This one was an impulse buy, purchased mostly thanks to its magnificent box, which I snapped up while trawling the aisles of a local Vietnamese supermarket. Based on the name I wasn’t expecting much, and was therefore delighted to discover the Vietnamese equivalent to halvah, a treasure trove of sweet, dusty dessert cubes, with a nice mung bean funk replacing the usually nutty twang. The exceedingly handsome package opens to reveal a tray of twelve separately packed containers (I notice that packaging within packaging seems to be a trend in Asian snacking, although I guess it is in American as well). As the box notes, this confection is a specialty of Hai Duong province, located in North Vietnam’s Red River Delta, where it’s apparently served in two distinct forms. I’m guessing this one is the dry version; the only real problem with these is actually how easily they crumble into dust, a condition that’s visible in the second picture below, which shows the little treats in its unpackaged form. The name Bánh Đậu Xanh literally translates to “mung bean cakes,” and the interplay between the beans and the rich coconut that provides the necessary fat content is pretty fantastic. Also not that hard to prepare on your own, if this recipe is to be believed.
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I’ve at this point come to accept the fact that, despite numerous attempts to get on their wavelength, the pleasures of certain snacks will always remain elusive to my palate. One particular weak spot seems to lie in the cold-served, offal-based bar foods of Southeast Asia. I’ve already twice failed to comprehend the complexities of soondae, the Korean sausage stuffed with pig’s blood and cellophane noodles. This may have had something to do with the circumstances of consumption; I nibbled on it once amid a spread of far-more-palatable dishes at a group dinner, then again by my lonesome with a beer at home, my vegetarian companion sneering with disgust at idea of supermarket-purchased intestines invading our kitchen. Hoping for a better atmosphere, I brought this package of Nem Chua, purchased on impulse from the counter at Tan Tin Hung to a rental house upstate, hoping the convivial atmosphere therein would inspire at least some drunken inquisitiveness. Unfortunately, the sight of these candy pink meat squares, looking like misbegotten Starbursts topped with bird’s eye chili slices, did not strike a chord with anyone. I ate one, sort of admiring the souse-like snap of this portable meat cube, individually wrapped in plastic within the confines of its cellophane package. I also appreciated the appearance of vermicelli strands, hidden inside like subterranean grubs, which added some additional textural interest. Beyond this, however, I can’t express much love for this vinegar-cured pork delicacy, although I’d be willing to try the dominant variety of this snack, which seems to come in a less-processed-looking roll form, under more preferable circumstances. Three days after my first fress, still trying to convince myself that I’d finish off the package, I found that the nem chua, which did not seem to require refrigeration (I refrigerated them anyway, for the sake of safety) had developed a few scattered mold spots and acquired an even more intense sour taste. Not wanting to risk food poisoning over a snack I wasn’t crazy about in the first place, I tossed the rest of the batch, marking this one down as another failure. The Bánh da lợn, which I purchased from the grocery counter on the same trip, remains resilient in my fridge, also waiting for its time in the sun. Its name translates to “pig skin cake,” a fitting bit of serendipity if nothing else.
A jujube is both a candy - the American equivalent to German gummies and Turkish lokum - and a fruit, a red date which has a large variety of medicinal and culinary uses, mostly in Southeast Asian cultures. Part of the buckthorn family, it’s also closely related to Ziziphus mauritiana, the tree which produces the slightly stockier fruit known as the Bere (or the Ber, the Chinee Apple, Indian plum or Masau). Most popularly, it’s referred to as an ‘Indian Jujube,’ although the decidedly Indian Patel Brothers grocery at which I purchased this apple-like fruit also used ‘bere’ on its display. It’s hard enough to separate one cultivar from another when dealing with familiar fruits; this becomes downright impossible when you range out into foreign exotics, so I’ll leave it up to someone else to taxonomically classify all these different variants. The one I ate looked something like this, although with the green skin cast of a Granny Smith apple, with flesh that was similar but a bit softer in texture.
I can say, from a little research, that none of these are related to the Indian Plum, also known as the osoberry, which in furtherance of all this confusion hails not from India but the Pacific coast of the North American continent. Pushing the botanical chaos even further, the ‘Indian Jujube’ does sometimes appear in plum guise, specifically in the wrinkled, preserved form of Xi Muoi, Vietnamese sour plums, which show up as both a Warhead-style sucker (taking the sucker-er through extreme stages of sweet, sour and salty, similar to those strange Chinese olives), and the basis for a refreshing tonic drink. I bought the plums pictured above in Denver over a year ago, and still haven’t figured out an adequate culinary use for them, beyond plunking one or two into a pitcher of lemonade or passing them off as candy to unsuspecting guests. The Indian Jujube, again appearing in its miniature, not-as-appley form, continues on the road toward utter mystification by appearing as one of the principal ingredients in this Chinese drink, a veritable party of exotic botanicals that falls within the inscrutable dessert category of ‘sweet soups.” Composed of chocolate syrup, milk and seltzer, it’s a famous anomaly that the classic New York egg cream contains no actual eggs. Vietnamese egg soda (Soda Sữa Hột Gà), on the other hand, is packed with yolky goodness, balanced out with the heavy tang of sweetened condensed milk and the fizzy snap of seltzer, the kind of concoction that’s almost a meal in itself. As served at Com Tam Ninh Kieu, in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, it pairs well with the sharp flavors of the restaurant’s namesake dish, which makes use of ‘broken rice’, the irregular toss-offs of the rice world, which have long since been rediscovered as an ideal flavor vehicle. Served with all the trimmings at Com Tam, the once-neglected rice is accompanied by two fried eggs, a slab of pork chop and a shrimp cake, a sort of Indochinese spin on a lumberjack breakfast. Breaking the cardinal rule of carbonated beverages, I took the remainder of my soda home, where it was reconstituted in this fantastic Silver Gulch pint glass, with a bit more seltzer added to cut down the egginess, nudging the texture out of full-bodied nog territory.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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