FOOD AND COSMOLOGY IN HOI AN, VIETNAM
Eating Lunch and Recreating the Universe
It was 11:30 am and Quynh said that lunch was ready. We all took our seats on the wooden stools by the round wooden table: Quynh and her husband Anh, his mother and sister, Irit (my spouse) and I. The food was already set on the table: a small plate with three or four small fish in a watery red sauce, seasoned with some fresh coriander leaves, a bowl of morning-glory soup (canh rau muong) boiled with a few dried shrimps, and a plate of fresh lettuce mixed with different kinds of green aromatics. There was also a bowl of nuoc mam cham (fish sauce diluted with water and lime juice, seasoned with sugar, ginger, and chili). An electric rice cooker was standing on one of the stools by the table. There were also six ceramic bowls and six pairs of ivory-colored plastic chopsticks.
We took our seats, with Anh’s mother seated by the rice cooker, and handed her our rice bowls. She filled them to the rim with steaming rice, using a flat plastic serving spoon. Quynh pointed at the different dishes and said: “com [steamed rice], rau [(fresh) greens], canh [soup], kho [‘dry’—pointing to the fish].” Then she pointed to the fish sauce and added “and nuoc mam.” In this chapter, I discuss the Hoianese1 daily, home-eaten meal as a cultural artifact, as a model of the universe (Geertz 1973): a miniature representation of the way in which the Vietnamese conceive of the cosmos and the ways in which it operates. This is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An since 1998.
The Basc Structure of the Hoianese Meal
The Hoianese, home-eaten meal is basically composed of two elements: steamed rice (com), served with an array of side dishes (mon an or “things [to] eat”). It could be argued that this meal is structured along the lines of a Levi-Straussian binary opposition: an amalgam of colorful, savory toppings juxtaposed over a pale, bland, staple grain. Moreover, the relations between the rice and mon an could be analyzed within the nature–culture dichotomy that underlies Levi-Strauss’s work, with the hardly transformed rice standing for “nature” and opposed to the deeply manipulated dishes that stand for “culture.” However, the Hoianese meal is better understood within the context of Vietnamese culture.
The mon an (‘things to eat”) are of a more varied and dynamic nature than the rice. The Hoianese mon an are made of raw and cooked vegetables and leafy greens and a small amount of animal protein, usually that of fish. The mon an adhere to the four categories mentioned by Quynh: rau—raw greens, canh—boiled soup, and kho—a “dry” dish (fried, stir-fried, or cooked in sauce), which are always accompanied by nuoc mam (fermented fish sauce).
The basic structure of the Hoianese home-eaten meal is therefore that of a dyad of rice and “things to eat,” which further develops into a five-fold structure encompassing five levels of transformation of edible ingredients into food: raw, steamed, boiled, fried/cooked, and fermented. This “twofold-turn-fivefold” structure is a Weberian “ideal-type.” Ashkenazi and Jacob suggest that such basic meal structures should be viewed as “schemes” for a meal “which individuals may or may not follow, but which most will recognize and acknowledge as a representation of the ways things should be” (2000:67). Thus, though Hoianese meals routinely adhere to the “twofold-turn-fivefold” scheme, there are innumerable possibilities and combinations applied when cooking a meal. Let us now turn to the ingredients and dishes that constitute the meal: rice, fish, and greens, and show how they conjure into a solid nutritional logic, firmly embedded in an ecological context.
Corn (rice)
“Would you like to come and eat lunch in my house?” asked Huong, a sales-girl in one of the clothes shops with whom we were chatting for a while. I looked at Irit and following our working rule of “accepting any invitation” said “sure, why not!” We followed Huong toward the little market near the Cao Dai temple and turned into a paved alley that soon became a sandy path and ended abruptly in front of a gate. “This is my house!” Huong exclaimed proudly, pushing her bike through the gate and into the yard. The small house was whitewashed in pale blue and looked surprisingly new. Huong invited us into the front room and offered us green tea.
She told us that her parents had left the country several years previously and had settled in the United States. Huong was waiting for her parents to arrange her immigration papers, while her younger brother was about to marry his Hoianese girlfriend and was planning to stay in town. The newly built house—with its ceramic-tiled floor, new wooden furniture, and double-flamed gas stove—was purchased with money sent by the parents in America. We browsed through some photo albums, sipped tea, and chatted. Shortly before 11:30, Huong said that it was time for lunch and went to the kitchen. In the small kitchen, the brother’s fiancée was sorting fresh greens. Rice was ready, steaming in an electric rice cooker. On the gas stove there were two tiny pots, one with a couple of finger-sized fish simmering in a yellow, fragrant sauce, and the other with a single chicken drumstick cooking in a brown sauce, chopped into three or four morsels. There was nothing else. “Is this all the food for lunch for the three of you?”
I asked Huong, feeling surprised and embarrassed. “Yes,” she replied. I returned to the main room and told Irit in Hebrew that there was very little food in the house, certainly not enough for guests, and that we shouldn’t stay and eat the little they had. We apologized and said that we hadn’t noticed how late it was and that we had to leave right away. Huong seemed somewhat surprised for a moment, but then walked us to the gate and said goodbye. She didn’t look angry or offended, so I thought that she was relieved when we left, as she avoided the humiliation of offering us the meager meal.
That afternoon, we recounted this incident in our daily Vietnamese language class. I remarked that the house didn’t look poor at all, so I couldn’t understand why this family was living in such deprivation, with three working adults having to share two sardines and one drumstick for lunch. Our teacher, Co (Miss/teacher) Nguyet, looked puzzled for a while and finally asked: “Why do you think that this was a small lunch—didn’t they have a whole pot of rice?”
Rice is the single most important food item in the Hoianese diet. The most meager diet that “can keep a person alive” is boiled rice with some salt. Rice is the main source of calories and nutrients, and constitutes most of a meal’s volume. In a survey of the eating patterns I conducted in 2000, the ten families who reported daily for six months on their eating practices had steamed rice (com) or rice noodles (bun) twice daily (for lunch and dinner), six to seven days a week. In addition, most of their breakfast items (noodles, porridge, pancakes), as well as other dishes and snacks they consumed in the course of the day (sweetmeats, crackers, etc.), were made of rice or rice flour.
