Any country that has a department of public service for eating deserves a visit. I discovered this only during our nine-day tour of Vietnam last month, confirming that beyond the disquieting reality that it is a totalitarian state, it takes food very seriously indeed.
But street and restaurant food can reveal only so much about a cuisine and its people.
So, on our last day in Hanoi, I signed up for a cooking class in Alex Nguyen’s modest home, somewhere beyond the tourist traps. With two other pupils—American nurses from near Edison, the desi side of New Jersey—Alex first took us through a local market to buy ingredients. There was not a tourist in sight as we met her local pork merchant, an unsmiling older woman; her fruit seller, neat and smiling with a flower in her hair; and walked through a spotlessly clean market bursting with herbs, produce, dried fish and pork skin.
On my last visit to Vietnam, some 35 years ago, I remembered eating snake-skin wafers and eyeing jars of preserved geckos and bear’s paws in a village outside Hanoi, then a smaller and quieter city. Alex’s neighbourhood market held only a few—to me—exotics. When she drove us home afterwards, she handed us aprons and put us to work.
Over two hours, we produced bánh xèo, crisp Vietnamese pancakes stuffed with minced pork; nom xoài xanh, a green mango salad; Vietnamese egg coffee (not for me); and bún cha, chargrilled pork patties with vermicelli and dipping sauce, another favourite of Hanoi’s streets. Alex was a patient, cheerful and excellent teacher. As we cooked, she distributed generous shots of her family’s home-made apple wine, an effective way to ensure we created an appropriately convivial buzz around her banquet.
That lunch—quiet, unhurried and domestic—turned out to be the best meal of the trip.
Food was everywhere in Vietnam: hygienic, cheap and omnipresent. The father of the nation—or, more accurately, its uncle—Ho Chi Minh, universally known as Uncle Ho, frequently invoked food, or the lack of it, in Prison Diary, the collection of poems he wrote while in Chinese custody in the 1940s.
“A stove for each of the prison folk,
And earthen pots of every imaginable size,
For making tea, boiling vegetables, and cooking rice.
All day the whole place is filled with smoke.”
From morning to evening, Hanoi’s kitchens appeared to be like lavish versions of Uncle Ho’s prison, things on the boil in busy kitchens. We lived easily amid the thrumming narrow streets of the city’s old quarter—think Chandni Chowk without potholes, garbage, smog or beggars—squatting on little stools along pavements to drink beer or eat smoky skewers of chicken, beef, pork or octopus.
The vegetarian spouse found limited but freely available vegetarian options on the cave-beach-forest splattered island of Cat Ba, provided she specified that her stir-fried vegetables should not be tossed in pork lard or fish sauce. Hanoi offered greater variety, vegan options and Indian restaurants, which she steadfastly refused to enter but were obviously vital to Indians, to whom the Vietnamese staples of beef and pork are anathema.
The 15-year-old was not as fussy but uninterested in going beyond her comfort zone. She rejected silk-worm pupae and roasted octopus in favour of her staples: beef pho—an aromatic broth simmered for hours before noodles, herbs and meat are added—and pork bánh mì, Vietnam’s famous street-food interpretation of the French baguette.
A slim but invaluable 130-page guide I bought, How To Cook Vietnamese Cuisine, made no concessions to tourists either. Its author, Văn Châu, uses vegetables liberally but nearly always tosses, braises, fries, or roasts them with pork, duck, beef, or seafood. The book ranges across the cuisines of north and south Vietnam, a country stretching some 1,650km, roughly the distance from Mumbai to Kanyakumari.
I bought the book after wandering through the “Hanoi Hilton”, the notorious prison where American prisoners of war were once held. Its real name is Hoa Lo prison, built by the French in 1896. After a disquieting meander through dark cells that laid bare the atrocities inflicted on Vietnamese freedom fighters—shackled for days without food or toilets, tortured and beheaded—the prison gift shop offered, among other things, books on Vietnamese food. The juxtaposition felt unintentionally ironic.
When I flipped through the book later, I realised the impressive credentials of its author. Châu, a chef since 1952, had worked through the French occupation and the transition to independence before becoming head of the cooking techniques department at a culinary school run by the ministry of internal affairs—the home ministry. That would be like Amit Shah overseeing a cooking school, in addition to the Intelligence Bureau, RAW, NIA, and sundry paramilitary forces.
The Vietnamese are not only famously resilient—having thrown out the French, the Americans, and the Chinese—they are also remarkably pragmatic. Or perhaps merely accommodating, given the hordes of tourists who now overrun this charming and easy country. Vietnam attracts more than double the number of tourists that India does, though India’s population is nearly 14 times larger.
Amid the bustle and commerce, the meal I remember most was not eaten on a pavement stool or in a celebrated restaurant. It was the bún cha we made ourselves in a quiet corner of Hanoi, a reminder that even a country that regards food as a public service delivers its best at home.
Alex Nguyen’s bún chả
Serves 4
Ingredients
400 gm pork belly
400 gm ground pork
70g fish sauce
70g sugar
70g lime juice/ vinegar
500 ml of water
500 gm vermicelli noodles (use a pack since homemade ones are hard to find in India)
50 gm green papaya, cut into fine strips
50 gm carrot, fine strips
20g chopped garlic
20g chopped spring onion
20g chopped lemongrass
10g black pepper
60g oyster sauce
150g caramel sugar sauce
Method
Sliced the pork belly into 2cm thick pieces.
(For the caramel sugar sauce, mix 20 spoons of sugar with 3 tablespoons of water. Cook this mixture over high heat until it turns golden brown. Turn off the heat, wait until it turns dark brown, then add a tablespoon of water and a drizzle of lime juice. You should have 20 g of caramel sugar sauce. Or simply buy a bottle.
Separate the pork belly and ground pork shoulder into 2 bowls. Season with the same ratio of spices and sauces. For each bowl: 10 g shallot, garlic, lemongrass, and spring onion (1 tablespoon), 10 g oyster sauce, caramel sauce, fish sauce (1 tablespoon) and 5g black pepper.
Marinate each for 30 minutes. Shape ground pork meatballs the size of a ping pong ball with your hand. Grill pork belly & meatballs over charcoal for 8-10 minutes (we did it in an air fryer).
For the bún chả dipping sauce: Mix 70g fish sauce, 70g sugar, 70g rice vinegar/lime juice, and 500 ml of water (1:1:1:7). Stir-fry some chopped garlic and shallots. Add in and boil the liquid.
Boil the dry vermicelli noodles for 6-7 minutes, then rinse them quickly under cold water. Mix with finely sliced green papaya and carrot. Add a spoonful of sugar and 2 tablespoons of rice vinegar. Mix well and let rest for 5 minutes.
Put 8-10 pieces of grilled meat in each bowl, and pour the sauce in. Eat with rice noodles, lemongrass and lettuce.
Our Daily Bread is a column on easy, inventive cooking. Samar Halarnkar (@samar11) is the author of The Married Man’s Guide to Creative Cooking—And Other Dubious Adventures.