Salted Stories

My heart sinks each time I cross the narrow cul-de-sac where a young woman from the suburbs lives. To earn a living, she pushes a bicycle around the streets of the town the whole day, crying out: "who wants to buy salt?" With one kilo costing less than 15 cents, she has to work very hard to make ends meet.

My thoughts go back to the resistance zone during the First War of Resistance against the French more than 40 years ago when we ran very low on salt was we were caught up in the jungles of Viet Bac in northen Vietnam. Salt was then a precious commodity. Many resistance workers, civilian and military, suffered grave health problems because they could not get the 20 grams or so that the body needs daily. It happened more than once that we had to do with the ash of burnt bamboo.

Ancient Vietnam comprising only the northern area of the present territory, had a mountainous region inhabited by a dozen ethnic minorities and the plains inhabited by the Viet, the majority group. Salt was therefore the most important article in barter trade between people of the plain and the highlanders.

As with many other cultures in the world, salt assumes a high symbolic character in Vietnamese culture.

Man's subconscious is haunted by salt. Is it because  the first germ of life which was to engender the human race came from the sea where water holds the same proportion of salt as human blood?

Salt is first of all the symbol of friendship, love, solidarity and hospitality and durable social ties. Is it because when sharing this indispensable stuff of life with another, one wishes to show that one's faithfulness is complete?  In ancient Greece, as well as among the Jews and Arabs, salt represented friendship, hospitality and respect for a promise made. Homer on many occasions affirmed the sacred character of salt which was frequently used in sacrificial rites.

According to Hindu philosophy, the individual self merges in the universal consciousness just as salt dissolves in water.

Another trait of salt is its indestructibility. For the Semites, to eat bread and salt together is to seal an indestructible friendship or a durable commitment. A French proverb says: "They will not eat a pinch of salt together, they will quarrel soon."

Salt and ginger constitute, according to a Vietnamese folk song, a vow of eternal love:

"I raise the plate of salt in my hand where I have  immersed ginger, 

the ginger is hot, the salt is salt, let neither of us will forget the other."

Salt is used to preserve fish, meat and food in general. Some beliefs make it a symbol of preservation and even purification. Japanese shintoism devotes a ritual ceremony to the harvest of salt. Small mounds of salt placed at the house entrance or on the brim of the well or on the ground of the house of someone who has fust died is believed to have a purifying and exorcising effect. Some Japanese spread salt on the threshold of their homes everyday; they do the same after the departure of an undesirable guest.

Many Vietnamese phrases allude to the figurative sense of the word "salty".

"A fish that refuses to be salte will be spoiled."

Excess of salt causes a burning sensation. The proverb "when the father eats too much salt, the child will be very thirsty", is  an allusion to Buddhist karma: Children have to pay for the crimes and bad acts of their parents.

Moral wounds are likened to the burn  caused by salt on live flesh in such expressions as: "Only he who has his entrails burnt by salt knows what it is", "he has his face salted, to be very ashamed, accept to do something very humilitating, to lose face, which is a very grave thing in Asian cultures".

The old expression to throw salt into the eyes means an eyesore, to be disgracefully unpleasant to the eyes.

The correct quantity of salt will give flavour to dishes and, in a figurative sense, give ardour to an action or a feeling, something piquant and spiritual,  to a narrative, a story. The French says: the salt of life, the salt of an epigram, a joke full of salt, that has plenty of salt, and so on.

For Vietnamese, a woman who speaks with charm is being salted sentiment; passionate love is salted ardour, and a customer who wants to buy  at any price is being salted purchase.

Grilled and salted sesame and salted vegetable are lean dishes in pagodas.

3. Traditional Banquets

Before the 1945 Revolution, formal meals in the traditional way were the plague of the old Vietnamese society, particularly in rural areas. Ruled by Confucian etiquette, formal meals held on the occasion of weddings, death anniversaries, even funerals, ritual village banquets, the celebration of promotions brought pain to many a family. Hundreds of guests were invited, each of whom was expected to do the same when his turn came. Communal pressure was such that nobody dared evade those "oral debts". To pay for them, people got into debt. Those in dire straits had to leave their villages.

The Revolution and thirty years of war broke that centuries-old custom, particularly in the liberated areas. The New Life movement launched by Ho Chi Minh urged sobriety, even austerity. Customs related to "eating and drinking in the village" together with expensive family and social celebrations practically vanished.

However, for a dozen years now, they have re-surfaced in the wake of new socio-economic factors. The resurgence of spirituality since the end of the war together with the need to reaffirm national cultural identity in face of modernism and Western cultures have resulted in a return to religion, village and family traditions with the rites and customs in their train. In face, these have been easily restored thanks to the relative improvement of living standards due to the policy of renovation started in 1986. The neuveaux riches, profiteers, as well as those who stubbornly long for the past, have taken the lead.