Rice has been cultivated in Vietnam for thousands of years. Grains of Oryza fatua, the earliest brand of Asian rice, were cultivated by the proto-Vietnamese Lac long before the arrival of the Chinese (Taylor 1983:9–10). Cultivating rice is the single most common activity in Vietnam (Nguyen 1995:218). A total of 80 percent of the population live in the countryside and roughly 80–90 percent farm rice. The rural landscape is of endless green expanses of rice terraces. Roughly 125 days per annum are spent directly in rice production, and most other rural activities revolve around the exploitation of rice residues (Jamieson 1995:34) or in supplementing its nutritional deficiencies. Peanuts, beans, and coconuts supply proteins and fats; leafy greens and aromatic herbs provide the vitamins, minerals, and fiber lost in the process of polishing; pigs are fed with rice bran and meals’ leftovers, mostly rice; ducks are herded over the newly harvested rice fields. Every grain ends up in the human food chain.
Even the dogs are fed rice. Traditionally, when a farmer died, he was buried in his own rice field, returning symbolically and physically into the “rice-chain” that is the source of human life.
In Vietnam, there are two kinds of rices: gao te: ordinary or “plain” rice, and gao nep: “sticky” glutinous rice. Sticky rice, the staple of many of the ethnic minorities in Vietnam, was domesticated thousands of years before the development of the hard-grained “plain” rice. Plain rice is cultivated nowadays on a much larger scale, as it yields significantly bigger crops, yet sticky rice is considered the “real” rice, hence its prominence in religious and social events. The distinction between plain and sticky rice in Vietnam is so important that the term nep-te (“sticky rice–plain rice”) is used to express oppositions such as “good–bad,” “right–wrong,” and even “boy–girl.”
The centrality of rice is evident in the language. Vietnamese features a wide variety of terms for rice in various states of cultivation, process, and cooking: rice seedlings are called lua, paddy is thoc, husked rice is gao, sticky rice is nep (and when boiled, com nep), steamed sticky rice is xoi, rice porridge is chao, and steamed (polished) rice is com. Com means both “cooked rice” and “a meal.” An com, “[to] eat rice,” also means “to have a meal,” and this term is used even in cases when rice is not served. Com bua, literally “rice meal,” means “daily meal.”
The most prominent aspect of Vietnamese rice culture is the great quantity of grain consumed daily. Though the total amount of food eaten in a meal is far smaller than that consumed in a parallel Western meal, the amount of rice is very large: 2–3 bowls of cooked rice per adult per meal, approximately 700 grams of dry grain daily, or roughly 1.5 kg of cooked rice, exceeding 2,000 calories.
Cooking rice is a serious and calculated process. The rice is first rinsed thoroughly so as to wash the dusty polishing residues. If left to cook, this dust would make for a sticky cement-like texture that would disturb the balance between the distinct separation of each grain and the complete wholeness of the mouthful of rice. Water is added in a 1:2 ratio and the pot is placed over the hearth. When the water boils, the pot is covered and the rice is left to cook for about twenty minutes. The rice is then “broken” or stirred with large cooking chopsticks and is left in its own heat for a few more minutes before serving.
Since the 1990s, when electricity became a regular feature in Hoi An, most Hoianese, urban and rural, have used electric rice cookers. These appliances regulate the proper temperature, humidity, and duration of cooking. In the suburbs of Hoi An, where the dwellers were mostly farmers shifting into blue-collar and lower-middle-class urban jobs, traditional wood-fed hearths were gradually replaced by gas stoves and electric rice cookers, and rice is no longer served from large, smoke-blackened pots but from smaller, lighter, bright tin ones. Still, people rely on their own expertise and experience even when using rice cookers.
Although rice makes the event of eating “a meal,” rice does not call attention to itself (Ashkenazi and Jacob 2000:78) with its white blandness, mushy consistency, moderate temperature on being served, and subtle fragrance. Yet, for the Hoianese rice undoubtedly constitutes the essence of a meal. The very act of eating a meal shows respect toward rice and reproduces Confucian patterns of seniority and status in the order with which people take the first bite of rice. Rice must be supplemented with other nutrients, notably protein, fat, vitamins, and fiber. The Vietnamese overcome the nutritional deficiencies of rice with ingredients abundant in their ecosystem: fish and seafood, coconuts and ground nuts, and a variety of leafy and aromatic greens.
Ca (fish)
Khong co gi bang com voi ca. Nothing is [better than] rice with fish
Khong co gi bang me voi con. Nothing is [better than] a mother with a child.
Vietnam has more than 3,000 km of coastline, several large rivers, and an endless system of irrigation canals and water reservoirs. These provide a fertile habitat for a rich and diverse variety of fish, seafood, and aquatic animals such as frogs, eels, and snails. The intimate relations of the Vietnamese with water and waterways can be discerned from the very early stages of their history. The Vietnamese terms for a “country” are dat nuoc (land [and] water), nong nuoc (mountains [and] water), or simply nuoc (water), while government is nha nuoc (house [and] water). It is easy to understand why under such socioecological conditions aquatic animals are essential components of the diet.
Coastal and freshwater fishing are extremely important; many farmers are part-time fishermen and some have recently turned their rice fields into shrimp ponds. Almost all farmers exploit aquatic resources within the rice system, regularly trapping frogs, snails, eels, fish, and crabs that inhabit the rice terraces and often compete with the farmer over rice seedlings and paddies. Many practice “electric fishing,” using electrodes powered by car batteries so as to shock and collect fish and amphibians at night (at great per sonal danger, they say, as they risk the bites of poisonous snakes as well as encountering hungry ghosts that roam the swamps at night).
