Vegetarian food is becoming more and more popular in Vietnam. The first month of the lunar year is traditionally a good time for vegetarian dining as it is when Buddhists pray to Buddha for good things in the New Year and eat a healthy, vegetarian diet to counteract the effects of the fatty food consumed during the Tet holidays.
Vegetarian food, which is made primarily from vegetables, fruit, pulses and tofu, is a favorite not only amongst Saigonese but also foreign tourists. Consequently a number of restaurants and hotels offer vegetarian programs on the occasion of the Lunar New Year.
Over the eight past years Van Canh Restaurant has gained a reputation for its vegetarian buffets in the New Year holidays as a gift for gastronomes. Its buffet program “Loc dau xuan” (Bud of Spring) features many of vegetarian dishes in combination with natural colors and flavors of plants, fruits and beans and vegetable.
Visitors will also have a chance to enjoy some of the well-known cake brand Givral, and will be presented with a photo of Saint Zenit as a symbol of prosperity and receive best wishes for health and happiness in the New Year.
The buffet program runs from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. from February 4 to 24 (the tenth day to the thirtieth day of the lunar new year). On February 9, or the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the restaurant will serve a buffet lunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tickets are priced at VND120,000 per adult and VND60,000 per child; a purchase of 10 tickets will get one free and a voucher valued US$10 for a trip to Cambodia.
At Que Huong 1 Restaurant is also offering vegetarian gastronomes a variety of choices from its buffet program on February 8 and 9. Tickets are priced at VND99,000 per adult and VND79,000 per child for buffet lunch and VND159,000 per adult and VND99,000 per child for buffet dinner.
Van Canh Restaurant is located at 184 Calmette Street, District 1, HCMC. Tel: (08) 3829 4963.
Que Huong 1 Restaurant is located at 49 Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street, District 1, HCMC. Tel: (08) 3829 4443.
A poor harvest in one of the nation’s main watermelon growing areas means there may be a shortage of the large juicy fruit during the coming Tet holidays.
Watermelon farms in several provinces in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta where this fruit is mainly grown have had a smaller than usual spring-winter harvest, according to senior provincial agriculture officials.
Nguyen Thi Nhu Y, head of the Cultivation Unit at Long An Province’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said the area under watermelon cultivation in the province for this year’s winter-spring harvest was about 1,100ha , a sharp decrease in area compared to the previous years.
"Bad weather was also one of the main reasons for the smaller harvest," said Y, adding that rain and cold spells last month and earlier this month resulted in many melons rotting away.
In 2007, Long An Province grew 3,900ha of watermelon, with 1,300ha for the summer-autumn harvest, 400ha for the autumn-winter harvest and 1,100ha for the winter-spring harvest.
Annually, the province grows from 1,500ha to 2,000ha of watermelon for the winter-spring harvest, according to Y.
The productivity estimated by the department this year is about 15 to 20 tonnes per hectare, decreasing by 5 to 7 tonnes per hectare compared to last year.
The poor harvest means watermelons will be expensive during the Tet holidays, when people often include the fruit in offerings to their ancestors.
Last Tet holidays, Long An Province harvested about 40,000 tonnes of watermelon, but about 80 per cent was sold to traders in Ha Noi for exporting to China.
Y said another reason for the smaller harvest was that farmers had converted some land for melons growing into rice paddies.
"The price of rice was high last year, thus farmers grew more rice," she said.
Associations responsible for collecting watermelons from farmers and managers of the sector haven’t escaped blame for the poor harvest.
Y said collection and distribution groups as well as managers had been letting farmers down.
"They have not been helpful for farmers, who have to sell their products to traders at low prices, while consumers have to buy at high price," she said.
Watermelon farmers in the southern provinces of Tien Giang and Ben Tre have also had poor harvests.
Nguyen Van Khang, director of Tien Giang Province’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said farmers in the province had the same difficulties as their colleagues in Long An.
He said the area used to grow melons for the winter-spring harvest was 1,000ha, 50 per cent smaller than last year.
The price of watermelons in HCM City has already increased slightly. At Ba Chieu Market, the price of watermelons has reached VND8,500 - VND9,000 per kg (US$0.5), increasing VND1,000 compared to prices one week ago. At the Co-op Food Supermarket, the price is VND6,800 per kg.