And so traditional banquets have re-appeared, tolerated and more and more accepted by public opinion, to the detriment of wage-earners and impecunious families. Weddings have no longer been celebrated the New-Life way: a meeting of relatives and friends of the bride and the bridegroom, with only tea, sweets and songs. Formal meals, at home or at some restaurants, are now a must, with aroud one hundred guests, and families of the newlyweds have to spend at least three million Vietnamese dong on one such occasion in the towns. But it must be said that generally speaking, they are not always the losers in this game: gifts brought by the guests, mostly in the form of money in envelopes, fill the deficit, if any. It is the guests who eventually bear the cost. In the season of marriages (autumn) many among my friends lament: "To cope with invitations to three weddings, two-thirds of my pay will be gone this month"-each wedding gift averageing 100,000 Vietnamese dong.

A peasant household may have to labour several decades to pay off its marriage debts. Formal meals held on the occasion of the death anniversariesand funerals, particularly in the countryside, are more and more costly and wasteful.

At traditional banquets held on the occasion of village festival at the communal house trays of victuals are laid out for four persons sitting on mats spread on the floor according to the order of precedence. The rules are that the food should include four plates of boiled meat and four bowl of food cooked in liquids. The unsophicated menu of a co giam gem comprised mostly boiled pork seasoned with vinegar and served with raw vegetables

The numbers of plate should always be an even one. In the towns, a traditional banquet comprises also four solid dishes: spring rolls, fried pork paste, boiled pork paste and sweet-sour salad served on plates, and four liquid dishes served in big bowls: bamboo shoot cooked with far pork, vermicelli, strips of drieds squid, fish bladder. The list may vary a great deal and include rare and expensive items: sea-swallow's nest, abalone, fragrant mushroms, stuffed pigeon, shark fin, etc. Boiled chicken eaten with a little salt mixed with lomen juice and lemon leave cut into fine strips cannot be absent from a dinner offered on the occasion of the death anniversary of a family member. A must item in the wedding banquet is a plate of steamed glutinous rice colored in red, the color of luck and happiness, with momordica juice.

A tray of food served at a traditional banquet is a pleasure for the eyes as well as the palate. This should not be held responsible for the abusive banqueting often perpetrated of "respect for the past" and "repayment of oral debts."

2. The Traditional Meals in Vietnam

One is reminded of the famous quip by the French gourment, magistrate Brillat Savarin: " The destiny of nations depends on the way they feed themselves "

( Physiology of Taste, 1825 ). The French, reputed to be gourments, turn a " real " meal into a five-act drama:

1- Hors d'oeuvres

2- Entrée

3- Meat and vegetables

4- Dessert

5- Cheese

This, I believe, is the stereotyped model of the West.

The traditional Vietnamese meal  follows other rites, dictated by a hot and humid climate and the civilization of rice marked by the vegetable.

First, the material organization. The Western meal is served on a table. The traditional Vietnamese one is served on a mat, which can be spread on a plank bed or on the floor itself. The dishes are laid on a tray of wood or bronze. In the West, in France in particular, the invitation to eat is: "A table s'il vous plait " ( Take your seat at the table, please ). In Vietnam, one way to say this is: " Take your seat at the tray, please. " About the order of predecence, in the West, the place of the person presiding over the meal may be at the center of the table ( the French way ) or at one end ( the British way ).

In Vietnam, at formal meals eaten at the communal house, on " superior mats " the highest places are reserved for notables, persons with degrees, or elderly ones, while " inferior mats " are for people of no peculiar distinction. Each tray is laid for four people (except in the case of family members ), who sit at the four corners of the mat without any order of predence. At a family meal, the rice pot is always put beside the mother ( of the first daughter-in-law ) whose role is to fill the bowls of the others when they are empty.

Before the familly meal is begun, an invitation must be extended by everyone, except the head of the family: "I vivite you, grandpa, grandma, father, mother, elder brothers, elder sisters... to eat the meal. " To say " eat ", the most formal words is used. Naturally, the youngest member of the family is the one who has to invite the most people. Since the 1945 revolution, and mostly following upheavals caused by thirty years of war, this ritual of invitation has unfortunately been lost in many famillies.

A proverb contains a piece of advice: " eating at a meal, one watches the pot; sitting down, one takes a careful look around. " This means that before asking for more bowls of rice, one must make sure that enough rice remains in the pot; before taking one's seat, one must make sure one is causing no inconvenience to others.

It seems that the tradition of a Western meal, eaten with a fork and knife and served in courses, dates back only to the 16th century. In a Vietnamese meal, all the dishes are laid out on the tray at the start of the meal. Except in the case of formal meals in which the dishes are eaten according to a conventional order, people sharing an ordinary meal can pick food with their chopsticks from any of these plates of bowls. Some reforms in the traditional use of chopsticks were thought necessarily as it was considered contrary to the rules of hygiene: each person is given a small individual dish or bowl to contain his share of brine or sauce; a pair of chopsticks is reserved for serving the food; each person will turn his chopsticks the other way round and use only the " clean " end to pick food from the plates ( that was the method used by soldiers during the first war of resistence, 1945 - 1954 ). However, these reforms were generally not very popular.

