The Spice Journey - From one surprise to another

Super hero in the 80’s

It seems she is timeless. I should have already known her for a very long time. I remember when I was still a child and didn’t know how to cook rice. Somedays it worked and somedays it didn’t, and I would have to use both hands to hold the big chopstick and turn the rice. Since then it has already been about 30 years. In the 80’s and 90’s we did not have much access to information; books and newspapers were even sparse. We lived in the poorest of provinces, and would wait patiently all day every time my mum took a trip to Ho Chi Minh City. It was certainly because I missed her, but I also anticipated the gifts even more. She did not always have enough money to buy gifts, especially the ones we most coveted: books. I didn’t yet know if there was a bookstore at that time, but even if there was, I don’t think that my mum had enough money to go there.

She usually bought books from the black market or from a dusty sidewalk on the street and took anything she could find. Some of books were still intact and some were missing pages. Even so, we still have a whole collection of more than 10 books from the same author: Trieu Thi Choi. One of them teaches about tailoring. Another one teaches you how to arrange flowers. There is also a cook written by her. Who is Choi Thi Trieu? Why is she so talented? She is really a hero in the mind of kids like us at the time. Maybe it isn’t so different with the way our children nowadays admire Superman. Why wouldn’t she be considered as a hero when she has helped my sisters make clothes, which were very valuable for our family at that time, by using only scraps of fabric bought on the black market. Thanks to her I know how to cook stewed fish, vegetable soup and bake cakes with many unexpected substitutions because we never had enough ingredients. Sometimes they turned out to be unbelievable creations, like when we used peanut or soy dregs - the byproduct given free from factories that produce soy or peanut oil - to replace pork, which was very expensive at the time.

Seeing my dear hero by accident like this, many memories about her suddenly came to mind as big waves of emotion overtook me. I was surprised at what she said. She was expressing her surprise about new and strange spices used in the preliminary round of the 2015 Golden Spoon contest. It was such a surprise for her to have this impression because she is considered as an expert of food, elite teacher and the most experienced author in this field.

Judge Choi Thi Trieu (second from the left) imparts judgement at the Golden Spoon contest

Lost in the jungle of spices

Not only Mrs. Choi Thi Trieu, but all other experienced seniors in this field such as Mr. Long Thanh Chiem, Mrs.Suong Thi Bui, Mr. Sanh Ly and Mrs. Anh Thi Hoang Ho went along on this Vietnamese spice journey. They were some of the judges in the third season of Golden Spoon contest, and discovering Vietnam’s rich spices was the theme.

Along each stop of the nation’s curve many wonderful things happened. The contest was full of great surprises like a barbecue smelling of pepper and lemon, but without use lemongrass or lemon fruit. It was because it came from a spice called lemongrass pepper or lemon pepper, which is a wild pepper found in the jungle of Quang Nam province.

Of course it would take the judges by surprise to taste spices heard of for the first time, such as: Bauhinia viridescens Desv – a wild vegetable; Firmiana simplex; wild Piper lolot; Scaphium macropodum seeds (the final round of Golden Spoon 2015); “lá dít” - which is the same with orange family; beehive mushroom, “đọt sâng” - which tastes like sweet mint; Neolamarckia cadamba - which has a bitter and sweet taste (the preliminary round in Nha Trang, Danang). Then there was also Zanthoxylum nitidum Roxb; perilla; Callicarpa cana L; cashew leaf; Artocarpus tonkinensis fruit; a thousand kinds of leaves, fruits and seeds of all diversity and which are grown in various locales. With Vietnam such a long country, the many different characteristics of land, weather and geography create a good aroma and an essence for hundreds of dishes; none of them the same. The Vietnamese spice journey provided such a rich harvest that, even when the most heated rounds had barely closed, they had already contributed to discovering, preserving and promoting elite Vietnamese cuisine as a vast and endless spice forest.

Bo Cong Anh