Farmers lose out
However, farmers are not benefiting from the rising melon prices.
According to Tran Van Tu, a watermelon grower in Thanh An Commune, Thanh Hoa District in Long An Province, he only gets between VND2,300 to VND2,800 per kg. It’s the middle men who are pocketing the profits from rising prices, said Tu.
"For several years we have mainly been growing watermelons for export after the Tet holidays and we only sell a small amount during Tet," said Tu.
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It is unlikely that Nguyen Tat Thanh had tasted pho before he left Vietnam because that national dish had not been widely known at the time. And even if he had heard of it, Thanh, who was utterly poor most of his life, would not have been able to afford it.
Pho: A new Vietnamese specialty
Unlike the "banh day" and "banh chung", dating back to the legendary origin of the Viet people, some 4,000 years ago, and still popular during the Tet season, pho came into being only at the start of the 20th century.
It is perhaps appropriate, as we approach the millennium of Hanoi and the centennial of pho, to retrace the origins where this national dish came from. Two schools of thoughts have emerged, both with influence from outside Vietnam: China or France. Both theories, incidentally, are based on the pronunciation of the word pho.
Nguyen Tung, an anthropologist based in Paris who has researched Vietnamese food in all three regions, agreed with Georges Dumoutier, an earlier writer, that pho did not exist in 1907. (1)
Tung went on to suggest that pho derived from the Cantonese pronunciation of "fun" (noodle), and thus the source of pho probably came from the Chinese refugees flowing into Vietnam in the late 19th Century and bringing with them a number of dishes which later were adopted by the Vietnamese: hu tieu, hoanh thanh, lap xuong, xa xiu, xi dau, pha lau, lau, ta pin lu, etc… (2)
R.W. Apple, Jr., a veteran New York Times journalist, having covered Vietnam during the war, and now elevated to the enviable position of resident-gourmet, advanced an alternate theory that pho came from the French beef-based comfort food, Pot au feu, brought to Vietnam, also in the late 19th Century, by the French colonial forces. (3)
To test this second theory, and no doubt to the chagrin of my dietician, I sampled a pot au feu at in Paris on the last day of 2004. It's a huge dish, made with four types of meat and four types of vegetables, cooked in a broth for a long time. The dish I tasted contained ox tail, beef tongue, beef rib, and an end of a femur with plenty of marrow inside; along with cabbage, potato, carrot, leeks, and turnip. The portion would feed three people.
I'm still debating which theory comes closer to the truth. Each source lacks one of the key components of pho: Chinese noodle soup does not emphasize the quality of the broth while the pot au feu , with good broth, comes with vegetables rather than noodle. Can it be that the Vietnamese, once again, borrow something from each to create something new, organically Viet? I'd like to hear from you, readers, on what you think of the origin of pho.
At any rate, pho took off like a wildfire, and quickly became the national dish for all seasons.
Half a century ago, Nguyen Tuan (1910-1987), the famed writer and a gourmet, penned these words:
"Morning, noon, afternoon, evening, late night, anytime is a good time for a bowl of pho. During the day, having an additional bowl of pho is like brewing a second pot of tea when the company is enjoyable; almost nobody would turn down an invitation to a pho shop. And the beauty of it is that pho makes it possible for a poor man to treat his friends without breaking the bank." (4)
It is now possible to find pho, the essence and symbol of Vietnamese cooking, on every habitable continent. From the tiny stalls in Hanoi, the cradle of pho, to the shopping malls in Orange County, to the Left Bank in Paris, one can now inhale the fragrant and distinctive flavor of "pho". And it is no longer true that only Vietnamese eat pho, or that pho is just breakfast food; it has now gained near universal acceptance, at any time of day or night.
Our beloved pho is Vietnamese to the core. Assuming that both the Chinese and French influences had something to do with the genesis of pho at the start of the last century, our ancestors synthesized, once again, the disparate strands that came across our land, added our Viet sense of balance with the various herbs and spices, and made something nutritious, easy to eat, and elegant at the same time. That story, in a nutshell, is also the history of Vietnam for over 4,000 years.
