A bit on the side

When summer arrives people push the oily and fatty foods to one side. But what should take their place? Well, there are plenty of options, but none of them are complete without pickled eggplant, says Minh Quang.

One of my favourite summer dishes is canh cua mong toi, a crab soup that my grandmother used to cook. It’s just one of many good soups made in Vietnam, but its deliciousness does not stand out unless it’s eaten along with ca muoi or pickled eggplant.

For a long time, ca muoi has been a “soup-mate”. The sour and hot pickled eggplant is not so special at first taste, but it is addictive if you eat it regularly. You can have an enormous meal replete with meat, fish and vegetable, but no “ca muoi” means an incomplete meal to many Vietnamese eaters.

My grandmother used to go to the market in lunar April to select ca phao, a small kind of eggplant. There are two kinds – ca nghe (yellow egg plant) and ca trang (white egg-plant). Yellow eggplant has thick skin and few seeds and gets crispy after being pickled, just the way my grandmother wanted it.

Ca Trang, also called ca bong (shiny eggplant), has a lot of seeds and can get tough when it is pickled. My grandmother says that some Vietnamese people believed a young bride would be deemed trite by her husband’s family if she couldn’t tell the difference between ca nghe and ca trang.

To pickle, the eggplants are cut out off their stems, washed clean, then cut in half before being poured into a pot with salt and little crushed garlic. In order to get the best flavour from pickled ca phao, it is dipped into mam tom (shrimp sauce). In the market this month, ca tim, a violet eggplant or aubergine, can be found alongside ca bat, a white large round kind of eggplant. These kinds of eggplant are also eaten raw after being dipped in shrimp sauce.

Two dishes to keep an eye out for are Ca Tim Bung Oc Nhoi, an eggplant soup cooked with large edible snails, grilled tofu, pig skin, onion, tomato, saffron, ferment and shrimp sauce or Ca Dai De Nuong, grilled eggplant dipped with salt, pepper and chili or soy sauce.

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