Often, much time and effort were invested in fishing a few, miniscule fish. Whenever I was in town during the Hoianese flood season (November and December), I would see many of my neighbors pole fishing in the raging drainage canals for a few hours each afternoon. They never caught more than a handful of small fish, yet were obviously content with their catch, which was promptly cooked for dinner. This led me to pay more attention to the quantitative relations between the fish and the rice eaten at every meal. For Israeli or Western diners, serving such a small amount of fish would probably seem insulting. For Hoianese, however, half a dozen finger-size fish, approximately equivalent to a single sardine can, were clearly perceived as sufficient for a family meal.
Fish are commonly cooked into a “dry” dish or soup. As a “dry” dish, fish and other kinds of seafood can be fried and then boiled in tomato sauce, lemongrass, or garlic, or may be steamed or grilled (another local specialty is grilled fish in banana leaves, but this is a restaurant meal). Small fish and shrimp are often cooked with leafy greens into canh (soup). However, the most popular method of fish consumption is in the form of nuoc mam, the Vietnamese fish sauce.
Nuoc mam (fish sauce)
Lanh lives with her husband and daughters in her in-laws’ shop-house opposite the pier, just by the municipal market. Lanh quickly realized where my interests lay and often invited me to come for a meal. We often went to the market and shopped together. Her home was at the top of a flight of stairs; I learned to take a deep breath and hold it as long as possible as we climbed up. When I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, I would silently empty my lungs and then, slowly and cautiously, breath through my mouth. However, this did not help. The thick, salty stench of fermenting fish would hit me. On my first visit, still unprepared, the stench was so heavy that I almost fainted.
At the corner of the room stood a large cement vat. Drops of amber liquid slowly dripped from its tap into a large ladle. “This is my mother’s nuoc mam,” said Lanh proudly, “the best in Hoi An!” Lanh’s mother-in-law bought a few kilograms of ca com (rice fish or long-jawed anchovy) every spring and mixed them with salt. The salt extracted the liquids out of the fish, while the tropical heat and humidity facilitated fermentation of the brine. After three or four weeks, the brine mellowed and cleared. Normally, this was the end of the process and the liquid was bottled and consumed.
In order to further improve its quality, Lanh’s mother-in-law kept the liquid “alive” by pouring it over and over again into the vat, allowing for a continuous process of fermentation that enhanced its flavor (and smell!). The result is an especially potent nuoc mam nhi (virgin fish sauce). Lanh told me that “only Vietnamese people can make nuoc mam because only they can understand! Now you know why my dishes are so tasty,” she added. “The secret is in the nuoc mam. Don’t worry, when you go back to your country, I’ll give you a small bottle. My mother always gives some to our relatives and close friends for Tet [the New Year festival].”
The tropical weather means that fresh fish and seafood spoil very quickly. Hence, rational practicality partly underlies this culinary icon, which is essentially a technique of preservation. However, nuoc mam embodies much more than nutritional and practical advantages, as it is the most prominent taste and cultural marker of Vietnamese cuisine. Nuoc mam is used in different stages of cooking and eating: as a marinade before cooking, as a condiment while cooking, and as a dip when eating.
In each stage, fish sauce influences the taste in a different way: in a marinade it softens the ingredients and starts the process of transformation from “raw” into “cooked”; nuoc mam is added to most dishes while cooking in order to enhance their flavor, to make the dish salty and, most importantly, to give the dishes their crucial “fishy” quality; at meals, nuoc mam is always present on the table, mixed with lime juice, sugar, crushed garlic, black pepper, and red chili into a complex dip. The diners dip morsels of the “side dishes” in the sauce before placing them on the rice and sweeping a “bite” into their mouths.
Since it is impolite for diners to adjust the taste of a dish with condiments, as it implies that the dish is not perfectly cooked, providing a complex dip allows for a polite and acceptable personal adjustment of the taste of a dish. Finally, the nuoc mam bowl is the agent of commensality in the family meal: rice is dished into individual bowls and the side dishes are picked out of the shared vessels, but everybody dips their morsels of food into the common fish-sauce saucer just before putting them into their mouths.
Leafy Greens and Aromatics
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No Vietnamese dish and certainly no Hoianese meal is served without fresh and/or cooked leafy greens: a dish of stir-fried or boiled rau mung (water morning glory), a tray of lettuce and aromatic leaves (rau song), or just a dash of chopped coriander over a bowl of noodles would do. Polished rice and fermented fish lack fiber and vitamins, specifically B1 (thiamin) and C (Anderson 1988:115). Lack of fiber causes constipation in the short term and might contribute to serious digestive maladies, including stomach cancer (Guggenheim 1985:278–82). Lack of vitamin C can cause, among other maladies, scurvy (ibid., 176); and lack of thiamin might result in beriberi (ibid., 201). For the rice-eating Vietnamese, the consumption of greens, and especially of raw greens, is therefore essential for balanced nutrition.
A variety of fresh, mostly aromatic, greens are served as a side dish called rau song (raw/live vegetables). There are regional variations in the composition of the greens. In the north, the purple, prickly la tia to (perilla) and (French-introduced) dill are often served. In the center and south, let tuce leaves (xa lach; note the French influence) are mixed with bean sprouts (sometimes lightly pickled), coriander, and several kinds of mints and basils. In the south, raw cucumber is sometimes added. In Hoi An, ngo om (a rice-paddy herb) and dip ca (‘fish leaves,” dark green heart-shaped leaves that, according to the locals, taste like fish) are often included in the platter. In the countryside, farmers tend small plots of greens right next to the house, creating convenient kitchen gardens. Urban dwellers buy the greens in the market just before mealtime.
Ba (Grandma) Tho, lips red from her constant chewing of trau cau (betel quid), handed me a bag of rau song just bought in the market and told me to wash them. The greens are harvested young and tender: a lettuce head is no bigger than a fist and the other greens are not higher than 10 cm and have only a few leaves. When lettuce is cheap, there is plenty of it in the mix, but when the price goes up, cheaper greens make up the volume.
I squatted on the cement floor near the tap, filled a plastic basin with water, and soaked the greens. The old woman placed a strainer near me and instructed me to carefully clean the leaves and throw away anything that was black, torn, old-looking, or seemed to have been picked at. If the leaves were too big for a bite, I was to break them into smaller bits. Only the good parts were to be put in the strainer for a second wash.
