Monday night I was driving home from piano lessons when I nearly wrecked the car while simultaneously defeaning my mother. While chatting with her about family matters, I saw a sign for "Vietnamese Fresh Seafood" and hollered, "A Vietnamese restaurant!" interrupting Mom mid-sentence. Mom was silent for a moment; no doubt stunned by the ringing in her ear (Hubby says I am capable of reaching a high pitch bearable only to insects and deaf people). The turn I made wasn't technically legal but I did discover that the car has a terrific wheel base given the turning radius I achieved, and as a bonus, I reacquainted myself with the finer points of torque and centrifugal force.
You must understand that where I currently live, access to ethnic food stores and/or restaurants is limited. Anything that has "Vietnamese" in its moniker is going to get a fair look from me. I thought at first that I was pulling up to a restaurant; but in fact it was a seafood market and a Vietnamese grocery store. Excellent.
I chatted with the store owner, Linh, who told me that she had recently moved to the area and the store was newly opened. I asked her for some items I needed and she had them all; it rendered me nearly delirious with joy that I would no longer have to make the trek to Atlanta in today's $2.79 per gallon fuel economy. As I was stocking up on fresh rice noodles, rau ram (Vietnamese coriander) and rice paper, we talked about various other exotic ingredients she was planning to stock.
"Authentic Vietnamese ingredients," she said. "Things you wouldn't find anywhere else." She paused, then became animated. "Come look!" She tugged my arm and pulled me towards the front of the store. "We have mangos from Asia and Vietnamese bananas!" she said, showing me a box full of humongous mangos and miniature bananas. "We'll get durian soon, too." (And I'm thinking, great, next time I will enter the store wearing an oxygen mask) Then, beaming with pride, she pointed to two knee-high stacks of cartons laden with eggs. One stack had larger eggs than the other. "See? Hot vit lon and hot ga lon."
Translation: "Fertilized duck eggs and fertilized chicken eggs."
"Completely authentic," Linh said, smiling.
It's a southeast Asian delicacy, known in the Philippines as balut and is popular in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. Writing the specifics of it makes me squeamish, but it's essentially a boiled, incubated egg. Those who love it swear by the broth and the flavors. It's a favored street food and you eat it the way you would a soft boiled egg.
When I was little and being indoctrinated in the wonderful world of street food cuisine (which goes a long way to explaining the cast iron stomach and the nematodes that can fight off any sissy western bacteria), I absolutely loved the cooked egg yolk. I'd have to shove aside some dark stringy material to get to it, but the yolk was worth it. When I was about eight, I finally connected the dots and realized that the gooey gunk I'd been pushing out of the way was actually an embryonic bird.
"It's a bird! It's a bird!" I screamed at my mother.
"Don't look at it!" she exclaimed. "Just eat it!"
(I'm sorry, I didn't realize that part of your role as a parent was to be Joe Rogan from "Fear Factor.")
I most certainly did not eat it and never ate it again. There are some childhood traumas that run deep. It makes me think of my former classmate, Dave. When Dave was six, he went to flush the toilet he was using at a public restroom and the urinal exploded, splashing him from head to toe with water while he stood there, screaming. To this day, Dave apparently jumps back a few feet after flushing. Well, seeing the cartons definitely made me jump back a few feet.
Dinner that night was another street food specialty -- banh uot: steamed white rice noodle crepes, thinly sliced pork sausage, fried shallots, chopped greens, and bean sprouts, doused with a fish sauce-based vinaigrette.
Authentic is good. Authentic food I want to eat, even better.
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