The taste of Hà Nội dishes

A phở restaurant in Paris

Hanoian rice raviolis in Paris

After we had spent the entire morning visiting the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, musician Trần Quang Hải proposed to me, “You have been eating French food for the past month. Why don’t you let me take you somewhere we can have bánh cuốn Thanh Trì (Thanh Trì rice raviolis) and phở (Hanoian flat rice noodles) for lunch!”

Trần Quang Hải loves Vietnamese food, though he has been living in France for many years and has performed in more than 50 countries. Luckily, he can afford his expensive tastes, thanks to his handsome income. Vietnamese food may be cheap in Việt Nam but not in France, where a bowl of phở is 40 francs (US $6) and a dish of bánh cuốn Thanh Trì 20 francs.

Hải continued as we were settled in a Vietnamese restaurant, “I eat out a lot, so I know there are about 600 restaurants in Paris where Vietnamese food is served. It is these restaurants that have helped the very demanding French diners accept Vietnamese dishes such as nem (spring rolls) and the taste of nước mắm (fish sauce) in dipping sauces. You know, a recent edition of Le Petit Larousse dictionary has included nem and nước mắm among its entries.”

I asked, “Nước mắm used to be translated as saumeure in French?” Hải replied, “That’s just a rough translation, but it is not accurate. The French tend to think of saumeure as a kind of salt. The use of the Vietnamese original word nước mắm in the modern French vocabulary helps avoid misunderstanding.”

During this visit to France, I had another chance to witness the popularity of Vietnamese cooking there. That was during the three-day Fête del’Humanité (the annual festival of the newspaper of the French Communist Party) at La Courneuve Park in the north-east of Paris; about one million visitors came here. As I approached the Vietnam Pavilion, I could smell the distinct aroma of chả (grilled pork) as a crowd of people were waiting for their turn. The Vietnamese served a wide range of specialties, including bún chả (round rice noodles with grilled pork), nem rán (fried spring rolls), cơm rang (fired rice), and chuối tẩm bột rán (fried banana pasties). Of the 330 French and foreign pavilions, the Vietnamese and the Cuban were, according to the organizers, the most popular.

Bánh cuốn Thanh Trì (Thanh Trì rice raviolis)

On the Air France flight back to Hà Nội, I was treated to famous French foods, but I could not help thinking proudly of the conquest Vietnamese cuisine had made in Paris, a centre of the world’s gastronomy.

Three regional styles

Foreigners like Vietnamese food not only because of its refined taste but also its variety. Vietnamese cookery has, at least, three distinct styles, each deriving from a particular region: Hà Nội (northern), Huế (central), and Mekong Delta (southern), to say nothing of the various sub-regional styles. Let’s take, for example, the level of sweetness of the food people from different regions eat. One can easily notice that one goes southward the food gets sweeter and sweeter. This sweet taste becomes very apparent in Hồ Chí Minh City. In a study of 85 northern, 240 central and 155 southern dishes, it was found that there was no sugar in any of the northern dishes, but there was sugar in 24% of the central dishes and 52% of the southern dishes.

Apparently, Chinese cooking, especially from Guangdong, has had a strong influence in southern Việt Nam, as the Chinese used to run many big restaurants in Saigon. During the 1950s, Vietnamese housewives learned how to cook some of the dishes served in these restaurants. Chinese dishes such as dabianlu (a kind of soup) gradually became favorite choices for drinking parties in families and Vietnamese restaurants.

Southern cooking has also been influenced by Khmer cuisine. The Khmer use a lot of coconut meat and milk in their cooking. The same study mentioned above also found coconut was present in 17%, 2% and 1% of southern, northern and central recipes respectively. Southerners also eat spicier foods. The study revealed that chili was an important ingredient in 40% of southern recipes as compared with 27% and 1% for central and northern ones respectively. Chili is often compared by lemon grass in southern dishes. Southerners also like to use groundnuts and bánh đa (rice paper sheets) as ingredients in their cooking. Phở is a dish of northern origin, but when they prepare it southern cooks often use additional ingredients that northerners would not use, such as bean sprouts and basil.

While both northern and southern dishes are enjoyable, the southern tend to be more exotic and the northern more profound. This is probably why Vũ Bằng, a Vietnamese gastronome, has titled his book on northern cooking Miếng ngon Hà Nội (The Delicious Dishes of Hà Nội) and southern cooking Miếng lạ miền Nam (The Extraordinary Dishes of the South).

Some people attribute the strange taste of southern dishes to the abundance and variety of fish, birds and insects in southern Việt Nam. For instance, đường or the coconut worm is widely available in the Mekong Delta, but can rarely found in northern or central Việt Nam. Southerners roast this insect to make a very tasty dish. Southern Việt Nam also has other exotic dishes made with turtles, rats, bats and the art’s eggs.

