My father's recipe for gỏi cuốn (or 'how I learned to stop worrying, bend with the wind, and love culinary abominations')
A version of this essay was first published in Mekong Review in 2016, shortly after Mr. Obama ate bun cha in Hanoi, and 18 months after my dad invented his own gỏi cuốn. The rest is history...
SOME SUMMERS AGO IN DUBLIN, my father found some half-forgotten bánh tráng (Vietnamese rice papers) tucked behind mason jars of arborio and basmati in his cupboard.
Rediscovering this forgotten gift from the east, and without consulting anyone in the west, he set about preparing gỏi cuốn (often translated as ‘summer rolls’, but more literally ‘salad rolls’).
In Ho Chi Minh City, through the transparent exterior of each fat yet elegantly wrapped gỏi cuốn, you will find three peeled prawns, a slice of boiled pork belly, two fingers of bún (airy, rice noodles), a piece of lettuce, a few leaves of húng quế (Vietnamese basil), and a single, uncut chive running up the middle and out of the end, like a green fuse.
Perhaps, half-confusing gỏi cuốn with bánh tráng phơi sương — a Mekong Delta dish for which diners make DIY-rolls from an extravagance of ingredients — my father riffed off his food memories from multiple peregrinations to Vietnam while improvising with whatever he had to hand. He baked mackerel and salmon fillets, he shredded lettuce and sliced cucumbers; he plucked mint and picked just-ripened tomatoes from his garden; he boiled up some thin (made-in-China) noodles and fashioned a dip out of (Thai) fish sauce. Soon, the whole Stokes clan was gathered around this improvised smorgasbord and concocting slapdash rolls, most of which fell apart as they met their maker’s mouths. No matter (ever tried, ever failed): the meal was declared a success in Dublin. But what on earth would a Vietnamese foodie, or, gulp, a combustible gatekeeper of Vietnamese cuisine make of this abomination, if a photo were to be leaked into the toxic waters of Twitter?
“To my mind the fundamentals of Vietnamese are freshness and fermentation as well as improvisation — your father’s gỏi cuốn had all of these elements, but what I like about this story is that the idea travelled and inspired others,” says Hien Ngo, a US-trained biochemist turned restaurateur, who at his Ho Chi Minh City eatery, Red Door1, reconfigures classic Vietnamese dishes, or “dishes as ideas,” as their own post-modernist alter-ego selves. “Whether we know it or not, food is always a cross section of culture.”
Instead of telling Hien that Irish people know exactly what he’s talking about (please be upstanding and salute the lasagne sandwich), I told him I was trying to write a review of Vu Hong Lien’s Rice and Baguette (A History of Food in Vietnam) but unfortunately it doesn’t get to the part where a man in Ireland has a bash at making gỏi cuốn, or explain why people like Hien are now freely tinkering with the Vietnamese canon. The book’s publication also didn’t quite have the timing to tell us about how President Barack Obama recently ate Hanoi’s most popular lunchtime noodle dish, bún chả, at 8pm in the evening — an event that singlehandedly introduced the split shift at all central Hanoi bún chả restaurants (while also underlining that the most effective way to win ‘hearts and minds’ in Vietnam is to simply pull up a plastic stool and eat among the locals).
But considering the rising popularity of certain Vietnamese dishes around the world, it does feel like the right time to take stock of this national cuisine with an informative ‘history of…’, and Rice and Baguette proves to be just the ticket but…
… I do have one gripe: in the introduction the author proclaims, “If modern Vietnamese food had a voice, it would be bilingual for it is the offspring of a marriage of convenience between a rice-based culture and a wheat- based diet,” and that today’s Vietnamese cuisine is a “mix of Vietnamese and French dishes.” Vu Hong Lien admits this is a startling statement (I’d argue it’s just wrong) that will offend anyone who suggests that “Vietnam’s culinary culture is subject to the palate of its Chinese big brother” (which would also be wrong).
The impact of France unloading its pantries into Vietnamese kitchens is as undeniable as the impact of roughly 10 centuries of Chinese influence (in all cultural spheres), but the ‘voice’ of Vietnamese cuisine isn’t even trilingual. It is itself, just as the Vietnamese language is entirely Vietnamese, even if it has borrowed and absorbed much from other vocabularies (some more than others, obviously).
The heritage expert William S. Logan once wrote that Vietnam’s cultural (and national) survival had depended on a Vietnamese ability to “bend with the wind.” Concerning himself mainly with architecture, he pointed to the multi-layered urban tapestries of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, which he said could be read like palimpsests of sorts.
So, can we describe Vietnamese cuisine as similarly multilayered? If so, Rice and Baguette certainly succeeds in peeling away many of the layers, gamely beginning at the bottom, in Nghe An province, where archaeologists have unearthed mounds of 8,000-year-old molluscs, “several metres high, hundreds of square metres in area” — which sounds a lot like what you’d also find on the floors of any typical ốc restaurant in Vietnam today, where locals feast on snails, periwinkles, scallops, cockles and mussels like there’s no tomorrow.
The book also manages to capture a sense of how important Vietnamese food is to Vietnamese people (stating the obvious I know), even if we’re just talking about a bowl of rice. “Over the centuries,” writes Vu Hong Lien, “it had become ingrained in the Vietnamese psyche that no matter what, a meal must be hot and served with rice.” (side note for those outside Vietnam: i) phở is a euphemism for a ‘bit on the side’ as it’s never eaten at home, wink-wink; ii) fetishise it all you want, and stuff it full of gourmet products if you like2, but banh mi in the land of its origin is a humble roadside snack). In one of the book’s best anecdotes, Lien explains that when fighting the French halfway through the 20th century, Viet Minh soldiers couldn’t bear to eat cold rice (cooked at night to avoid the attention of the enemy), which is why they devised a smokeless cooking system that emitted smoke away from where the actual stove sat. Ultimately, Vu Hong Lien suggests it played a key role in the decisive 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu. Never mind General Giap: the brains behind this historic victory was an inventive cook from Hoa Binh called Hoang Cam.
