One image which creates Long Son’s characteristics is small shrimp paste stands locating unobtrusively by Hoi An ancient town in front of the Big House (Nha Lon)’s antechamber gate.
Excursionists visiting the Big House often drop in these stands, buy some bottles of shrimp paste as gifts. Making shrimp paste has been an industry for a long time, which brings stable income for 250 households at Long Son.
With the motorized junks, Long Son inhabitants sleep or sit flat on Long Son river, or Cha Va trench to catch tiny shrimp.
Tiny shrimp are cleaned, exposed to the sun, grinded twice for well- kneading, then re-exposed to the sun, mixed with salt in conformity with the formula of 10kg of tiny shrimp with 1,7kg of salt. This mixture is put into large glazed earthenware jars, and kept during 1 month to have good shrimp paste. Finished sauce must have shrimp’s taste with moderate salt. It is not delicious if it is too salt, and if it is too insipid shrimp paste will get decayed.
There is nothing more to be said if adding some bounced garlic, a little of chili, lemon to make spicy into shrimp paste, using it as sauce with boiled bamboo shoot or roll with girdle cakes, half fat and half lean meat.
Alternatively, shrimp paste for braising with coconut is also a delicious food which makes fellow eaters smack their lips. Shrimp paste is a daily simple dish, and if you come to Long Son on festivals, you can enjoy its “speciality” cooked by the Big House’s unprofessional cooks.
Fish soup (a kind of fresh water fish) is cooked on 07th Lunar New Year to offer ancestors which has tradition from Ong Lon’s time. Sticky and ordinary rice is roughly roasted to smell its aroma, then make fish soup. Fishes is cleaned, pack and boil or steam until it is turned, then get meat out of born, eat with fish soup.
Fresh water fish soup is not strange to everybody, but fish gruel at Big House has its private taste, only smell its flavor you definitely want to try it. Spices together with fish gruel is premature banana cut by slices, mixed with sugar, salt that make eaters remember forever by its sweat, good smell of fishes, the pretty acrid of banana, and hot of pepper...
Visiting Long Son, if you want to enjoy seafood, you can drop in Cay Dua (Coconut Tree) restaurant (Hamlet 1, Long Son commune). Cooks will make you satisfy by 2 favourite dishes: baked oysters and fried fishes. Alive oyster after being cleaned, put some salt, seasoning powder, fresh onion in, it is interesting for eaters by baking those oyster by themselves. Baked oysters make eaters ....hissing sound by its smell with nutrition. Fried fishes of Cay Dua restaurant also make eaters lavish with good complements.
After buying codfishes, cooks will get scrape fish meat by each spoon, then get them to mortar and smash them out, put spices (sugar, salt, seasoning powder)..., next put fishes to oil pan to fry them till they become yellow-ripened. Finished fried fish is both sweat and tough, deep with chili sauce, you can eat when it is still hot, or cut into slices, roll with girdle cake, vegetables and noodle, and deep with hot and sour fish sauce.
(Culture Reporters Team)
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