This Month’s Film: Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
Cuisine: Indian
I have a confession to make: I almost never get tagged for a meme, but if it looks like fun, I sometimes go ahead and participate anyway. I guess that makes me a ‘meme crasher’. But who cares? It’s my blog and I can meme if I want to…
One of the most recent memes of intrigue is a little game called the ’23rd-post-5th-sentence meme’, in which foodbloggers are challenged to go back into their inchoate archives and locate the 5th sentence of their 23rd post to ponder and riff on its meaning and subtext. So here’s mine…
Dateline: Napa, CA…May 23, 2004…Post #23…Sentence #5: “And despite my skepticism regarding my first experience cooking with nuoc mam, the nuoc cham dipping sauce was the star of the show.” (Click here to read the post in its entirety.)
When I first went back and read my 23rd/5th post, I thought to myself, “There’s no subtext here. It’s just a random sentence.” But as days went by, the notion began to ferment in my head and I realized that indeed there was a great deal of subtext…Asian food is all about the nuoc mam.
A little browsing ahead to a later post revealed the source of my love affair with nuoc mam. Here’s what I had to say on the subject back in those days…
“Okay, so I’m looking at all these Vietnamese recipes in my two cookbooks, plus a little extracurricular research on epicurious.com, and one thing is obvious. I’m definitely gonna need something called nuoc mam. Now although I may have originally given the impression that I’m a total neophyte when it comes to Vietnamese cuisine, that’s not entirely true. I know what nuoc mam is.
Back in my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, I helped an ex-boyfriend open a gourmet restaurant called The Casbah, and although the menu was strictly ‘continental’, his #1 employee was a darling Vietnamese woman named Mai Nguyen. My ex was a Vietnam War veteran, and because he was so familiar with her culture, the two of them got along famously. Mai’s story was heartbreaking (her family, one with a long and aristocratic heritage, had to flee the country in a homemade skiff with what few possessions they could carry on their backs), nevertheless, she had an amazingly buoyant spirit and an indomitable work ethic. Not only did Mai and her aged father Dan help restore the historic Mediterranean building for The Casbah restaurant, once it opened, Mai did most if not all of the daily prep and cooking for both the lunch and dinner shifts.
But when she prepared meals for herself and her family in the restaurant kitchen, she made Vietnamese food, and for that, she always kept a bottle of nuoc mam on the pantry shelf. Mai’s nuoc mam was the subject of much curiosity and even a little good-natured kidding from the other staff members, who wanted no part of that strange brew.
Thanks to Mai’s culinery expertise, the Casbah enjoyed a few good years in the Mobile restaurant scene, but when it finally closed, Mai had saved up enough money to open her own restaurant, The Ivory Chopstick, located in a turn-of-the-century home in the city’s scenic garden district. Shortly after it opened, just a few months before I moved to California, I had the pleasure of enjoying one of the finest meals I have ever eaten: a delicate spring roll appetizer, followed by a heavenly lemongrass broth with seafood dumplings, and for the main course, pan-sauteed sole with a soy-ginger beurre blanc accompanied by a medley of perfectly steamed vegetables…Each dish lovingly and expertly prepared by the hands of Mai Nguyen.”
Since May 23, 2004, not only have I made countless dishes with nuoc mam, I have also learned that it goes by the name of patis, nam pla and the generic ‘Asian fish sauce’, and is an essential element of almost every Asian cuisine. Despite my initial skepticism, nuoc mam has become my new favorite Asian ingredient and is now an indispensible staple on my pantry shelf.
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