The story of the world’s best fish sauce begins, like so many others, with a son who just wanted to make his mother happy. Cuong Pham and his parents came to the United States from Saigon as refugees in 1979. They settled in northern California, where Cuong eventually became an engineer, spending 16 years with Apple. His mother, however, could never find the fish sauce (nuoc mam in Vietnamese) she remembered from Vietnam. Cuong’s family owned a fish-sauce factory; his uncle would bring his mother 20-litre cans of specially selected, just-for-family nuoc mam. In America she had to settle for commercial fish sauce, often the saltier Thai variety – designed, in the words of Andrea Nguyen, a cookbook author and proprietor of the indispensable Viet World Kitchen website, “for the lusty highs and lows of Thai food, [not] the rolling hills and valleys of Viet food”). So Cuong did what any son would do: he started his own fish-sauce company.
Fish sauce – the liquid produced from anchovies salted and left to ferment in the heat for months – has long repelled most Western palates. That is starting to change. It adds a savoury depth to soups and stocks that salt alone cannot provide. If soy sauce is a single trumpet played at full blast, fish sauce is a dozen bowed double-basses; and Cuong’s fish sauce is without parallel. And while he may have made it for expats like his mother, chefs across the Pacific and in Europe have grown to love it. (...)
It forms the chief protein source for millions, and is as central to the diverse cuisines of mainland South-East Asia as olive oil is to southern Italian and Levantine food. It goes by different names: nam pla in Thailand, tuk trey in Cambodia and patis in the Philippines. A similar condiment called garum featured in ancient Roman cuisine, and indeed south-west Italy still produces small amounts of colatura di alici, an anchovy liquid similar to nuoc mam. In other parts of South-East Asia, notably Myanmar and Cambodia, people eat fermented-fish pastes, which tend to be more assertive – often used as a central ingredient rather than a flavouring. These products wring value from abundant, tiny fish too small to eat on their own; like pickling, fish sauces preserve a bountiful harvest’s nutrition.
Fish sauce can repel first-timers: it often has an intensely fishy odour, especially in the cheaper varieties, with a rubbishy edge. But its flavour rounds and mellows with cooking. Eventually it becomes addictive, essential: I’m about as Vietnamese as a bagel, and I can’t imagine my kitchen without it. You can build a marinade for nearly any grilled thing – meat, fish or vegetable – around its umami sturdiness. Greens stir-fried with garlic, nuoc mam and a squeeze of lime or splash of white wine make a happy light lunch, served over steamed rice. Mix it with lime juice, sugar, water and perhaps some sliced chillies or chopped garlic, and it becomes nuoc cham, a dip that makes everything taste better (it pairs especially, if unconventionally, well with soft, watery fruits such as pineapple and strawberry).
Fish sauce – the liquid produced from anchovies salted and left to ferment in the heat for months – has long repelled most Western palates. That is starting to change. It adds a savoury depth to soups and stocks that salt alone cannot provide. If soy sauce is a single trumpet played at full blast, fish sauce is a dozen bowed double-basses; and Cuong’s fish sauce is without parallel. And while he may have made it for expats like his mother, chefs across the Pacific and in Europe have grown to love it. (...)It forms the chief protein source for millions, and is as central to the diverse cuisines of mainland South-East Asia as olive oil is to southern Italian and Levantine food. It goes by different names: nam pla in Thailand, tuk trey in Cambodia and patis in the Philippines. A similar condiment called garum featured in ancient Roman cuisine, and indeed south-west Italy still produces small amounts of colatura di alici, an anchovy liquid similar to nuoc mam. In other parts of South-East Asia, notably Myanmar and Cambodia, people eat fermented-fish pastes, which tend to be more assertive – often used as a central ingredient rather than a flavouring. These products wring value from abundant, tiny fish too small to eat on their own; like pickling, fish sauces preserve a bountiful harvest’s nutrition.
Fish sauce can repel first-timers: it often has an intensely fishy odour, especially in the cheaper varieties, with a rubbishy edge. But its flavour rounds and mellows with cooking. Eventually it becomes addictive, essential: I’m about as Vietnamese as a bagel, and I can’t imagine my kitchen without it. You can build a marinade for nearly any grilled thing – meat, fish or vegetable – around its umami sturdiness. Greens stir-fried with garlic, nuoc mam and a squeeze of lime or splash of white wine make a happy light lunch, served over steamed rice. Mix it with lime juice, sugar, water and perhaps some sliced chillies or chopped garlic, and it becomes nuoc cham, a dip that makes everything taste better (it pairs especially, if unconventionally, well with soft, watery fruits such as pineapple and strawberry).
by Jon Fasman, 1843/The Economist | Read more:
Image: Quinn Ryan Mattingly
