Photo: Rice paper wrappers on a bed of herbs, My Tho, Vietnam.Once I was sitting around with some friends and we were joking about our cultural heritages. Mostly my French-Jewish friend and I were commiserating with each other that our ethnicities predisposed us to depression. To lighten the mood, our Vietnamese friend piped up with: "You can tell I'm Vietnamese because I like to wrap things in lettuce and dip them in sauce!"
I'm not sure what, if anything, this says about "the Vietnamese psyche", but these delicious roll-your-own options are certainly characteristic of the cuisine. Everywhere we went in southern Vietnam, anyhow, every meal was accompanied by a vast and generous pile of foliage, with just the right combination of herbs and greens for each dish.
Besides lettuce and mustard greens, we often were given these transparent rice wrappers to contain various foods. So thin and delicate they don't need to be dampened, the papers held together noodles, meats, herbs, and sauce without spilling, yet melted into the mouth. Ngon (delicious)!
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