Huế’s dishes, on the other hand, are highly refined. Many such dishes originated at the Nguyễn court in the 19^th century. Some popular dishes from Huế are tôm chua (fermented shrimps), bún bò Huế (round rice noodles with beef and a pig’s legs), bánh khoái (a kind of rice cake) and chè đậu ván (bean pudding). As more and more people are looking for delicate tastes, restaurants serving Huế food are mushrooming in Hà Nội and Hồ Chí Minh City.

Việt Nam is a long, narrow country stretching from north to south, with many different social, cultural and geographic regions and sub-regions, so its wide variety of dishes is understandable. A recent cookbook published in Hà Nội has listed 555 Vietnamese dishes, but experts say this is just one tenth of the total number of the dishes eaten across the whole country.

How Hanoians cook and eat

There is a very good reason for beginning with Hanoian cooking. Hà Nội has been a centre of Vietnamese culture for many centuries. As early as the third century BC, the Âu Lạc Kingdom chose Cổ Loa on the suburbs of present-day Hà Nội to be its capital. Since Việt Nam regained its independence in 939 from 1,000 years of Chinese rule, different Vietnamese governments have chosen Hà Nội as the capital city of the country, except the Đinh in the 10^th century and Nguyễn in the late 19^th and first half of the 20^th century. The multiple layers of this long history from the foundation on which Hanoian cooking rests.

Square sticky rice cake

Hà Nội’s foods are described in early historical records. In his book Dư địa chí (Việt Nam’s Geography) published in the early 15^th century, Nguyễn Trãi listed some well-known foods and drinks of the capital city at the time, such as lotus liquor, chrysanthemum liquor from Hoàng Mai and Bình Trọng Villages, sticky rice liquor from Đồng Thái Village, litchis from Quang Liệt Village, and anabases (a kind of fish) from Thanh Liệt Village.

Vũ Bằng observers, “One Autumn day I wandered through the 36 streets of Hà Nội’s old quarter. I suddenly realized that Hà Nội had changed a lot: the streets, houses and clothes. One thing remained unchanged, though: the foods Hanoians eat.” Hanoian youths may be wearing modern suits, T-shirts or jeans, but they still enjoy eating traditional dishes such as bánh chưng (square sticky rice) phở (flat rice noodles with chicken or beef), bánh cuốn Thanh Trì, bún chả (round rice noodles with grilled pork) and bún ốc (round rice noodles with boiled snails). Popular Hanoian dishes, often associated with a place name or a particular cook, include bánh cuốn Thanh Trì; bánh giày Quán Gánh (Quán Gánh round sticky rice cake); cốm Vòng (Vòng young green rice); bánh cốm Hàng Than (Hàng Than young green rice cake); bún thang (round rice noodle soup with chicken, crab and pork); and phở Thìn (Thìn flat rice noodle soup).

Hà Nội cooks can easily prepare good foods because they have almost all the ingredients they need immediately to hand from the markets all around town. Everyday tones of food supplies pour in from Hà Nội’s suburbs and other provinces: aromatic rice from neighboring province, pork from Móng Cái (Quảng Ninh Province), cods and crabs from Hải Phòng, longans from Hưng Yên, tea from Thái Nguyên, and mushrooms from the mountain of Lạng Sơn.   

As inhabitants of the century-old royal capital of the country, Hà Nội housewives have inherited the cooking style previously reserved for kings and senior mandarins. Hà Nội’s cooking has, over the course of centuries, become a refined art. For example, cooks often carefully remove the dead seeds from the bean sprouts used for making stuffing for spring rolls, or in some dishes where lettuce is used, they remove the midribs and the stalks before cutting the leaves into very thin threads.

Flavoring the food is an important part of Hanoian cooking. Each dish has its own spices and garnishes: lemon leaves and peppered salt for boiled chicken; balm mint and chili for snails; sweet marjoram for bún noodle soup with rice field crabs; shrimp paste and belostomatid for rice dumplings and round rice cakes; garlic for duck; and ginger for beef.

For traditional Hanoians, the way one dines is no less important than the food itself. Because they consider it an occasion for friends and relatives to meet and share, connoisseurs and ordinary folk alike have certain rituals that surround a meal. For example, they will eat and drink little by little to savor all the flavors of the different dishes. Too often, in a rush of modern life this traditional way of eating is vulgarized, as when people devour their food without really appreciating or even really tasting what they are eating. In general, Hà Nội’s cooking has improved a lot since the end of the Việt Nam War. With a peaceful life and better income, Hanoians have revived many old dishes which they had to drop during the war, when a stomach-filling meal was more important than a stylish but scanty one. What is more, Hanoian cooking is becoming more diversified as it is influenced by French, Italian, Russian and Thai cooking, as Việt Nam is now part of the world community. The next challenge will be to present the distinct style of traditional Hanoian cooking without keeping it from absorbing the best elements of other cooking traditions./.