"Pho" reflects the migration of Vietnamese in the 20th century
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| A famous pho restaurant on Ly Quoc Su Street, Hanoi. |
On a smaller scale, the propagation of pho across the globe also reflects quite accurately the history of our homeland in the 20th Century.
If Georges Dumoutier and Prof. Nguyen Tung are correct, then we owe the French a recognition for having inspired the creation of pho. In return, we Vietnamese more than paid back this debt, in full and with plenty of interest.
It is likely that pho came into being around 1910-1912, early enough in the new century, and just in time before the first forced émigrés from Vietnam arrived in France to help the "mother country" repulse the German invasion during World War I. They were conscripts; many were sacrificed throughout the bloody front.
I haven't been able to find out how many of our Viet ancestors fought on, and gave their lives for, the French side during the First World War. But in March 2005 Thanh Nien related the story of Mr. Hue, one of the "linh tho" of the time and a survivor of the war, who resettled first in Lyon, got married, then moved to Lebanon, another French territory, in search of opportunity, and eventually prospered with two well established restaurants in Beyrouth.
It was also about this time that young Ho Chi Minh arrived in the United States where apparently he stayed for a few years. There was no doubt that he did the menial work to support himself, while learning English and absorbing the American culture. He acquired an affinity with the blacks in New York, Harlem in particular, and when he declared independence for Vietnam on September 2, 1945 in Hanoi, Ho quoted verbatim the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence.
Still it was unlikely that this pioneer generation of emigrants would have known pho well enough, if at all, to plant it in France or anywhere else.
By the Second World War, many more Vietnamese were conscripted again and sent to fight on behalf of France. This time, the number was larger and the theater more widespread since France was occupied and De Gaulle himself took refuge in England.
At the end of WW II, many of the surviving Vietnamese soldiers received French citizenship and were allowed to resettle in France or in another French colony. It was this second generation of expatriates that exported pho to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and even Micronesia. In the 1950's and 60's, it was not uncommon to find Vietnamese restaurants in Cote d'Ivoire or Senegal, Pondichery or New Caledonia.
The next major movement of the Viet people was internal. Following the Geneva Agreement in 1954 that temporarily divided the country into two zones, hundreds of thousands fled from the North to the South, and a smaller number in the opposite direction. These refugees from the North introduced their compatriots in the South to the taste of pho; the South in turn modified pho with bean sprout, basil, ngo gai, and other herbs that are plentiful in the warmer climate.
The South embraced pho, albeit on its own terms, to such a degree that today, the "southern style" of pho is the predominant version: outside of North Vietnam, I have encountered only one restaurant serving pho in the original, Hanoi style, i.e. without bean sprout and basil. That distinctive shop is Thap Rua, on Larkin Street in San Francisco.
Then thirty years ago, it was our turn, baby boomers and Generation X, to leave home. Over the years since 1975, roughly two millions of us left Vietnam. By and large we achieved what we set out for, and then some.
Today, Vietnam itself has a population of 8 million while the diaspora counts almost 4 million, or about five percent of the homeland. More than half of the overseas Vietnamese live in the United States, and almost half of this population choose California as their home. By comparison, China, our neighbor to the North, with a population of 1.3 billion, is connected to a Chinese diaspora estimated at 85 – 90 million. Depending on how one looks at this glass of water: overseas Chinese make up less than ten percent of the homeland population, or the Chinese diaspora is larger than Vietnam itself.
In this context, pho has reached every corner of the Earth as three million Vietnamese sought refuge in dozens of countries, from Denmark to New Zealand, from Japan to Israel. Few other books or tales can tell the story of our migrating people more eloquently. Dang Nhat Minh, the noted film director from Hanoi, has suggested that Vietnam should emphasize food as our brand name, and first among all other dishes, is "pho", our national brand par excellence.
In this new century, as it is welcomed all over the world, pho is an accepted term in both English and French, just like spaghetti or croissant, dim sum or sashimi, this common dish is now truly Vietnam's gift to the world. And as with any gifts, the most useful ones are often the small, deceptively simple, yet used day in and day out, to the point of becoming an integral part of a person's life. Pho is such a gift to the
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