Vietnamese Cooking
Very few people indeed can live decadently off the fat of the land…. That is what I was thinking one day recently as I watched an old lady serving freshly cooked food to some 30 people from a barrow on a street corner in Vietnam.
Street food, Annam style
Wherever you go on this planet you will find that the most widely popular recipes are those which utilise a small quantity of highly flavoured ingredients to enhance the greater bulk of a dish.
By drawing out every last atom of flavour from, say, a cheap tough cut of meat you can easily add magic to something bland like potatoes, pasta or rice.
The old lady on the Hoi An street corner had been up since dawn making stock from chicken carcasses so that she could sell her version of pho, which is probably the most popular dish in South East Asia. In Vietnam they like to eat the intensely flavoured broth poured over cooked rice noodles, with plenty of fresh cut herbs and a squeeze of lime, for breakfast - a habit I found easy to adopt during my fortnight’s holiday in that hot and fascinating country.
Drying food in Hoi An market
But while a savoury and fragrant soup for breakfast might appal many traditional English diners, we also have been evolving the bulking-out trick for as long as history can recall. Indeed, meat-and-two-veg - arguably the most classic British dish of them all - is our best known way of eking out a bit of meat in our attempt to feed a family. The flavoursome gravy made from all those meat juices goes a long way in helping the blander tasting vegetables to provide a balanced meal.
The same in this country applies to a good old fashioned stew or hot-pot. Bones and tough cuts of meat are slow-cooked for hours to bring out flavour so that all manner of blander root vegetables can be added. One of the tastiest dishes on our national menu, for example, is oxtail soup - a concoction made flavoursome by using nothing more than bone and sinew.
As long as it’s done carefully and with a bit of planning and forethought, the humble a fish cake can provide another example of clever “bulking out”.
Spring rolls
To be honest, though, we’ve become a little lazy in the making-few-ingredients-go-far game since globalisation allowed us to cherry-pick all manner of toothsome foodstuffs from poorer countries. Indeed, it has traditionally been those poorer countries which have been the most inventive in this respect - a fact which now, ironically, sees the cuisine of such places being universally identified as the most healthy.
Street vendor in Mekong Delta
Take the Mediterranean diet enjoyed in Italy as the most obvious example. Many of the dishes we now pay good money for in Italian restaurants were originally conceived as a way of making the basic combination of flour and water go much much further. The average pasta dish is a work of genius in this regard. The Italians evolved a vast array of pasta shapes especially so they could absorb or hold as much of a thinly spread but flavoursome sauce as possible.
Even the much-maligned pizza is a masterpiece when it comes to the concept of making a few tasty morsels go far. A pizza, after all, is nothing but a disc of crispy, doughy, bread crowned with a thin, usually intensely flavoured, topping.
What excites me about travelling to such places is that I can learn the local tricks and bring them home. In that way we can utilise amazing English produce in a bid to both economise while boosting the flavours produced in our own kitchens.
Mekong prawns
In Vietnam, two of the hotels I visited hold regular cookery courses for their guests. A few hundred yards from where the old lady was making pho in Hoi An, the lovely riverside Anantara Hotel (https://hoi-an.anantara.com/) employs a local woman to stage the classes in a special open air kitchen, where I learned about the local take on the ubiquitous Vietnamese spring roll, as well as how to cook an amazing caramelised belly pork dish that I shall most certainly be making at home.
Me learning to cook Vietnam style at The Annam
Several hundred miles to the south in a sumptuous coastal resort called The Anam (https://www.theanam.com/) on the northern Cam Ranh Peninsula, I witnessed (and tasted the results of) an innovation I have never seen before, but which I believe could be emulated elsewhere. Once or twice a week the resort stages special “Mammas’ Nights” when the mothers of the local staff are invited (and paid) to come in and cook traditional dishes and family favourites for the guests.
It is a huge and popular success. Certainly I enjoyed a host of dishes I’d never tasted or even heard of before. The next day one of the hotel’s chefs gave me a two hour cookery lesson and provided me with the recipes which we include here…
The Vietnamese Nem Cua Be would be fantastic with some local Westcountry pork, prawns and crab meat. As we speak I am making the chicken with lemon grass (from a bird bought from a local farmers’ market) - but am also using up the chicken carcass to make a simple stock for my own Somerset version of pho.
Vietnamese Nem Cua Be
Ingredients
200 g cooked shrimp peeled, deveined
Finely chopped 200 g cooked pork
2 tbsp fish sauce
pepper
15 g shallots chopped
15 g sprigs coriander chopped
20 g dried wood ear mushrooms (available from supermarkets or Asian food stores) soaked and finely chopped
30 g cellophane (rice) noodles soaked and chopped
1 cup carrot, shredded
50 g bean sprouts chopped
1 egg
500 g white crab meat (I suggest adding a little of the brown as well)
vegetable oil for frying
rice paper wrapper (bánh đa nem - available online or from Asian shops)
Method
In a large mixing bowl 200 g shrimp peeled, deveined and finely chopped, 200 g pork minced, 2 tbsp fish sauce, pepper and mix well with your hands. Then add in 15 g shallots, the coriander, 20 g dried wood ear mushrooms finely chopped, 30 g cellophane noodles soaked and chopped, 1 cup carrot and 50 g bean sprouts chopped and mix again thoroughly.
Finally add in the crab and mix again.
Wrap the mixture with at least 2 layers of the rice paper wrapper, rolling it in the way you would with a spring roll. Fry for around three minutes a side until crisp all over.
Simmering Fish in a Clay Pot
Ingredients
200g fill fillet (a cheap Westcountry species like gurnard would be ideal)
3 tbsps sugar
1 tbsp salt
50 ml fish sauce
5 g black pepper
20 sliced ginger
30 g spring onion
2 fresh red chilli
10 ml vegetable (or similar) cooking oil
1/2 tsp dark soy sauce
2tsp finely chopped shallot and garlic
50 ml fish stock.
Cookery course Hoi An
Method
Make caramel: 2 tbsp of sugar with a little cooking oil in a hot pan - cook the sugar until it’s dark brown in colour then carefully add 30 ml of water (watch out, it will spit - stir until the caramel is made.
Marinate the fish in remaining sugar, salt and fish sauce for about 30 minutes.
Heat a clay pot (I used a Spanish version which I bought in a UK supermarket, but an oven proof pan like a Le Creuset would do) over a medium heat, put in the garlic, shallot and sauté until it becomes fragrant. Add the marinated fish and cook gently. Add the dark soy sauce, and the stock and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes, then decrease the temperature and cook until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon.
Sprinkle with the black pepper and spring onion - garnish with sliced red chilli and serve with steamed rice.