The bag contained no more than a kilo but it took me a while to go over it thoroughly. The mound of rejected leaves was constantly larger than the pile of perfect, crunchy greens in the strainer. Grandma Tho, obviously unsatisfied, asked me why I was taking so long and why I was throwing away so many good greens. She picked up the pile of rejected leaves and went to the back of the kitchen where, at the narrow space between the toilet wall and the fence, stood her beloved chicken coop. She threw the leaves in and contentedly watched the chicks fight over them.
Greens are served fresh and crunchy, fragrant, cool, and bright, and their contribution to the taste, texture, and color of the meal is substantial. They are picked up with chopsticks, dipped in nuoc mam, sometimes mixed with rice or other side dishes, and then eaten. As they are so fragrant and aromatic, it seems obvious that the greens are there for their taste and smell. However, a specific taste is not the main objective.
The prominence of the bland nonfragrant lettuce and bean sprouts further hints at other aspects of the greens. Here I recall my own eating experience: the cool crunchy greens adjust and balance the texture of the meal. The moist rice and the slippery, almost slimy, fish are counterbalanced, “charged with life,” so to speak, by the fresh crispness of the greens. The aromatic greens cool down the dishes, not only by reducing the temperature, but also by adding a soothing quality that smoothes away some of the sharp edges of the other tastes. The random mixing of aromas and tastes adds a new dimension to every bite: a piece of ca tu (mackerel) cooked in turmeric and eaten with a crunchy lettuce leaf is a totally different from the same bite of fish eaten with some coriander. Here again we see how the structured rules of etiquette, which prevent personal seasoning and stress common taste, are subtly balanced by a setting that allows for personal modification and constant, endless variation and change.
Meal Structures and Cosmology
Chi, a local chef and one of my most valuable informants and friends, suggested on several occasions that the basic dyad of “rice” and “things to eat” “is am and duong” (yin and yang). A similar point was made by Canh, another prominent Hoianese restaurateur, when we discussed the medicinal and therapeutic qualities of his cooking, while Tran, a Hoainese scholar, also suggested that am and duong shape the ways in which dishes and meals are prepared.
Yin and yang is an all-encompassing Chinese Taoist principle that champions a dynamic balance between the obscure, dark, wet, cold, feminine energy of yin and the hot, powerful, shining, violent, male energy of yang (Schipper 1993:35). This cosmic law maintains that harmony is the outcome of the tension between these opposites, which are the two sides of the same coin and existentially dependent upon each other, as there would be no “white” without “black,” no “cold” without “hot,” and no “men” without “women.” Jamieson, in his insightful Understanding Vietnam (1995), claims that the principle of yin and yang is the key to understanding the Vietnamese society, its culture and history. He particularly points out that “Diet could disrupt or restore harmony between yin and yang” (1995: 11), stressing the essential relationship between this cosmological principle and the culinary realm.
As pointed out earlier, am and duong were mentioned by my informants on several occasions when discussing food and, specifically, when I asked them about the structures of meals and dishes. They suggested that the bland, pale, shapeless rice was compatible with the notion of am (with rice related to femininity, as the senior female is the one who serves rice to the others), while the colorful, savory, varied mon an adhere to the definition of duong as flamboyant, savory entities to which men have privileged access. Moreover, the meal is wholesome only when both rice and mon an are presented on the table or tray, making for a material representation of am and duong, with a bowl of rice and mon an resembling the famous graphic symbol of yin and yang.
Am and duong, however, were actually mentioned by my informants quite rarely, and only by highly skilled cooks or educated professionals. The popular and common discourse was mainly concerned with the therapeutic qualities of food, within the medical cold–hot paradigm, according to which all dishes, ingredients, seasoning, and cooking techniques are either “heating” or “cooling.” According to this theory, a dish should be balanced, combining hot and cold elements (as in the case of sweet-and-sour dishes) so as to maintain the diners’ physical and emotional harmony.
In some cases, heating or cooling are desired, usually due to some health problems, as in the case of colds and flues, when ginger is used so as to “heat” up the dish and, as a consequence, the eater, so as to help him or her overcome a cold condition. In other cases excess is sought, as in instances when enhanced masculine sexual potency is desired. In such circumstances, aphrodisiacs such as snake, he-goat meat, or duck embryos, which are extremely “heating,” would be consumed so as to enhance the level of duong.
While the hot–cold paradigm for food was mentioned often, very few were aware that it is an implementation or implication of the am and duong theory. It seems, then, that in between abstract cosmological notions and lived experience there exists a third, mediating level, concerned directly with practical knowledge of the body and its well-being. While only a few people talk confidently about am and duong, the “hot-and-cold” paradigm is often evoked in discussions about food and cooking. The important point is that although the Hoianese only rarely linked the meal structure directly to the cosmological theory of am and duong, they did refer often to its practical implications of “hot and cold.”
If the twofold structure of the Hoianese meal is a manifestation of the cosmic principle of am and duong, it would be reasonable to argue that the fivefold structure into which it evolves also stands for a cosmological principle. Here, I suggest that this fivefold structure is a representation of the cosmological theory of ngu hanh or “the five elements.”
The five elements (or phases): water, fire, wood, metal, and earth, are finer subdivisions of the am and duong and “represent a spatio-temporal continuation of the Tao” (Schipper 1993:35), standing for the cardinal directions, the seasons, the planets, the viscera, and for everything else that exists. Hence, “like the yin and yang, the five phases are found in everything and their alternation is the second physical law [after yin and yang]” (ibid.). The five elements are interrelated in cycles of production and destruction (e.g., water produces wood and extinguishes fire); their relations and transformations generate the movement that is life.
