Mussel rice - Photo: Nau.vn
Discovering the
secret ingredient in Hue’s signature dish
The
people of Hue eat as if learning lessons on life. They’ve got to taste it all:
salty, bland, sour, spicy, sweet, and nutty. They disrelish no flavour and even
take pleasure in two flavours that most of the world fears, spicy and bitter.
In the gardens of the North, bitter melon is grown. But there they just use the
red melon and stuff it with meat to make a stew, whereas the green melon is
used only to rub children’s fevered brows. Yet the people of Hue like to use
the bitter melon when it is still green. To cook a soup, water from a boiling
pot must be poured over the bitter melon before it is dropped in, so as to
ensure its bitterness. And then there’s the crushing of raw bitter melon to
make a salad, which is fantastically bitter. One day, when the train stopped at
Lang Co Station, I saw boletus mushrooms sold so cheap that it was as if they
were giving them away for nothing. I ebulliently purchased an entire basket as
a gift for my friend in Danang. Boletus mushroom porridge is ever so delicious,
but only the people of Hue noisily slurp down the porridge with praise, whereas
my Danang drinking buddies all abstain from it, because they cannot stand its
bitterness. As it turns out, we may be separated merely by the Hai Van Pass,
but the way in which Hue people eat and drink is just that peculiar!
But
the strangest thing is Hue people’s custom of eating food so spicy that I, myself,
cannot fathom why it is so. The Hue people have sufficient linguistic tones for
describing spicy flavours that include all sensations—mouth-burning hot,
tongue-rending hot, deafening to the nose hot, tear-letting hot, sweating hot,
deafening-to-the-ears hot, and brain-deafening hot. It can be said that the
people of Hue begin their daily menu with a bowl of dreadfully spicy beef
noodles. Thereafter follows a day that’s spicy ‘all the way up to the eyes and
nose’ that finishes with the cry ‘Compote (che) to eat, anyone?’—a saccharine
cup before bedtime.
Allow
me to introduce a day of ‘Heaven’s torturously (spicy) bliss’ for Hue people.
I’ll start with mussel rice. Hue dishes like beef noodles and tripe porridge
have now become commonplace throughout the country (despite losing their
original spicy character). Only this Hue dish of mussel rice doesn’t exist
anywhere else. Hanoi and Saigon also have restaurants with mussel rice. I’ve
tried them, but they’re all finely sliced oyster. Where’s the mussels?
First
of all, I’ll speak about the rice. Vietnamese people, however their rice is
eaten, must always eat it hot. Only with mussel rice is it imperative that the
rice is cool. It seems as if the Hue people want to express the notion that in
life nothing should be discarded, so they present a cool dish of rice with
little speckled mussels that render anticipation in those who cook this food
called ‘mussel rice.’ Later on, in Hue, people additionally displayed a dish of
mussel noodles that uses noodles instead of cool rice. I really detest such
ways of sundry innovation. Moreover, the people of Hue (in the past, but not
nowadays) are quite adamant about their culinary standpoint. I think that, on
the issue of taste, conservatism is a cultural factor that is extremely
important to preserve heritage. For me, a specialty dish resembles a cultural
relic that must appear exactly as it did in ancient times, and all contrivances
to improve upon them all bear a destructive character that merely fabricates
fakes.
Allow
me to continue this tale of mussel rice. Of the mussels in Hue, the tastiest
are islet mussels. For this reason, the mound that emerges to occupy the
eminently noble position of ‘Azure Dragon on the Left’ [A geomancy term for an
auspicious land formation] from the Classic Book of Changes (Yijing,
Vietnamese: Dich Kinh) as part of the capital citadel’s architecture, is
referred to colloquially as ‘Con Hen’ (Mussel Islet). The bottom of the river
around the islet has a deep layer of mud, which is a fertile environment for
mussels. The remarkable thing about the mussels is that, despite lacking arms
and legs, when the weather changes and causes the current to flow powerfully,
they can dive deep down to the bottom of the mud in order to avoid being swept
away. The people on the islet, who make their trade by scooping up the mussels,
every year hold a ceremony to worship mussels in the seventh month. On the
boisterous bannered ferryboats, the beat of the drums echoes far. People boil
the mussels and then bring them out to the river to regale in large baskets.
