Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [29]
Eating and drinking | Vietnamese food |
Vegetables – and vegetarian food
If all this has put you off meat for ever, it is possible to eat vegetarian food in Vietnam, though not always easy. The widest selection of vegetables is to be found in Da Lat where a staggering variety of tropical and temperate crops thrive. Elsewhere, most restaurants offer a smattering of meat-free dishes, from stewed spinach or similar greens, to a more appetizing mix of onion, tomato, bean sprouts, various mushrooms, peppers and so on; places used to foreigners may be able to oblige with vegetarian spring rolls (nem an chay, or nem khong co thit). At street kitchens you’re likely to find tofu and one or two dishes of pickled vegetables, such as cabbage or cucumber, while occasionally they may also have aubergine, bamboo shoots or avocado, depending on the season.
However, unless you go to a specialist vegetarian outlet – of which there are some excellent examples in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Hué – it can be a problem finding genuine veggie food: soups are usually made with beef stock, morsels of pork fat sneak into otherwise innocuous-looking dishes and animal fat tends to be used for frying.
The phrase to remember is an chay (vegetarian), or seek out a vegetarian rice shop (tiem com chay). Otherwise, make the most of the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month when many Vietnamese Buddhists spurn meat and you’re more likely to find vegetarian dishes on offer.
Eating and drinking | Vietnamese food |
Snacks
Vietnam has a wide range of snacks and nibbles to fill any yawning gaps, from huge rice-flour crackers sprinkled with sesame seeds to all sorts of dried fish, nuts and seeds. The white steamed dumpling called banh bao is a Chinese import, filled with tasty titbits, such as pork, onions and tangy mushrooms or strands of sweet coconut. Banh xeo, meaning sizzling pancake, combines shrimp, pork, bean sprouts and egg, all fried and then wrapped in rice paper with a selection of greens before being dunked in a spicy sauce. A similar dish, originating from Hué – a city with a vast repertoire of snack foods – is banh khoai, in which the flat pancake is accompanied by a plate of star fruit, green banana and aromatic herbs, plus a rich peanut sauce.
Markets are often good snacking grounds, with stalls churning out soups and spring rolls or selling intriguing banana-leaf parcels of pâté (a favourite accompaniment for bia hoi), pickled pork sausage or perhaps a cake of sticky rice.
A relative newcomer on the culinary scene is French bread, made with wheat flour in the north and rice flour in the south. Baguettes – sometimes sold warm from streetside stoves – are sliced open and stuffed with pâté, soft cheese or ham and pickled vegetables.
Eating and drinking | Vietnamese food |
Fruit and sweet things
Vietnam is not strong on desserts, and restaurants usually stick to ice cream and fruit, although fancier international places might venture into tiramisu territory. Those with a sweet tooth are better off browsing around street stalls where there are usually candied fruits and other Vietnamese sweetmeats on offer, as well as sugary displays of French-inspired cakes and pastries in the main tourist centres.
Green-coloured banh com is an eye-catching local delicacy made by wrapping pounded glutinous rice around sugary, green-bean paste. A similar confection, found only during the mid-autumn festival, is the “earth cake”, banh deo, which melds the contrasting flavours of candied fruits, sesame and lotus seeds with a dice of savoury pork fat. Fritters are popular among children and you’ll find opportunistic hawkers outside schools, selling banana fritters, banh chuoi, or mixed slices of banana and sweet potato, banh chuoi khoai.
Most cities now have ice-cream parlours selling tubs or sticks of the local, hard