Though my Hoianese friends never said that the five components of the Hoianese meal are representations of the five elements, when I suggested that this was the case, several of the more knowledgeable ones (e.g., Chi, the chef, and Co Dung, my Vietnamese language teacher) thought that I had a point. They were not able, however, to help with a formulation of the elements into a culinary matrix. The only clear reference was to rice, which is the centerpiece of the meal and corresponds to the “center” and, as such, to the “earth” element. I assumed that the soup corresponds to “water” and the greens to “wood,” but was not sure which of the other two, the fish sauce and the “dry” dish, corresponded to fire and which to metal. However, since the fish sauce is a fermented substance used in different stages to transform other ingredients, I would attribute it to “fire,” while the “dry” dish corresponds to “metal.”
The fivefold structure also encompasses the five possible states of transformation of edible matter into food: raw, steamed, boiled, fried/grilled, and fermented. The Hoianese meal can be seen as a model of the universe: an abstract, condensed version of the ways in which the universe looks and operates. In similar lines to Eliade’s (1959:5) claim that “all the Indian royal cities are built after the mythical model of the celestial city, where the Universal sovereign dwelt,” and to Cohen’s (1987) suggestion that the cross pattern employed by the Hmong in their textile design, as well as specific pattern of face piercing applied by devotees during the vegetarian festival in Phuket (Cohen 2001), are cosmological schemes, I argue that the Hoianese meal is also a model of the universe and of the ways in which it operates.
Thus, whenever the Hoianese cook and eat their humble daily meal, they make a statement about the ways in which they perceive the universe and, when physically incorporating it, reaffirm the principles that shape their cosmos, endorsing them and ensuring their continuity. As with Indian Royal cities, Hmong embroidery patterns, or Thai piercing, most Hoianese are unaware of the cosmic meaning of the food they prepare. However, cooking and eating, just like piercing or following specific architectural designs, is a practice that encompasses “embodied Knowledge” (Choo 2004:207), knowledge that exists but not always intellectually and reflexively.
By Nir Avieli in the book "Everyday Life in Southeast Asia" edited by Kathleen M. Adams & Kathleen A. Cillogly, Indiana University Press, U.S.A, 2011, excerpts p. 218-228. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
We took our seats, with Anh’s mother seated by the rice cooker, and handed her our rice bowls. She filled them to the rim with steaming rice, using a flat plastic serving spoon. Quynh pointed at the different dishes and said: “com [steamed rice], rau [(fresh) greens], canh [soup], kho [‘dry’—pointing to the fish].” Then she pointed to the fish sauce and added “and nuoc mam.” In this chapter, I discuss the Hoianese1 daily, home-eaten meal as a cultural artifact, as a model of the universe (Geertz 1973): a miniature representation of the way in which the Vietnamese conceive of the cosmos and the ways in which it operates. This is based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the central Vietnamese town of Hoi An since 1998.
The Basc Structure of the Hoianese Meal
The Hoianese, home-eaten meal is basically composed of two elements: steamed rice (com), served with an array of side dishes (mon an or “things [to] eat”). It could be argued that this meal is structured along the lines of a Levi-Straussian binary opposition: an amalgam of colorful, savory toppings juxtaposed over a pale, bland, staple grain. Moreover, the relations between the rice and mon an could be analyzed within the nature–culture dichotomy that underlies Levi-Strauss’s work, with the hardly transformed rice standing for “nature” and opposed to the deeply manipulated dishes that stand for “culture.” However, the Hoianese meal is better understood within the context of Vietnamese culture.
The mon an (‘things to eat”) are of a more varied and dynamic nature than the rice. The Hoianese mon an are made of raw and cooked vegetables and leafy greens and a small amount of animal protein, usually that of fish. The mon an adhere to the four categories mentioned by Quynh: rau—raw greens, canh—boiled soup, and kho—a “dry” dish (fried, stir-fried, or cooked in sauce), which are always accompanied by nuoc mam (fermented fish sauce).
The basic structure of the Hoianese home-eaten meal is therefore that of a dyad of rice and “things to eat,” which further develops into a five-fold structure encompassing five levels of transformation of edible ingredients into food: raw, steamed, boiled, fried/cooked, and fermented. This “twofold-turn-fivefold” structure is a Weberian “ideal-type.” Ashkenazi and Jacob suggest that such basic meal structures should be viewed as “schemes” for a meal “which individuals may or may not follow, but which most will recognize and acknowledge as a representation of the ways things should be” (2000:67). Thus, though Hoianese meals routinely adhere to the “twofold-turn-fivefold” scheme, there are innumerable possibilities and combinations applied when cooking a meal. Let us now turn to the ingredients and dishes that constitute the meal: rice, fish, and greens, and show how they conjure into a solid nutritional logic, firmly embedded in an ecological context.
Corn (rice)
She told us that her parents had left the country several years previously and had settled in the United States. Huong was waiting for her parents to arrange her immigration papers, while her younger brother was about to marry his Hoianese girlfriend and was planning to stay in town. The newly built house—with its ceramic-tiled floor, new wooden furniture, and double-flamed gas stove—was purchased with money sent by the parents in America. We browsed through some photo albums, sipped tea, and chatted. Shortly before 11:30, Huong said that it was time for lunch and went to the kitchen. In the small kitchen, the brother’s fiancée was sorting fresh greens. Rice was ready, steaming in an electric rice cooker. On the gas stove there were two tiny pots, one with a couple of finger-sized fish simmering in a yellow, fragrant sauce, and the other with a single chicken drumstick cooking in a brown sauce, chopped into three or four morsels. There was nothing else. “Is this all the food for lunch for the three of you?”
I asked Huong, feeling surprised and embarrassed. “Yes,” she replied. I returned to the main room and told Irit in Hebrew that there was very little food in the house, certainly not enough for guests, and that we shouldn’t stay and eat the little they had. We apologized and said that we hadn’t noticed how late it was and that we had to leave right away. Huong seemed somewhat surprised for a moment, but then walked us to the gate and said goodbye. She didn’t look angry or offended, so I thought that she was relieved when we left, as she avoided the humiliation of offering us the meager meal.
That afternoon, we recounted this incident in our daily Vietnamese language class. I remarked that the house didn’t look poor at all, so I couldn’t understand why this family was living in such deprivation, with three working adults having to share two sardines and one drumstick for lunch. Our teacher, Co (Miss/teacher) Nguyet, looked puzzled for a while and finally asked: “Why do you think that this was a small lunch—didn’t they have a whole pot of rice?”
