Tasty red: Salted jellyfish at No 1 Lê Văn Hưu Street.
One
food that has emerged as a gourmet favourite for summer is the jellyfish, which
is appreciated not only for its taste, but also for its medicinal properties.
Herbalists say jellyfish is good medicine for hypertension.
This
seafood lends itself to many dishes, including nộm sứa (jellyfish salad) and sứa
muối (salted sứa) and many others.
In
fact, on hot summer days, sứa should
be a must in every household menu.
My
friend, Vi Hồng Nhân, a native of Tĩnh Gia District in the coastal province of
Thanh Hóa, is prone to get wistful during summer about the days she and her
friends rushed to the immense sandy beaches.
“Despite
the heat, under the sunlight, we could enjoy a mass carpet of very beautiful
and colourful jellyfish pushed to the shore by waves. They looked like the moon
during a mid-lunar month.
“I
liked the jellyfish a lot, and would often select several big ones to bring
home for my mother to make nộm sứa,”
Nhân said.
Diligent work: The woman has served salted jellyfish at No 1 Lê Văn Hưu Street for dozens of years. She inherited the career from her mother.
Nhân’s
mother, Nguyễn Thị Toàn, said choosing fresh sứa was very important to ensure a tasty dish. “The jellyfish
should have been pushed fresh to the seashore and they have to be cleaned very
carefully because their tentacles have a lot of sand in them.”
To
make sứa tastier and crispy, Toàn
said she would wrap it with tender guava leaves for 30 minutes and re-clean it
with strong tea before mixing it with pieces of cucumber, young fresh mango,
banana slices and some homemade shrimp paste.
This
salad is often had with rau mùi
(cilantro), rau răm (fragrant
knotweed), marjoram, young cassava and đinh
lăng (polyscias fruticosa) leaves, said Toàn, adding that her grandparents
always asked her to have rau má (centella)
while enjoying jellyfish salad.
Crispy, juicy: A plate of jellyfish salad mixed with mango.
Sứa muối
A
relative in Thái Bình Province, Vũ Văn Tám, recently sent us several kilos of
salted sứa, coloured dark red.
I
cleaned the sứa with cool, boiled
water and then cut it into pieces. My husband, a native of Nghệ An Province,
enjoyed it, saying the most tasty and crispy part of sứa was its tentacles.
I
immediately remembered Toàn saying that salted sứa should be had with a salad of rau mùi, rau răm, marjoram, young cassava and đinh lăng leaves and fried groundnuts.
The
dish gets even more tasty when it is dipped in Cát Hải fish sauce that comes
from Hải Phòng City or fish sauce from Phú Quốc Island in Kiên Giang Province.
A bit of lemon juice, crushed garlic and red chilli should be added to the fish
sauce.
My
Thái Bình relative said there were many varieties of jellyfish, including sứa sen, which locals choose as good
food. The sứa sen season lasts from
the fourth to the eighth lunar month every year.
After
catching this jellyfish, fishermen rub it repeatedly on the spot to remove the
slime. Then it is cut into pieces and put into a large glazed terracotta jar
that has guava leaves, alum and salt. The jellyfish is kept in the jar till it
shrinks.
Salted jellyfish is a specialty of Thái Bình Province that has won the appreciation of many gourmets.
Tám
said his family earned between VNĐ80-100 million from last year’s sứa season by
exporting it to mainland China and Taiwan, where it is a specialty food that
commands a high price.
“Sipping
salted sứa with locally made wine,
known as rượu cuốc lủi, is so good
that no man can refuse,” said Tám, adding that he and his fellow fishermen
often celebrate a bumper sứa catch
with a party.
Apart
from being good food in summer, sứa sen
is very good medicine for patients with high triglyceride, constipation,
pneumonia and many other ailments, according to herbalist Hồ Văn Sinh of the
Nghệ An Centre of Traditional Medicine
“It
is also very effective for treating children with prickly heat and other skin
disorders. Boil sứa and salt, and
wash the skin with the water,” he said.
By Ha
Nguyen/VNS