If you have ever thought of visiting Vietnam and applying for a Vietnam visa, you need to first know their food. Vietnam’s street food is well known everywhere, and history has a lot to do with its evolution. History has a lot of influence on any place’s food, it evolves along with its culture and gets richer with time, bringing new and different flavors from a country’s influences which will create and give it flavors to the cuisine. And definitely, Vietnamese cuisine is not an exception to this and got a lot of influence during its history.
Let’s unravel Vietnamese food history and get to know more about this incredible country, what has influenced its cuisine, and check some of the best dishes you can’t miss when you visit Vietnam.
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Vietnamese Phở[/caption]
The traditional Vietnamese food concept is still a bit of a challenge itself. Vietnam has a great diverse food culture which keeps growing and developing nowadays. To understand better its gastronomic culture, let’s go back in time to where the story starts.
The known history of Vietnam dates back around 12,000 BC, when the indigenous people of today’s Vietnam settled in the Hong River Valley. Back then, they used to sustain life by hunting and harvesting plants. Six thousand years later, evidence of agricultural advances can be found, and Vietnamese people started wet rice farming. This rice, along with the herbs and plants they were harvesting, and the fish and meat they were hunting and was available, all of that was the early base of the Vietnamese diet.
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Street food in Ha Giang, Vietnam[/caption]
The Vietnamese cuisine would eventually evolve as cooking tools were getting more sophisticated, influences from other places were getting stronger as well with colonization. In the 2nd century BC, all of what back then was known as Nam Viet was considered a Chinese province. And for a thousand years, the Vietnamese people lived under the reign of various Chinese dynasties, this proximity will bring a lot of changes and influence into their culture and of course their food, with one outstanding product: noodles.
Soon after noodles were introduced in Vietnam, they caught the base and the techniques and started using them as their own in different and delicious ways. It is easy to think that this is when phở (one of the most famous Vietnamese soups) was invented, but it wasn’t created after almost two thousand years later, in the early 20th century.
Vietnam was an essential part of French Indochina from 1887 to 1954, so once more the culinary influences hit again, this time the strong French cuisine made its way into Vietnam and its influence can still be seen today. So, the famous pho has its start with the French cuisine when a beef broth with vegetables was made; when the Vietnamese added their noodles to this soup, phở was created.
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Bún bò Huế[/caption]
But the French cuisine didn’t influence just on the soup, Vietnamese took the French baguette and added marinated meats, eggs, herbs, pickled vegetables, and some chili to create their type of sandwich called bánh mì. Transformed their crepes into Bánh xèo, filling it with bean sprouts, shrimp, and pork. So French cuisine had a huge influence on the Vietnamese one.
But Vietnamese cuisine didn’t only transform by other cultures influence, it changed between different places in the same country with the different species each of them used on their dishes because it was the ones they could find easier. The northern and southern Vietnamese cuisine varies, when Vietnam was split in two after the Geneva Convention in 1954 many of the people from the north migrated to the south and they took their recipes with them. The cooking in the south started to add the products that they could find available and that wasn’t in the north, that is when the phở, for example, started changing into the spicier and more sour than before and this is the one that has become internationally standard, the southern style.
There is one dish that comes from a royal past into the Imperial City and is still eaten nowadays, we are talking about Bún bò Huế soup. Huế was the capital of Vietnam from 1802 to 1945 and is still referred to as the Imperial City. This classic soup and Huế’s best-known dish it’s a spicy, sour number crammed with fermented shrimp paste, ginger, pork knuckle, lemongrass, banana blossom, and the unmissable noodles. This is the most popular dish from Huế, but there are many more where this one came from which are definitely worth a try.
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The Imperial City of Huế[/caption]
In the years following the American War, Vietnam and especially Hanoi were under hard times where food was scarce, and the meat was a treasured commodity thanks to a nearly 20 years U.S. trade embargo. This is when bún đậu mắm tôm come into history, “food for the poor” is the translation of this plate’s name which is still eaten and enjoyed until these days. This dish consists of cold rice noodles, tofu, and fermented shrimp paste. The tofu comes fried, and it can be ordered as little or much you want it fried. Is the combination of textures that makes this dish so special and tasty, the softness of the noodles, the crispiness of the tofu, and the electric touch of the fermented shrimp paste that makes anyone who tries it falls in love with it. A dish that started as an emblematic of poverty has made its way into one of the most popular dishes among the street food, and has different variations and additions into it.
Has this post made you hungry? Start your Vietnam eVisa application so you can travel and try all these delicious dishes. Getting entry to Vietnam is a simple process that can be easily and quickly done on our website, don’t lose any more time and check the Vietnam visa requirements to apply. There’s a lot more to discover in this amazing country; its rich culture, traditions, food, and the beautiful places it has to offer will make your visit to Vietnam unforgettable.
AdminPUBLISHED ON 13 Dec 2021
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