Rice is the single most important food item in the Hoianese diet. The most meager diet that “can keep a person alive” is boiled rice with some salt. Rice is the main source of calories and nutrients, and constitutes most of a meal’s volume. In a survey of the eating patterns I conducted in 2000, the ten families who reported daily for six months on their eating practices had steamed rice (com) or rice noodles (bun) twice daily (for lunch and dinner), six to seven days a week. In addition, most of their breakfast items (noodles, porridge, pancakes), as well as other dishes and snacks they consumed in the course of the day (sweetmeats, crackers, etc.), were made of rice or rice flour.
Rice has been cultivated in Vietnam for thousands of years. Grains of Oryza fatua, the earliest brand of Asian rice, were cultivated by the proto-Vietnamese Lac long before the arrival of the Chinese (Taylor 1983:9–10). Cultivating rice is the single most common activity in Vietnam (Nguyen 1995:218). A total of 80 percent of the population live in the countryside and roughly 80–90 percent farm rice. The rural landscape is of endless green expanses of rice terraces. Roughly 125 days per annum are spent directly in rice production, and most other rural activities revolve around the exploitation of rice residues (Jamieson 1995:34) or in supplementing its nutritional deficiencies. Peanuts, beans, and coconuts supply proteins and fats; leafy greens and aromatic herbs provide the vitamins, minerals, and fiber lost in the process of polishing; pigs are fed with rice bran and meals’ leftovers, mostly rice; ducks are herded over the newly harvested rice fields. Every grain ends up in the human food chain.
Even the dogs are fed rice. Traditionally, when a farmer died, he was buried in his own rice field, returning symbolically and physically into the “rice-chain” that is the source of human life.
In Vietnam, there are two kinds of rices: gao te: ordinary or “plain” rice, and gao nep: “sticky” glutinous rice. Sticky rice, the staple of many of the ethnic minorities in Vietnam, was domesticated thousands of years before the development of the hard-grained “plain” rice. Plain rice is cultivated nowadays on a much larger scale, as it yields significantly bigger crops, yet sticky rice is considered the “real” rice, hence its prominence in religious and social events. The distinction between plain and sticky rice in Vietnam is so important that the term nep-te (“sticky rice–plain rice”) is used to express oppositions such as “good–bad,” “right–wrong,” and even “boy–girl.”
The centrality of rice is evident in the language. Vietnamese features a wide variety of terms for rice in various states of cultivation, process, and cooking: rice seedlings are called lua, paddy is thoc, husked rice is gao, sticky rice is nep (and when boiled, com nep), steamed sticky rice is xoi, rice porridge is chao, and steamed (polished) rice is com. Com means both “cooked rice” and “a meal.” An com, “[to] eat rice,” also means “to have a meal,” and this term is used even in cases when rice is not served. Com bua, literally “rice meal,” means “daily meal.”
The most prominent aspect of Vietnamese rice culture is the great quantity of grain consumed daily. Though the total amount of food eaten in a meal is far smaller than that consumed in a parallel Western meal, the amount of rice is very large: 2–3 bowls of cooked rice per adult per meal, approximately 700 grams of dry grain daily, or roughly 1.5 kg of cooked rice, exceeding 2,000 calories.
Cooking rice is a serious and calculated process. The rice is first rinsed thoroughly so as to wash the dusty polishing residues. If left to cook, this dust would make for a sticky cement-like texture that would disturb the balance between the distinct separation of each grain and the complete wholeness of the mouthful of rice. Water is added in a 1:2 ratio and the pot is placed over the hearth. When the water boils, the pot is covered and the rice is left to cook for about twenty minutes. The rice is then “broken” or stirred with large cooking chopsticks and is left in its own heat for a few more minutes before serving.
Since the 1990s, when electricity became a regular feature in Hoi An, most Hoianese, urban and rural, have used electric rice cookers. These appliances regulate the proper temperature, humidity, and duration of cooking. In the suburbs of Hoi An, where the dwellers were mostly farmers shifting into blue-collar and lower-middle-class urban jobs, traditional wood-fed hearths were gradually replaced by gas stoves and electric rice cookers, and rice is no longer served from large, smoke-blackened pots but from smaller, lighter, bright tin ones. Still, people rely on their own expertise and experience even when using rice cookers.
Although rice makes the event of eating “a meal,” rice does not call attention to itself (Ashkenazi and Jacob 2000:78) with its white blandness, mushy consistency, moderate temperature on being served, and subtle fragrance. Yet, for the Hoianese rice undoubtedly constitutes the essence of a meal. The very act of eating a meal shows respect toward rice and reproduces Confucian patterns of seniority and status in the order with which people take the first bite of rice. Rice must be supplemented with other nutrients, notably protein, fat, vitamins, and fiber. The Vietnamese overcome the nutritional deficiencies of rice with ingredients abundant in their ecosystem: fish and seafood, coconuts and ground nuts, and a variety of leafy and aromatic greens.
Ca (fish)
Khong co gi bang com voi ca. Nothing is [better than] rice with fish
Khong co gi bang me voi con. Nothing is [better than] a mother with a child.
Coastal and freshwater fishing are extremely important; many farmers are part-time fishermen and some have recently turned their rice fields into shrimp ponds. Almost all farmers exploit aquatic resources within the rice system, regularly trapping frogs, snails, eels, fish, and crabs that inhabit the rice terraces and often compete with the farmer over rice seedlings and paddies. Many practice “electric fishing,” using electrodes powered by car batteries so as to shock and collect fish and amphibians at night (at great per sonal danger, they say, as they risk the bites of poisonous snakes as well as encountering hungry ghosts that roam the swamps at night).
