Phan Thiet Fish Sauce

13 million jars. Nearly a hundred years ago, in a single year, the Bình Thuận coast filled that many jars of fired clay with fish sauce, nước mắm. People there called such a jar a tĩn.

At one jar a second, counting day and night without a break, it would take about five months to reach the last jar.

The tĩn of those days had a swelling belly in the middle and narrowed at both ends. It was the color of eel skin. Some of these jars were not made in one piece. Two bowls were joined together with a mortar of lime, sand and clay. One of the two bowls had no bottom, and it became the mouth of the jar.

Nor was a jar used once and thrown away. People bought old jars back. They split the two halves apart, washed them clean, and joined them together once more.

Once a jar was full of fish sauce, its mouth was covered with a lid, also of fired clay, called a dũm. Cement was pressed around the dũm to seal it tight. While the cement was still wet, the label went straight on. Last of all came a handle woven from sedge or rush. Buyers carried the whole jar home and never had to pour the sauce into anything else.

Long ago, Phan Thiết made a great many of these jars. The place had everything the work needed: fuel, clay and fine silt. South of Phan Thiết, one hamlet even took its name from the jar. It was called xóm Tĩn.

Then the full jars set out. They went by ghe bầu, big wooden boats under sail. The boats came one after another to the Cà Ty and the Phú Hài rivers. Merchants bought the fish sauce and carried it to many regions, above all to the south of the country. For a time, no place had more fish sauce boats than Phan Thiết. In those days there were many large fish sauce houses here, and most of them owned boats to carry their own sauce.

A large ghe bầu from Phan Thiết could carry more than 10,000 jars. To move all 13 million jars of that year in boats like these would take hundreds of trips, perhaps more than a thousand. The boats sailed down to the Ông Lãnh market in Saigon and to Lái Thiêu. They also went to Mỹ Tho and Gò Công. The boats went to Bến Tre as well. Each voyage took half a month, sometimes a whole month. On the way home, the boats carried rice, sugar, cloth and many other goods.

Sometimes the fish sauce went to Saigon by train. But the train cost more. One railway car carried far fewer jars than one big boat. Along the way the cars jolted and bounced, and the jars broke easily.

Even those jars were not the beginning of the craft. Fish sauce making on this coast has gone on for hundreds of years. Some count more than 300 years, others more than 200. In the beginning, people from central Vietnam followed the fishing seasons down to these waters. They fished, and they made fish sauce for their own families.

In Phan Thiết there is a simple account of how fish sauce first came to be. On some trips to sea, fishermen caught more fish than they could sell. They packed the fish in salt to keep it longer. A liquid seeped out of that fish and salt, and people called it nước mắm.

Today, in Phú Hài, there are still yards full of sunlight. On a morning in the anchovy season, loads of fresh fish arrive at a fish sauce workshop. Sometimes the catch is scad. The fish sauce maker is already waiting, with coarse white salt close at hand. For this maker, the fish must be truly fresh and the salt truly good.

The sea off Phan Thiết never lacks fish. Offshore, two great currents of the sea flow in and meet in these waters, so the fish are plentiful. That is also why Phan Thiết fish sauce became famous.

The maker mixes the fish with the salt, turning it until it is even. The share of fish to salt is each family's own reckoning, handed down within the house. Then the whole batch is shoveled into a big earthenware vat. Fish sauce makers call this mass of salted fish in the vat chượp.

Over the chượp, the maker lays a bamboo mat, then scatters on another layer of salt. The mat is wedged in place, and stones are set on top to press it down hard. The fish lie still under salt, under bamboo, under stone.

The maker seals the vat. Behind the workshop gate, hundreds of vats and wooden barrels stand in rows. The vats sit out in the open, in the heat of the sun. The sun slowly warms the inside of each vat, so the chượp ripens sooner. A dry sea wind blows along the rows. Fish sauce makers believe it is this very sun that gives Phan Thiết fish sauce its own fragrance.

The fishing season passes. The sun keeps pouring down on the yard, day after day. The maker walks along the rows of sealed vats, and waits. A batch of chượp needs many months, and some batches need more than a year to ripen.

Then one morning, the batch has had enough sun. The maker draws off the first run. The fish sauce flows out clear, with a strong, deep fragrance. This first run is nước mắm nhĩ, which makers consider the best. The work is hard, the maker says, bound to fish and salt all year round. But watching this nhĩ flow out, the maker feels that all the toil has been worth it.

Only when the nhĩ is all drawn does the maker pour more water into the chượp. The later runs are called nước mắm ngang. The fish sauce here ranges in color from straw yellow to a deep reddish brown.

13 million jars, counted one a second, would take about five months. This batch of chượp asked for a longer wait than that. Today, in the sunny yard at Phú Hài, the maker has just finished waiting for one batch.