They remove the shells and take just the meat of the mussels to measure out
into bowls and sell to people who make mussel rice.
‘If you talk like
that, then what’s there left of Hue?!’
This
mussel meat is the chief flavour of mussel rice. It is stir-fried and
accompanied by cellophane noodles, dried bamboo shoots, and finely shredded
pork. The third ingredient is fresh vegetables. It may be just a pinch, but
these fresh vegetables are made of banana stems or banana buds that are sliced
into thin strips and mixed with mint, star fruit, and finely cut fragrant
herbs. Sometimes, the order calls for yellow marigold petals that look fresh to
the eyes and add a fragrance of their own.
The
broth used to boil mussels is ladled out from a steaming pot with a ladle made
from a fine coconut shell. The water is poured to fill a bowl that has it all,
including cold rice, stir-fried mussels, fresh vegetables, and the addition of
all sorts of colourful flavours. The mussel broth has ground ginger added and
is a murky white. Indeed, there’s an utmost infatuation with that murky colour.
To eat mussel rice and complain that the broth is murky would be ludicrous!
The
set of colours in mussel rice is the most sophisticated among all beneath the
skies. Here’s a list of the spices that I have observed in one shoulder pole of
mussel rice—surely it can be considered ideal: 1) chilli sauce, 2) colourful
chilli and chilli pickled in fish sauce, 3) fresh shredded pork, 4) crumbled
rice paper, 5) roasted salt, 6) coarsely ground peanuts roasted in lard, 7)
roasted sesame, 8) crispy roasted pigskin, 9) lard and lard cracklings, and 10)
monosodium glutamate. Everything is stored in bottlenecked glass jars and pots
displayed in baskets. The aunties who sell mussel rice take it out with a small
poon ladle. Their hands nimbly take a little bit of everything as if sifting
holy water.
The
fragrance redolent throughout these people’s lives is the smell of dried
shredded pork, the aromatic scent of which rises straight to the brain and the
spiciness of which draws tears. Those enthused with mussel rice in their blood
are not just satisfied with the dish’s ready-made spiciness and further demand
the addition of a fresh hot pepper to bite on and exclaim ‘fiery hot!’ Tears
pour down with effusive sweat in small beads into the bowl of rice, and yet
they slurp, gasp and ejaculate, ‘Tasty! Delicious!’ When travelling afar, its
recollection is compounded to the point of rending strands of hair. To have
lived abroad and then fly out to Hue in order to eat, by any means, a bowl of
mussel rice to one’s heart’s content is…just like that — oh heavens, Hue!
I
recall once, on a grey rainy afternoon in November, I was sitting eating mussel
rice at a friend’s house on Hang Me Street. I had just come back from the West.
Throughout the two weeks, I stayed in the hall for a writers’ congress. Every
meal had nothing but meats, butter, and cheese to the point that I was
dismayed. For many days, I just brought a bundle of fruit back to my room and
ate it in lieu of a meal. For many weeks, I didn’t have a single grain of rice
in my belly. When I heard the peddling of mussel rice, I was stirred down to my
gums. That was the first time that I ate a bowl of mussel rice with the
entirety of my soul. Seeing that the sister selling her wares had to put so
many things in my little bowl, I felt pity for her and asked: ‘How much do you
profit that you must go to such exaction? You just need three or four things.
Wouldn’t that save you the effort?’ She looked at me with a pair of uncanny,
irate eyes, ‘If you talk like that, then what’s there left of Hue?!’
She
shouldered her wares away, her frame frail and slender, her ao dai black and
over worn, her conical hat tattered; yet the voice with which she peddled her
wares was resounding. At that moment, I finally discovered a fifteenth flavour;
that is fire. Indeed, a nurturing hearth fire that fosters throughout the
wintery rain, abidingly following after the footsteps of men.
* The article is from
the book Độc Đáo Ẩm Thực Huế (The Unique Cuisine of Hue), complied by Nguyen
Nha, Thong Tan Publishing House, 2011
By Vietnam Heritage