In the course of a family meal, if a visitor turns up unexpectedly, he is invited to join in without any need for ceremony. A proverb says that in such a case, one simply brings an extra bowl and an extra pair of chopsticks. With friends, one shares whatever food one has.

In the old day, the same time-table was not applied by people of all walks of life for their meals. In the towns, traders took their lunch at about 9 a.m, and their dinner at about 5 p.m. Civil servants ate a full meal at arout 6 in the morning, lunch at noon, and took practically nothing in the evening. In the countryside peddlers ate their meals very early in the morning and very late in the evening, by lamblight. Hence this folk song:

" Each day I eat my meals twice by lamplight
How can I manage the time to powder my cheeks and lacquer my teeth "

At the time of ploughing and harvesting, hired labourers took their meals before sunrise; lunch was brought to them in the fields; they had nothing in the evening, in most cases.

Meals were frugal. Meat was seldom eaten especially in the countryside. Rice growing claimed most land available and animal husbandry was little practiced. Proteins came from fish, shrimp, mussel, soya bean. Rice, often supplemented by sweet potato, maize, casava, was the staple food. A man convalescing after a long illness was deemed to recover his health as soon as he started to eat rice to make up for missed meals. A fold saying recommended that one should be content with three bowfuls of rice at mealtimes, a change of three shirts to cover one's back. The most common foods were boiled convolvulus with garlic, salted aubergines, boiled vegetables, fried bean curd, fish cooked in brine, etc...

Fish brine frequently accompanies the food served. The dishes are simple and wholesome, and suit the tropical climate. They vary with the seasons. In people's mind, the meal is a symbol of family union. One feels contentment at having just some well-cooked rice and soup. These things are not always available in a restaurant. Meals eaten in the company of one's family are treasured.

Source: " Pages 326-329 " of Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, 7th edition by Hữu Ngọc. Copyright 2007 by Thế Giới Publishers.

1. Our Bowl of Rice

The Vietnamese expression " ăn giả bữa " means to eat with a vengeance to make up for what one has missed. This is very true with a sick person: as soon as he feels an urge for rice again he is sure to be on the way of recovery. His restored physio-psychological equilibrium means his reinforcement in the cultural environment of rice.

Vietnam belongs to the rice civilization whose habitat coincides with the natural dwelling of the bamboo. In his well documented La terre et l'homme en Extrême Orient ( Land and People of the Far East ), French geographer Pierre Gourou analyses the characteristic traits of rice-planting peoples of East Asia between the Mekong River and the confluence of the Amour and Oussouri Rivers. They are of an agricultural civilization founded on cultivation rather than on animal husbandry, marked by a monsoon climate, an advanced agricultural technique, a great rural population density, an aspiration for sobriety and a communal spirit required by the village cell and fostered by Confucianism.

Ninety percent of the world's rice area is concentrated in Asia, where rice production feeds forty percent of the globe's population.

The first traces of rice culture in Vietnam date back to the Mesolithic culture of Hoa Binh-Bac Son, 10,000-8,000 years before the Christian era. In the Bronze Age ( the first millenary B.C ) rice cultivation developed to a high level, which led to a surge in the Red River civilization. Vietnam is also marked by traits common to other rice-growing countries in Southeast Asia-the consumption of betel, the house on stilts tattooing, the lacquering of teeth, aquatic games, the bronze drum, kite flying, the water-wheel, and other traits.

 The word " rice " may be misleading because in Vietnamese it may mean rice plant, paddy, husked rice, cooked rice or steamed glutinous rice.

Rice, the staple food in Vietnam, comes in two main kinds-the hard or ordinary rice and the sticky rice. Hard rice came much later but it has surpassed glutinous rice in importance because it can grow on much less fertile soil while yielding much more. In the plains, glutinous rice is used mainly as votive offerings or for cakes.

The two traditional crops are the Lúa Chiêm in the fifth lunar month and Lúa Mùa in the 10th lunar month, which is the principal crop.

Because of frequent floods, drought and pests, rice planters in Vietnam must show great skills, endurance and patience in all their operations, ploughing sowing, weeding, replanting, irrigation, havesting, threshing, winnowing, husking and polishing (making rice clear).

Innumberable are rice-inspired stories, proverbs, expressions and songs which speak of the farmer's pains, love and hopes.

" You who taste a bowl of rice,

Do you feel  in the fragrant grains,

All the pains I've taken to grow then?"

" Take it easy, girl,

Or you 'll waste all that golden moonlight

While scooping water from the field. "

" Let's till the fill the land and replant the seedlings.

Today's pains will pay in tomorrow's wealth. "

Source: " Pages 325-326 " of Wandering through Vietnamese Culture, 7th edition by Hữu Ngọc. Copyright 2007 by Thế Giới Publishers.
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