remake/remodel

something fishy

While googling around for recipes today, I stumbled upon this outburst:

One warning about Vietnamese food….fish sauce!!! It is one of their favorite seasonings….

The waiter said to me “fish sauce vegetarian!!” and when I explained that I did not want the fish sauce and could he ask the cook to leave it out, he again said, in a slightly louder voice “fish sauce vegetarian!!” (At this point, whether it was or wasn’t vegetarian should have been no concern of his. In fact, I had never said that I was a vegetarian, I had only requested that there be no fish sauce in my meal. His response and reaction were rude at the very least.) He finally went back into the kitchen to ask what dishes did not have fish sauce and came back and told me that every dish contained fish sauce.

Not a happy dining experience and I have not returned there.

No, it’s not vegetarian, but my suggestion to this finicky diner would have been to ask a Greek restaurant instead to go easy on the olive oil. Or fuck off. It’s called nuoc mam, and it’s the soul of the cuisine.

My mom would often stew it with pork and hard-boiled eggs (that would be “clay pot pork” at a Vietnamese restaurant), splash it in with pan-fried chicken, soy sauce, and sugar (the closest thing at a restaurant that I’ve found being “drunken chicken”), or, most frequently, and most familiarly, serve it as a dipping sauce. I believe that nuoc mam in condiment form is properly called nuoc cham, but my mom always called it nuoc mam regardless of how it was used, not unlike the way Texans liberally use the word queso, maybe. You will never find good nuoc cham at a restaurant — to mask the fishiness, it is always loaded with sugar — but it’s easy enough to make it the right way:

1. Pour a serving of nuoc mam into a bowl.
2. Add a small amount of sugar (perhaps a couple teaspoons, depending on the amount of nuoc mam used) and warm water.
3. Add chopped garlic and fresh smashed red chili peppers.
4. Before serving, squeeze a lime into the sauce.
5. You can add sliced carrots for color, but my mom thinks that’s some weird Chinese thing.

Which brand of fish sauce to use? Beats me. My mom says to use any. Some people say that Filipino fish sauce (patis) is inferior, but I can’t say. I’ve read that the best nuoc mam comes from the southern Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc, where the fish is fermented with sea salt in handmade wooden barrels by businessmen as proud as any winemakers, but supposedly cheap nuoc mam from elsewhere is often labelled as if it came from Phu Quoc — bringing to mind the old champagne controversy — but, again, I wouldn’t know anyway. I do know that I recently threw out a bottle of “Phu Quoc” fish sauce that was vile. So. Mom says anything’s fine. Just go easy on the sugar.

By the way, nuoc mam is, strictly speaking, a misspelling. The correct spelling is nước mắm, but that may or may not display correctly in your browser.