"Delicious" with spicy eel dish from Nghe An on a monsoon day

Eel is a freshwater aquatic species found in all the rice fields and coastal areas of Vietnam. Delicious dishes made from eel are also very diverse: in the South, there is salt-baked eel, sour eel soup, crispy fried eel rolls, eel stewed in coconut water...; in the North, there is eel stewed with banana, eel vermicelli, steamed eel with salt and lemongrass... Each region has a different way of cooking, but in Nghe An, just a few rustic ways of cooking are enough to make the brand "Nghe eel" famous far and wide.

Nghe An eel porridge. Photo: Provincial Tourism Promotion Center

Nghe An is a sunny and windy Central region. Due to the harsh terrain and climate, the products of the fields are not as fertile and rich as those of other provinces and cities. However, with skillful hands and a refined sense of taste, women in poor rural areas in Nghe An still find ways to utilize and create many delicious dishes from simple ingredients available around their home gardens.

First of all, eel porridge. The brown, slim eel has firm meat, just lifted out of the trap after a night of “sleeping in the field”. Clean the slime with coarse salt or ash, go to the alley entrance and quickly strip off a pair of bamboo ribs to cut the meat. Leave the eel meat in long pieces, marinate thoroughly and stir-fry quickly with shallots, chives, turmeric, red chili… The shallots and turmeric have just been picked from the garden and are still fresh. After a moment of stirring with chopsticks, the rich, sweet aroma will rise. Stir-fried over a fire, the eel meat must still be soft and chewy, shimmering with the golden color of turmeric, tingling with the spicy taste of chili… only then will it be “passable”.

A woman who is good at cooking must adjust the time to be just right, which means that before making eel, she must have put the porridge on the stove. The porridge is made from rice, mixed with a little sticky rice to make it thick and fragrant. The eel bones are not wasted either, but the secret is to pound and filter the backbone thoroughly to get the water to cook with the porridge.

When the porridge blooms, not too thick or too thin, season it and scoop it into a bowl, pick up the eel chopsticks, drizzle some golden stir-fried water, sprinkle some shallots, Vietnamese coriander, green onions, pepper... Adding a warm flavor to a bowl of porridge on a cold day is the atmosphere of gathering and gathering of the whole family and friends, bowing their heads to sniff and enjoy each small spoonful of porridge, until the last spoon is reached without realizing it!

Eel soup can be eaten with rice paper, bread, wet rice cake... Photo: Provincial Tourism Promotion Center

People who are not into porridge can enjoy eel soup. A friend from far away came to Vinh and was treated to Cong Thanh eel soup, and had to exclaim, “the world’s best dish.”

Nghe An people often add a few pork bones to the broth for eel soup. The marrow in the bone marrow and the backbone of the eel are simmered until soft, carefully filtered for foam, the remaining clear water is the essence of sweet, fatty, and fragrant flavor. Eel meat is also processed similarly to when stir-fried to make porridge, except that eel soup needs to be spicier, so the red color in this dish is a bit richer. Nghe An eel soup is eaten with bread, rice paper, rice paper..., eating while sniffling makes you crave it but still not satisfied, like "not far away but already missing it".

Attractive eel vermicelli dish. Photo: Provincial Tourism Promotion Center

People in the countryside of Nghe An also prepare eel vermicelli, eel stewed with banana, eel stir-fried with lemongrass and chili... for daily meals. Many visitors wonder why eel is available everywhere, how to prepare eel porridge, eel soup, eel stewed with banana, eel stir-fried with lemongrass and chili... are posted all over the internet, easy to learn, but why is it that wherever you eat it, it can't compare to the original Nghe eel? Nghe An people far from home, or visitors from far away, as soon as they set foot in this land, they rush to find an eel restaurant to soothe their taste buds?

It is difficult to explain this, or is it that everywhere there are eels but they are not eels from the fields of Nghe An; everywhere there is sticky rice and regular rice but they do not grow in the Lao wind; everywhere there are Vietnamese coriander, shallots, green onions, purple onions... but home-grown spices are still more fragrant?