Often, much time and effort were invested in fishing a few, miniscule fish. Whenever I was in town during the Hoianese flood season (November and December), I would see many of my neighbors pole fishing in the raging drainage canals for a few hours each afternoon. They never caught more than a handful of small fish, yet were obviously content with their catch, which was promptly cooked for dinner. This led me to pay more attention to the quantitative relations between the fish and the rice eaten at every meal. For Israeli or Western diners, serving such a small amount of fish would probably seem insulting. For Hoianese, however, half a dozen finger-size fish, approximately equivalent to a single sardine can, were clearly perceived as sufficient for a family meal.
Fish are commonly cooked into a “dry” dish or soup. As a “dry” dish, fish and other kinds of seafood can be fried and then boiled in tomato sauce, lemongrass, or garlic, or may be steamed or grilled (another local specialty is grilled fish in banana leaves, but this is a restaurant meal). Small fish and shrimp are often cooked with leafy greens into canh (soup). However, the most popular method of fish consumption is in the form of nuoc mam, the Vietnamese fish sauce.
Nuoc mam (fish sauce)
At the corner of the room stood a large cement vat. Drops of amber liquid slowly dripped from its tap into a large ladle. “This is my mother’s nuoc mam,” said Lanh proudly, “the best in Hoi An!” Lanh’s mother-in-law bought a few kilograms of ca com (rice fish or long-jawed anchovy) every spring and mixed them with salt. The salt extracted the liquids out of the fish, while the tropical heat and humidity facilitated fermentation of the brine. After three or four weeks, the brine mellowed and cleared. Normally, this was the end of the process and the liquid was bottled and consumed.
In order to further improve its quality, Lanh’s mother-in-law kept the liquid “alive” by pouring it over and over again into the vat, allowing for a continuous process of fermentation that enhanced its flavor (and smell!). The result is an especially potent nuoc mam nhi (virgin fish sauce). Lanh told me that “only Vietnamese people can make nuoc mam because only they can understand! Now you know why my dishes are so tasty,” she added. “The secret is in the nuoc mam. Don’t worry, when you go back to your country, I’ll give you a small bottle. My mother always gives some to our relatives and close friends for Tet [the New Year festival].”
The tropical weather means that fresh fish and seafood spoil very quickly. Hence, rational practicality partly underlies this culinary icon, which is essentially a technique of preservation. However, nuoc mam embodies much more than nutritional and practical advantages, as it is the most prominent taste and cultural marker of Vietnamese cuisine. Nuoc mam is used in different stages of cooking and eating: as a marinade before cooking, as a condiment while cooking, and as a dip when eating.
In each stage, fish sauce influences the taste in a different way: in a marinade it softens the ingredients and starts the process of transformation from “raw” into “cooked”; nuoc mam is added to most dishes while cooking in order to enhance their flavor, to make the dish salty and, most importantly, to give the dishes their crucial “fishy” quality; at meals, nuoc mam is always present on the table, mixed with lime juice, sugar, crushed garlic, black pepper, and red chili into a complex dip. The diners dip morsels of the “side dishes” in the sauce before placing them on the rice and sweeping a “bite” into their mouths.
Since it is impolite for diners to adjust the taste of a dish with condiments, as it implies that the dish is not perfectly cooked, providing a complex dip allows for a polite and acceptable personal adjustment of the taste of a dish. Finally, the nuoc mam bowl is the agent of commensality in the family meal: rice is dished into individual bowls and the side dishes are picked out of the shared vessels, but everybody dips their morsels of food into the common fish-sauce saucer just before putting them into their mouths.
Leafy Greens and Aromatics
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A variety of fresh, mostly aromatic, greens are served as a side dish called rau song (raw/live vegetables). There are regional variations in the composition of the greens. In the north, the purple, prickly la tia to (perilla) and (French-introduced) dill are often served. In the center and south, let tuce leaves (xa lach; note the French influence) are mixed with bean sprouts (sometimes lightly pickled), coriander, and several kinds of mints and basils. In the south, raw cucumber is sometimes added. In Hoi An, ngo om (a rice-paddy herb) and dip ca (‘fish leaves,” dark green heart-shaped leaves that, according to the locals, taste like fish) are often included in the platter. In the countryside, farmers tend small plots of greens right next to the house, creating convenient kitchen gardens. Urban dwellers buy the greens in the market just before mealtime.
Ba (Grandma) Tho, lips red from her constant chewing of trau cau (betel quid), handed me a bag of rau song just bought in the market and told me to wash them. The greens are harvested young and tender: a lettuce head is no bigger than a fist and the other greens are not higher than 10 cm and have only a few leaves. When lettuce is cheap, there is plenty of it in the mix, but when the price goes up, cheaper greens make up the volume.
I squatted on the cement floor near the tap, filled a plastic basin with water, and soaked the greens. The old woman placed a strainer near me and instructed me to carefully clean the leaves and throw away anything that was black, torn, old-looking, or seemed to have been picked at. If the leaves were too big for a bite, I was to break them into smaller bits. Only the good parts were to be put in the strainer for a second wash.
The bag contained no more than a kilo but it took me a while to go over it thoroughly. The mound of rejected leaves was constantly larger than the pile of perfect, crunchy greens in the strainer. Grandma Tho, obviously unsatisfied, asked me why I was taking so long and why I was throwing away so many good greens. She picked up the pile of rejected leaves and went to the back of the kitchen where, at the narrow space between the toilet wall and the fence, stood her beloved chicken coop. She threw the leaves in and contentedly watched the chicks fight over them.
Greens are served fresh and crunchy, fragrant, cool, and bright, and their contribution to the taste, texture, and color of the meal is substantial. They are picked up with chopsticks, dipped in nuoc mam, sometimes mixed with rice or other side dishes, and then eaten. As they are so fragrant and aromatic, it seems obvious that the greens are there for their taste and smell. However, a specific taste is not the main objective.
