This year the Feldberg Family joined President Obama in declaring an amnesty for some lucky turkey. However, unlike Barack and Michelle, we ate our Thanksgiving dinner on the sidewalk at the corner of Hang Bong and Duong Thanh streets, where a Vietnamese family had set up a grill and a number of low plastic tables, crowded with locals. We squeezed into a space with Roz, Sarah and Mary perched on the tiny red stools while I, in an attempt to spare my aching knees, sat on a slightly higher blue stool. I was puzzled at being the object of some curious stares by the other diners until I realized I was actually sitting on what they considered a table (think of a guest in your house climbing up on the dining room table to eat – that’s me). Before I share our Thanksgiving feast with you, however, let me say a few words about food in Vietnam.
We learned a little about the Vietnamese approach to food by taking a cooking class at the Hidden Hanoi center at 137 Nghi Tam, Tay Ho district (crossing the street to get there took all our courage). Our class started with an hour field trip to both the illegal neighborhood “Moving Market” (so named because it can’t stay open in the same place very long or the authorities come to shut it down) and the larger neighborhood legal market.
Food is very important to the Vietnamese. Indeed they spend a significant portion of the day eating (I think we figured it out as about five small and not-so-small meals a day plus a break for iced coffee at a café). Freshness is highly valued and there are no cooling trays or misting devices here, so everything is brought into the city daily for sale (some items are brought in from the countryside twice daily). Meat is expected to feel warm to the touch, indicating it is freshly slaughtered and unsold greens are discarded at the end of the day. The fish are swimming before being purchased. We purchased some essentials and headed back to the cooking school where we next met the two other people in our class (a couple of young Australian physicians who insisted their cab driver take a U turn so they wouldn’t have to cross the street!) and then spent a leisurely hour drinking tea with Ms Anh, who explains the philosophy of how flavors are balanced in each meal and how each meal is incomplete if some form of rice is not served. Then it was off to the kitchen where we were each assigned a task preparing our ingredients and shown the best way to do it. The five of us worked together to prepare the “seafood menu” (a different menu is featured each day of the week). This consisted of green papaya salad, sweet and sour prawns, fresh spring rolls, sour fish soup and, of course, rice. With the assistance of three staff members, we finished in time to consume the efforts of our labors for lunch.
In the states, when someone mentions Vietnamese food, we mainly think of pho (pho is actually a breakfast food in Vietnam, although it is available and can be consumed all day long). Pho is quite complex with each bowl prepared individually and each preparer creating something unique. But pho is a very (very) small part of the Vietnamese cuisine, which reflects the incredibly varied geographic and climatic regions of the country as well as the ethnic diversity of the population and the season. For example, each banquet and lunch I attended ended with a large bowl of soup and each soup seem to reflect a regional specialty. At our last banquet, the Vietnamese faculty were quite adamant that the soup was a specialty of a village that one of them had come from and was best sampled in that village. What characterizes Vietnamese cuisine is the large variety of herbs and fresh leaves that are used in their varied dishes. For example, they have a number of different kinds of mint, basil and cilantro and each form is used somewhat differently. They also value contrasting tastes in each dish and so any one dish will have both sweet ingredients and sour ingredients, or spicy ingredients and cooling ingredients. I regret to say that my taste buds have long since lost the discriminating power they once had and I was often unable to discern these subtleties
So what did we have for Thanksgiving? Bia Ha Noi (Ha Noi beer) of course and a selection of the skewers shown below.
We had choices of salmon, beef, shrimp, snails, corn, fish, potatoes, several types of mushrooms, taro root, tofu, as well as a number of skewers with chunks of unidentified material. It was all very good and since no one around us spoke any English there was no familial discord and, like that First Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, it is amazing how much can be communicated by gesticulating and grunting (like “get off the table, doofus”).
and, of course
