Once, a friend of mine from the South came to Hue to visit. After sitting in a coffee shop for a while, he said: "Let's go eat tendon and pickled onions later. It's been a long time since I've had this Hue dish." I replied: "That's right. If you come to Hue and don't eat tendon and pickled onions, how can you go?"
Having said that, the two of them stood up and left. Along the streets of Hue, you can easily come across places selling pickled onions. A large table is set up, and the seller displays on it dishes that can be eaten with pickled onions; pig intestines, pig ears and lips, meat...
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Pickled onions served with boiled pork |
Nguyen Dac Thanh |
We stopped at a restaurant selling spring onion tendons on Tran Thuc Nhan street. The spring onion tendons here are rich in flavor, spicy, and very typical of Hue.
Sitting down to eat, drinking a few beers, my friend brought up his college days and the dish of tendons and pickled onions to chat. This rustic, cheap and delicious dish is always chosen by students whenever they have a few pennies from royalties.
After graduating, each of us went our separate ways. Every now and then, we would text each other and talk about how much we craved spicy tendons and pickled onions when the cold season came to Hue.
I have time to go away but then I come back to Hue, the dish of pickled onions or pickled onions is always a priority in the meal. My mother lives in the countryside, knowing that I like such rustic spicy dishes, so every cold season she always makes a few jars of pickled onions to eat gradually. Pickled onions are eaten with fish sauce and a little chili powder, eaten with white rice, enough to make people exclaim.
A few years ago, my mother occasionally planted a few rows of shallots, but she stopped planting them later. Whenever she needed to make pickles, she went to the market to buy them. In Hue now, there are many areas that specialize in growing shallots, so finding the ingredients is not difficult. My mother washed the shallots she bought 3-4 times, then drained them. She left a 3 cm section of the shallot roots and tubers, then wrapped them in leaves and tied them. My mother spent the whole morning working on a 4 kg pile of shallots. She said, "It hurts my back to sit there, but it's a delicious dish."
My mother is an “old-fashioned person”, she likes rustic dishes, so no matter what she does, Tet must have pickled onions, pickled vegetables… From pickled onions, she can transform them into many delicious dishes. With pickled onions wrapped in leaves, eaten fresh, my mother cleans the onions then spices them with garlic, fresh chili, vinegar, salt. All of these spices are mixed together to create a thick sauce, then poured into the pickled onion bowl and continue mixing. After everything is done, leave it for a few hours to be used. The pickled onions with the leaves intact, blend into the spices just enough to absorb, creating a crispy, spicy dish when eaten with boiled meat slices, everything combines very well on a rainy day.
If you don't want to use fresh pickled onions, you can also pickle them to reduce the pungency of the onions. Using the same method of wrapping the onion leaves as above, but this time only use fish sauce, vinegar and fresh wet onions to keep the whole fruit (chili pepper). After preparing all the ingredients, put them in a glass or plastic container, then cover tightly, within two days you will have a flavorful pickled onion dish.
With sweet and sour pickles, after buying the pickles, clean them and remove all the leaves, taking only the white part underneath. Wash the pickles, drain them and soak them in sugar and vinegar. After two days, the sugar and vinegar will have soaked into each pickle, and they are ready to eat. Sweet and sour pickles are often served with banh chung and banh tet.
During the cold season, and especially during Tet, my mother often makes dishes related to pickled onions. “This way, when eaten with meat, it won’t be too greasy,” she said.
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