The author also explains how imported technology also played its part in the evolution of Vietnamese cuisine. The arrival of the rice cooker, for example, in the ‘70s and ‘80s bought home cooks more prep time for crafting dishes. Science also got in the mix — monosodium glutamate became so commonly used in Vietnam over the years it could be described as a “traditional ingredient.” And through Rice and Baguette there are also shout-outs for (in no particular order) Vietnam’s cross-border and international relations with the Khmer, the Cham, the Americans, Japanese, the Soviet Russians, oh, and the Romans (in the first century AD, they had fish sauce, too — culinary wormhole theorists, you have the floor ...).
In many ways, the more you read of Rice and Baguette, the more you’ll scratch your head over the suggestion that Vietnamese can be boiled down to a marriage of Vietnamese and French foodstuffs and cooking techniques. To truly fathom the DNA of Vietnamese cuisine, if we acknowledge the multiplicity and complexity of Vietnamese history (as modern academics like Christopher Goscha strongly advise) we also have to do away with simplistic narratives. And, of course, with all this talk of absorbing foreign influences, let’s not forget the ingenuity of Vietnamese home-cooks and chefs, who, generation to generation, and mostly anonymously, continue to both honour culinary traditions while also adapting, tweaking and inventing dishes, forever inspired by the bounty of foodstuffs at their disposal. 3
In my time in Hanoi (2000-2012), I noticed small evolutions to classic dishes. Responding to calls from hungry (and increasingly affluent) punters, bún riêu (tomato, tofu and crab noodle soup) stalls seemed to offer an increasing array of protein add-ins (beef, prawns, sausage…) – I even recall the street food guide Mark Lowerson discovering one place that added grilled pork belly (bún riêu - cha, he called it). New dishes also came into existence during my time. When I arrived there was no such thing as phở cuốn4 but now, well, it’s a traditional street food dish (just a very young one). Cuisines are always morphing.
Of course, as entrepreneurs search for the next food fad, some new fangled creations are not always worth celebrating – in Hanoi and/or Saigon I have tried a ‘rice burger’ (rice ‘buns’, pork patties), various attempts at a pho burger (better to not visualise it), and even a banh mi pho — a cinnamon flavoured roll with beef, onion and herbs in the middle. And we know America can play this game too. Exhibit A: the phoritto (yes, that is a burrito stuffed with pho-style fillings).
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, judging by the Guardian food pages, there tend to be two approaches to Vietnamese food: the first encourages authenticity; the second, like my father’s goi cuon, says, let’s take the idea of a dish and then see what’s in the supermarket/fridge. At the time of writing, the last two online columns are: “How to cook perfect pho”; and a playful interpretation of bun cha, normally made with pork, but in this case (look away, ye purists) made with prawn patties and lemongrass.
The good news, for anyone outside of Vietnam is there is more, much, much more to come, and learn. “The variety of cuisine in Ho Chi Minh City alone is just incredible,” says Jack Lee, now the presenter of Vietnam’s MasterChef, and once a nine- year-old Saigonese refugee by the name of Ly Vinh Vien. “Where else in the world can you find a 100 different options for breakfast on a single street? The next stage for Vietnamese cuisine, overseas, is spreading the word about that variety — outside of Vietnamese communities, it’s still mostly just phở, gỏi cuốn bánh mì and bún chả. But generally speaking, Vietnamese food ticks a lot of boxes for countries in the West that are getting more and more health conscious: low in carbs, grilled lean meat, fresh herbs, fresh vegetables, a fruit platter for dessert. That’s why I believe Vietnamese food can revolutionise the way people cook and eat around the world.”
And therein lies the rub: when a cuisine jumps the fence, it’s not just a story of exportation and replication, which is more often than not impossible (I mean, some would probably argue you can’t get a worthwhile bowl of the Hoi An speciality cao lầu 5km down the road in Danang). But what better gift to the world than to inspire other culinary traditions, or to change individualised perceptions of what we eat, and how we eat? Can’t a memory of eating cao lầu inspire somebody, somewhere (anywhere) to make a delicious salad bowl with char siu, thick chewy noodles, beansprouts and whatever herbs they have to hand? The only error they can make would be to post a picture of it on social media5.
All of which sort of takes us back to my father’s fishy gỏi cuốn — or maybe I should have told you about the time he invented “festive phở” from leftover turkey bones and bits? No matter (ever tried, ever failed), you get my point: the idea of Vietnamese food is travelling, more than ever before, and today, wherever you are, it’s there to inspire, too. So I say run with it — and have fun with it. And if a photo does leak onto Twitter and a combustible gatekeeper blows a gasket at the sight of your culinary abomination, just tell them that they need to stop worrying and bend with the wind.
Sadly Hien’s cuisine was a little ahead of its time for D3 but Red Door lives on as a cafe (400/3 Le Van Sy, D3 and 3rd floor of 151 Dong Khoi, D1). In many ways, what he was doing would remind people of Peter Cuong Franklin’s ‘cuisine moi’ at Anan.
For further reading, please download Erica Peters’ academic essay “Defusing phở: Soup stories and ethnic erasures”.
In my one and only attempt at investigative food journalism, I tried to find out who invented Pho Cuon. I failed to find out anything concrete but I heard some good theories.