The prominence of the bland nonfragrant lettuce and bean sprouts further hints at other aspects of the greens. Here I recall my own eating experience: the cool crunchy greens adjust and balance the texture of the meal. The moist rice and the slippery, almost slimy, fish are counterbalanced, “charged with life,” so to speak, by the fresh crispness of the greens. The aromatic greens cool down the dishes, not only by reducing the temperature, but also by adding a soothing quality that smoothes away some of the sharp edges of the other tastes. The random mixing of aromas and tastes adds a new dimension to every bite: a piece of ca tu (mackerel) cooked in turmeric and eaten with a crunchy lettuce leaf is a totally different from the same bite of fish eaten with some coriander. Here again we see how the structured rules of etiquette, which prevent personal seasoning and stress common taste, are subtly balanced by a setting that allows for personal modification and constant, endless variation and change.
Meal Structures and Cosmology
Chi, a local chef and one of my most valuable informants and friends, suggested on several occasions that the basic dyad of “rice” and “things to eat” “is am and duong” (yin and yang). A similar point was made by Canh, another prominent Hoianese restaurateur, when we discussed the medicinal and therapeutic qualities of his cooking, while Tran, a Hoainese scholar, also suggested that am and duong shape the ways in which dishes and meals are prepared.
Yin and yang is an all-encompassing Chinese Taoist principle that champions a dynamic balance between the obscure, dark, wet, cold, feminine energy of yin and the hot, powerful, shining, violent, male energy of yang (Schipper 1993:35). This cosmic law maintains that harmony is the outcome of the tension between these opposites, which are the two sides of the same coin and existentially dependent upon each other, as there would be no “white” without “black,” no “cold” without “hot,” and no “men” without “women.” Jamieson, in his insightful Understanding Vietnam (1995), claims that the principle of yin and yang is the key to understanding the Vietnamese society, its culture and history. He particularly points out that “Diet could disrupt or restore harmony between yin and yang” (1995: 11), stressing the essential relationship between this cosmological principle and the culinary realm.
As pointed out earlier, am and duong were mentioned by my informants on several occasions when discussing food and, specifically, when I asked them about the structures of meals and dishes. They suggested that the bland, pale, shapeless rice was compatible with the notion of am (with rice related to femininity, as the senior female is the one who serves rice to the others), while the colorful, savory, varied mon an adhere to the definition of duong as flamboyant, savory entities to which men have privileged access. Moreover, the meal is wholesome only when both rice and mon an are presented on the table or tray, making for a material representation of am and duong, with a bowl of rice and mon an resembling the famous graphic symbol of yin and yang.
Am and duong, however, were actually mentioned by my informants quite rarely, and only by highly skilled cooks or educated professionals. The popular and common discourse was mainly concerned with the therapeutic qualities of food, within the medical cold–hot paradigm, according to which all dishes, ingredients, seasoning, and cooking techniques are either “heating” or “cooling.” According to this theory, a dish should be balanced, combining hot and cold elements (as in the case of sweet-and-sour dishes) so as to maintain the diners’ physical and emotional harmony.
In some cases, heating or cooling are desired, usually due to some health problems, as in the case of colds and flues, when ginger is used so as to “heat” up the dish and, as a consequence, the eater, so as to help him or her overcome a cold condition. In other cases excess is sought, as in instances when enhanced masculine sexual potency is desired. In such circumstances, aphrodisiacs such as snake, he-goat meat, or duck embryos, which are extremely “heating,” would be consumed so as to enhance the level of duong.
While the hot–cold paradigm for food was mentioned often, very few were aware that it is an implementation or implication of the am and duong theory. It seems, then, that in between abstract cosmological notions and lived experience there exists a third, mediating level, concerned directly with practical knowledge of the body and its well-being. While only a few people talk confidently about am and duong, the “hot-and-cold” paradigm is often evoked in discussions about food and cooking. The important point is that although the Hoianese only rarely linked the meal structure directly to the cosmological theory of am and duong, they did refer often to its practical implications of “hot and cold.”
If the twofold structure of the Hoianese meal is a manifestation of the cosmic principle of am and duong, it would be reasonable to argue that the fivefold structure into which it evolves also stands for a cosmological principle. Here, I suggest that this fivefold structure is a representation of the cosmological theory of ngu hanh or “the five elements.”
The five elements (or phases): water, fire, wood, metal, and earth, are finer subdivisions of the am and duong and “represent a spatio-temporal continuation of the Tao” (Schipper 1993:35), standing for the cardinal directions, the seasons, the planets, the viscera, and for everything else that exists. Hence, “like the yin and yang, the five phases are found in everything and their alternation is the second physical law [after yin and yang]” (ibid.). The five elements are interrelated in cycles of production and destruction (e.g., water produces wood and extinguishes fire); their relations and transformations generate the movement that is life.
Though my Hoianese friends never said that the five components of the Hoianese meal are representations of the five elements, when I suggested that this was the case, several of the more knowledgeable ones (e.g., Chi, the chef, and Co Dung, my Vietnamese language teacher) thought that I had a point. They were not able, however, to help with a formulation of the elements into a culinary matrix. The only clear reference was to rice, which is the centerpiece of the meal and corresponds to the “center” and, as such, to the “earth” element. I assumed that the soup corresponds to “water” and the greens to “wood,” but was not sure which of the other two, the fish sauce and the “dry” dish, corresponded to fire and which to metal. However, since the fish sauce is a fermented substance used in different stages to transform other ingredients, I would attribute it to “fire,” while the “dry” dish corresponds to “metal.”
The fivefold structure also encompasses the five possible states of transformation of edible matter into food: raw, steamed, boiled, fried/grilled, and fermented. The Hoianese meal can be seen as a model of the universe: an abstract, condensed version of the ways in which the universe looks and operates. In similar lines to Eliade’s (1959:5) claim that “all the Indian royal cities are built after the mythical model of the celestial city, where the Universal sovereign dwelt,” and to Cohen’s (1987) suggestion that the cross pattern employed by the Hmong in their textile design, as well as specific pattern of face piercing applied by devotees during the vegetarian festival in Phuket (Cohen 2001), are cosmological schemes, I argue that the Hoianese meal is also a model of the universe and of the ways in which it operates.
By Nir Avieli in the book "Everyday Life in Southeast Asia" edited by Kathleen M. Adams & Kathleen A. Cillogly, Indiana University Press, U.S.A, 2011, excerpts p. 218-228. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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