An chay

Photo: hu tieu chay at a food stall in Can Tho, Vietnam.

I'm a bit fascinated by what I've seen of Vietnamese attitudes to vegetarianism.

On one hand, Vietnam is a historically Buddhist country with a very strong culinary tradition of vegetarian cooking. On the other hand, it can be really hard to find examples of the vegetarian food, as restaurants tend to be very fishy and meaty.

From what I gather, while monks and some few laypeople are strict vegans (eschewing even onion and garlic - imagine Viet food with no fried onion, let alone nuoc mam!), most Viet Buddhists happily eat all manner of living creatures. But it's quite common to fast (eat vegan) on the 1st and 15th of the lunar calendar, so every homecook knows how to prepare a wealth of traditional vegetarian dishes. Otherwise, your best bet is to find one of the vegetarian eateries - they aren't as common as you'd hope, but once you find one you can eat pretty much anything in the huge Vietnamese repertoire in a tasty vegan version.

I've been lucky enough to be staying in a Saigon home and eating homecooking for nearly half my time in the country, including quite a few veggie dishes. One night recently, an auntie prepared vegetarian bun rieu for us. The original version is a spicy tomato and oniony crab soup with rice vermicelli. Soy replaces the crab, and we got to observe the traditional way it's prepared. First you soak soybeans for a long time until they're soft, then rub their skins off. They're pureed and strained into two grades, creamy and frothy (the whey-like part). The latter is curdled (using tamarind as the curdling agent!) to make this really nice light grainy tofu that elegantly replaces the chewy crab floating at the top of the bowl.

The auntie who made the soup has actually been eating vegan for a few months for religious reasons, but despite turning out plenty of food for the visiting fish-and-chip-ocrite, she is surprisingly ununderstanding about my breed of vegetarianism. She told my friend that I should "practice" eating meat! I found this contrast surprising and amusing, but in the end it makes sense. Vegetarianism in Vietnam is traditionally a matter of religion, not taste, and when times are hard, you have to eat what you can get!

In Vietnam, what you get is liable to be delicious.