Saigon Broken Rice

Saigon takes pride in a plate of rice cooked from broken grains. Broken rice sounds like an odd thing to show off.

Yet Saigon shows it off all the same. Rice begins as paddy, which is milled to free the grain. With every milling, some grains snap in half, and some crumble into small pieces. The millers gather up these broken pieces and call them tấm. Tấm goes hand in hand with cám, the bran, so people speak of the two together: tấm cám. It sounds like the names of two sisters in a fairy tale.

Cơm tấm, broken rice, was once called the rice of poor homes, because it was cooked from leftover broken grains.

People in the Mekong Delta tell how tấm became a meal. In the days when the rice bins were full, the broken grains were saved for the chickens, and the bran for the pigs. The chickens and pigs grew, and in turn they fed the people. No one thought of eating broken rice. Then came years when the water rose and covered the fields in white, month after month. The rice in the house ran low, then ran out. Not one patch of dry ground was left to let the chickens out. So people cooked a pot of the chickens' broken grains, just to try. They tasted it and found it good. From then on, there was cơm tấm.

So the people of the Mekong Delta tell it. Whoever first cooked tấm into rice left no name behind.

In the old days, broken rice fed the rice harvesters, hired porters who carried the harvest, and farmers working distant fields. It filled the stomach, and it tasted good.

But broken rice is not easy to cook. The broken grains swell very little. They are sticky with rice starch and full of bran dust. The cook waits for a rolling boil before pouring the grains in. The water is measured with care, so the rice comes out neither dry nor mushy. Once cooked, the rice sits over a very low flame, or goes into a steamer to stay warm. Cooked well, it goes with anything. People often cooked broken rice for breakfast, and one meal kept them full until noon.

In time, the harvesters' rice found its way to the city. In the days when the French were still in Saigon, coaches ran out to the provinces. Trains ran to Mỹ Tho and to Hóc Môn. Passenger boats sailed downstream to Bến Nghé and to Chợ Lớn. Along the roads and in every small town, eateries sprang up one after another. Broken rice grew ever more popular and became a breakfast dish at the markets.

The sellers wanted this rice to stand apart from an everyday meal. That way they could serve the traders at the market, office workers, and Chinese and Indian customers alike. So they served broken rice on a plate, with a spoon and fork, instead of in a bowl with chopsticks. The broken grains, once set aside, now had a plate of their own, as proper as any other dish.

Following people from the countryside to the city, broken rice entered the meals of countless working people. From a breakfast dish, it became a full main meal.

A writer who grew up in Saigon still remembers the broken rice of his childhood, when his family was poor. There was only rice, scallion oil and fish sauce. As a boy, he would sometimes buy a few coins' worth of scorched broken rice, already spread with scallion oil. Then he pretended he was eating bread and butter.

The best friends of the broken grains are scallion oil and fish sauce, the sweet and sour kind. The seller drizzles scallion oil over the top. The grains still carry a faint taste of bran, and the oil makes them richer, more fragrant, and a little less loose. The smell of broken rice is the gentle scent of rice, mingled with onion sizzled in fat. That same writer says that without scallion oil and fish sauce, broken rice has no soul.

Little by little, the poor family's plate gained new companions. Someone came up with the idea of eating broken rice with shredded pork skin. To make it, the cook boils pork skin until all the fat is gone, then squeezes it completely dry. The skin is cut into thin strands and tossed with toasted rice powder and a little seasoning. The strands are chewy and crisp at once. So began the simplest plate, broken rice with pork skin.

After the pork skin came the egg meatloaf. To make it, the cook beats eggs into minced pork and adds chopped glass noodles, wood ear mushrooms and green onions. Everything is seasoned, mixed well, and steamed over a medium flame.

In those days, poor people ate their broken rice with only pork skin and egg meatloaf. Those a little better off could add a piece of grilled pork chop. That was already the good life, easy and comfortable.

On a plate of broken rice, each topping follows its own tradition. The grilled pork chop follows the French way. The pork skin tossed with rice powder follows the way of northern Vietnam. The egg meatloaf is how Vietnamese people of Chinese descent make it.

When a plate has all three, it also carries a playful name. In Vietnamese, the grilled pork is sườn and the pork skin is bì. The egg meatloaf is chả. Run the three names together, twist their sounds a little, and they become sà bì chưởng.

As for when broken rice began, only one account offers a clue. An older man from Quảng Nam, who had lived in Saigon for many years, said that broken rice was already around before 1945.

There was once a broken rice stall that was nothing more than a damp thatched roof. In 1969, Dương Trữ La, another writer in Saigon, described that stall. The rice was laid out on a rickety wooden platform. The owner sat on it too, beside a lidded money basket. After eating, customers drank a steaming bowl of cinnamon tea. Later, the thatched roof became a brick house with an upper floor, blazing with neon lights. The food stayed the same: broken rice with pork skin, with fish sauce poured over it.

Early in the morning, a broken rice stall often sets up at the mouth of an alley. The seller lights the charcoal stove first. The pork chops have been marinated ahead of time. Some sellers brush a little honey over them, to turn the meat golden brown. As soon as the first chop goes on the grill, the seller turns the fan toward the stove. Smoke and the smell of grilling pork roll into the alley and slip into every house. Passersby smell the smoke and know that broken rice is sold nearby.

The people of the alley come out one by one. First come those neatly dressed for work, and children in school uniforms, who stop to sit down for a plate. A little later come the late risers, and the elderly coming home from their morning exercises. Every alley in Saigon has its broken rice, sold from early morning until late at night, from sidewalk stalls to elegant restaurants.

Before 1990, a person could travel all the way to Hanoi and not find a single broken rice stall. Today it is sold in central Vietnam, in the north, and abroad as well. Vietnamese people all over the world carry with them a longing, a craving, for a plate of broken rice.

Then the broken rice trade grew so large that the grains broken by nature were no longer enough. Some other grain had to take their place. Someone has lamented that the new grains lack the rice starch and the bran dust. In that view, even though the new grains are softer and more fragrant, they are not as good as the broken rice of old.

Long ago, broken grains were simply what was left over after each milling. Later, people took whole, unbroken grains and milled them one more time, breaking them on purpose.