Snacking across Asia, part III: Vietnam and Cambodia

(... continued from Part II.)

Oftentimes in Vietnam, the lines were blurred on what was a meal and what was a snack.  Fully 90% of my meals took place planted on an ankle-high stool in a street somewhere, cost less than $2, and took only a few minutes out of my day while I slurped up the fist-size chunk of noodles or wrapped odds and ends in lettuce, basil, and mint leaves.  Were these meals or snacks?  Sometimes I ate five of them a day, but was that because of their diminutive size or my Vietnamese food gluttony?

Another peculiarity of Vietnam was that its best snacks were often technically drinks.  On every heat-drenched corner was a maze of stands selling rau má (pennywort juice), nước mía (sugarcane juice), nước ép (fruit juice) and sinh tố (fruit shakes).  The sinh tố was where things could get wild, making use of fruits as diverse as durian and jackfruit, mango, tomato, pineapple, squash, kumquat, soursop, avocado and sapodilla (a fruit I knew only as the Vietnamese 'sapoche' until this very second, when I looked up the English translation).

Keeping this in mind,

1. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Sinh tố

Making sinh tố is far from an exact science, and the proportions vary slightly by stand, but the recipe for a Vietnamese smoothie is, roughly, as follows:

Scoop edible portion of fruit into blender
Grab can of condensed milk; glop a ton of it into the blender on top of the fruit
Grab sugar jug and make it snow on top of the fruit and milk
Add ice
Blend

Even though I watched this process at least 50 times over my four weeks in Vietnam, and fully expected every time that my smoothie should taste like sugar and milk, it magically never did.  It always tasted like someone liquefied and concentrated my favorite fruit and put it directly on my tongue.  Durian shakes were appropriately stinky and retained a nice bit of custardy texture, while the jackfruit versions thankfully cut out their hint of slime.  Avocado shakes made my American palate forget that avocados were meant for guacamole and savory dishes, not sweet ones (I told a smoothie-hawker once that Americans ate avocado only with salty things and she laughed so hard she knocked over a whole pineapple she was about to slice).  I don't like sapodilla much, so it was entirely appropriate for me to think that the shake version tasted like rotten avocados.

Sinh tố was, if not the centerpiece of many photos, at least in the background, fueling the photographer.

Sinh tố in the southeast of the city 

Sinh tố at Chợ Lớn market

Sitting behind a sinh tố stand in District 10

Sinh tố in Phnom Penh

Where the Phnom Penh sinh tố came from 

2. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: "Bánh Mì"

Bánh mì (sandwich) shops are almost as omnipresent as sinh tố stands, but I was surprised to see them pop up from time to time in Phnom Penh.  The Cambodian version, name unknown (as Khmer script is all loops to me) was half the size, coated with fiery red sauce and a heavy, pudding-like paté that tasted almost fermented, and had crunchy pork skins scattered across the top instead of head cheese.

3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia: banana-filled rice

This five-cent snack came from a griddle full of its twins run by an old lady sitting across from the Chinese Embassy.  Unadulterated, nothing but a grill-blackened pad of rice surrounding a lava-hot, sticky flow of ripe banana.  I'm surprised the rest of the tropics haven't caught on!

4. Everywhere: Quail eggs

They come hardboiled; they come as balut.  They come wrapped up pretty in little quail-egg-sized bags, tied with a ribbon.  A ribbon!  Inside the ten-egg packet is an even smaller packet of chili-spiced salt that is stapled closed.  Their vendors cycle through the street and wend their way between tables at seafood, barbecue, and hotpot restaurants.  I'd stop them on the sidewalk on my way home, hand them the equivalent of 25 cents, and go home with a bag of eggs to painstakingly peel and eat sprawled out on my hotel bed.

5. Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam: Bánh chuối

Down the street from our last hotel was a tiny grocery which we never entered.  We never entered it because its bakery was outside, and it had perfect round spheres of blackened banana pastry all ready for us to order from the sidewalk. The proprietor would slice a big fat triangle of jiggling cake-pudding hybrid into a plastic bag at night, and it would warm to breakfast temperature in the hot room by morning.

Quận Bình Dân, Part 2

...continued from Part 1.

One of the best things about Bình Dân district was how friendly, open, patient, and just plain kind everyone was.  There was a fairly significant language barrier even after my four month crash course in Vietnamese, as the audiobooks I used featured a Hanoi accent, and everyone in HCMC (obviously) has a southern accent.  I could talk to people, but as soon as they delightedly exclaimed that I knew Vietnamese and started chattering back to me, it became clear that I couldn't understand a word out of their mouths.

This didn't deter the people in the neighborhood.  Every morning and evening when we came walking down our small side street, everyone waved and said hello.  And the day we left, unsteadily toting our suitcases down the uneven gravel, people spilled out their doors to say goodbye.

A group of ladies a few storefronts down from us had a sinh tố (fruit smoothie) operation running early morning to late evening, and they always stopped what they were doing (gnawing corn on the cob and gossiping, usually) to fix us strawberry, durian, avocado, mango, sapoche, or passionfruit drinks for $0.60.

Another thing that would happen regularly is that a random English-speaker would show up at the most opportune times and lend their services.

In the local market, chợ An Lạc, I wanted to buy some candied ginger, but didn't know how to convey the concept of 'half-a-kilo'.  No worries, a college student showed up behind me from out of nowhere and negotiated the transaction!

Down the street by the park badminton courts, I wanted to buy a cheese bánh mì to fortify myself for a bracing game of hot and humid badminton.  But I had forgotten how to say 'cheese' (it's not a common ingredient in Vietnamese cooking).  Not a problem!  A worker selling New Year mooncakes came running across the street to translate.

At a restaurant advertising cơm gà Hải Nam in giant yellow letters, the English menu had 50 items, none of which were Hainan chicken.  A waiter rushed over to point out that this was actually a category of dishes, and that I could choose from duck, pork, chicken, intestines, or any combination thereof and order it Hainan style.  Then he apologized for his poor English.  I couldn't tell him he was being ridiculous because my mouth was full of melting pork fat and wonderful ginger sauce.

(Bottom dish) $2.75

There was only one exception to the 'exceptionally friendly' rule.

In a surprisingly spacious area for a place that served only one dish, bánh xeo, I sat down one table away from a group of boisterous men who were getting unabashedly sloshed at 4:30 in the afternoon.  Accustomed to respectful curiosity from everyone that I'd met, I remained open to the possibility of civil conversation when one approached me.

This was not to be the case.  He sat with his face three inches from mine as he slurred Vietnamese questions at me.  When I didn't understand them (I could understand most questions spoken at a clear, slow pace, but Drunken Slurring is not a dialect my course had covered) he would smack my arm or leg with his hand and repeat them in exactly the same way, but louder and more spitty.  The owner of the restaurant looked on with detached amusement as his friends roared with laughter and pointed fingers.

I put up with this for exactly three minutes before I grabbed my food and took it to a faraway table. 

Since I ate at lightning speed to escape this situation, and I didn't take photos lest Drunken Man grab my phone and use it to slap my arm, I have little to say about the food other than that it sustained me long enough to walk to the bò lá lốt I wrote about in my last entry.  It only cost $1, though.