Vietnamese island guards a national treasure:
Fish Sauce
The pungent,
fermented nuoc mam sauce from Phu Quoc
is a staple of the country's cuisine.
|
FINAL
TOUCH: Nguyen Thi Le fills bottles
with fermented fish sauce on Phu
Quoc Island.
SIMON MONTLAKE |
PHU
QUOC, VIETNAM - Nguyen Thi Tinh
draws a sample of her 2006 vintage from
a wooden vat, inhales deeply, and dips
her finger into the golden-brown liquid.
The verdict? A sharp nose. Nice warm hues.
And the taste is, well, sour, salty, and
unmistakably fishy.What cognac is to France,
so the pungent, fermented fish sauce in
Ms. Tinh's vats is to Vietnam: A national
treasure that shouldn't be produced anywhere
else. And everyone agrees that the best
fish sauce, or nuoc mam, comes from the
island of Phu Quoc. The islanders use
only top-grade black anchovies, natural
inputs, and traditional storage methods
to make their sauce, as they have done
for a century or more.
Wherever
you travel in Vietnam, you're never too
far from a bottle of fish sauce. It's
a protein-rich staple of the cuisine,
and a constant companion to any savory
dish. Other Southeast Asian countries
like Thailand and Cambodia produce their
own sauces, but nobody does it quite like
the Vietnamese.
"Every
morsel that people put in their mouths
is either cooked in fish sauce or dipped
in it," says Ashok Mittal, vice-
president of Unilever Vietnam's food division,
which sells fish sauce from Phu Quoc under
its German subsidiary, Knorr.
But
Phu Quoc is changing, and so is the fish-sauce
industry. Until the 1980s, when Vietnam
began to tinker with its socialist economy,
producers sold their sauce to the government
at a fixed price. Private traders then
took over. As demand increased, more families
entered the business. Today, there are
more than 80 producers on the island.
Producers
began to complain, though, that traders
on the mainland were diluting their premium
product with low-grade fish sauce and
passing off the result as Phu Quoc sauce.
Eventually, Vietnam's government took
notice. In 2001, it ruled that only sauce
produced and bottled on Phu Quoc could
use the island's name, giving it the kind
of territorial copyright that European
wines and cheeses enjoy.
Enter
Mr. Mittal's Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch
consumer-brand company. Unilever built
a $1 million bottling plant on Phu Quoc
in 2002 and began selling Knorr-branded
fish sauce in Vietnam. The move upset
some traditionalists who asked why a multinational
was marketing a national treasure, but
producers saw a way to get better returns
from their sauce.
"Knorr
is the first attempt to brand a commodity
that's like salt and sugar in Vietnam.
It's so integral to daily life,"
says Mittal.
Today,
about one-third of the island's top-grade
sauce, or 2,500 tons, is sold under the
Knorr brand in Vietnam. But the government
hasn't kept up its end of the bargain,
says Mittal, as companies that buy in
bulk and bottle on the mainland continue
to use the Phu Quoc name.
The
industry also faces the issue of sustainability.
Fishermen are finding it harder to catch
the prized black anchovies in the waters
around Phu Quoc and are forced to sail
further afield. "We have so many
fish- sauce manufacturers. I think in
future it will be hard to find enough
supply" of fish, says Pham Huynh
Quoc, who inherited a medium-sized sauce
business from his mother.
But
there's a new game in town: tourism. In
recent years, as newly affluent Vietnamese
take more vacations, beachfront property
on Phu Quoc is being turned into resorts.
The island is abuzz with rumors of foreign
investors snapping up land, and local
officials are promoting Phu Quoc as the
next big destination for holidaymakers
in Southeast Asia.
Both
Mr. Quoc and Tinh have joined the rush
by opening their own hotels, where guests
can also buy bottles of private-brand
sauce. Both hotels are close to the beach
– and far from the pungent vats
of fermenting fish.
Inside
the open-air warehouse where the sauce
is prepared, dozens of tall wooden vats
march along the concrete floor. The handmade
vats are 10-ft in diameter and can hold
several tons of tiny, briny anchovies,
which the boats haul in from in the waters
off Phu Quoc. For every three tons of
fish, a ton of sea salt is added, before
the container is sealed at the top. After
one year of fermentation, the first extract
is sampled – a process that is akin
to the first pressing of olive oil.
Traditionally,
this is women's work. "Every housewife
here knows how to make fish sauce. The
husband would go out to fish, and the
women would stay home and make the sauce,"
Tinh says.