee, and the strawberry jams from Dalat, are European traditions. Vietnamese curries, though gentle rather than intense, point to the influence of ancient Cham culture, while the appearance of soy sauce is clearly Chinese. The diet in the north--close to China--is much more Cantonese while the diet down south, nearer Thailand, is much more tropical.
None of these facets were entirely clear to me until I got into the kitchen and understood which ingredients were going into particular dishes and how they were being cooked. In the kitchen I was face-to-face with French, Cham, Thai and Chinese cuisine and eating traditions, all brought together as what we understand to be Vietnamese cuisine. To write about food or even to write a recipe is then, for me, ultimately to write about culture. I am a unenthusiastic tourist, but give me the opportunity to buy herbs in the market from a young woman in a polka-dot shirt, or to visit a friend's home where we take turns to roll goi cuon while her elderly father sits in front of the television, and I'm on the next plane.
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