LIFE+STYLE-Talk Around Town | The rise, fall, and rise of mixed rice
Illustration by Trịnh Lập
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Those who survived the hardest times in the late 1970s and early 1980s and can now have better days, with a bowl full of white rice, are enjoying trendy and healthy “mixed rice”..
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Today, Việt Nam is known around the world for its extraordinary variety of food.
While visitors may want to try as many new dishes as possible, a recent line on a restaurant menu unexpectedly touched my nerve: “Cơm độn khoai lang”, it read, or rice mixed with sweet potatoes.
It has been quite trendy for eateries in Hà Nội to reminisce about life under a centralised economy from the late 1950’s in the North and then across the whole country between 1975-1986.
It was a tough post-war period of a planned economy and sanctions, when people lacked everything from rice, sugar and meat to even paper for schoolchildren.
It was peacetime, but everyone was thin, often malnourished, because they could never get enough food to satisfy their hunger.
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“Cơm độn” means mixing something else with rice. “Độn” has always carried a negative implication, referring to the need to add or substitute something to increase volume when the main ingredient was insufficient.
“Cơm độn” refers to stretching rice by adding sweet potatoes, manioc, maize, or coix seeds. It was a staple food for poor families who could not afford an all-rice diet every day.
Today, we may add a variety of beans, nuts or sweet potatoes to make it a more diversified source of carbohydrates. Ironically, sweet potatoes now cost more per kilogram than white rice.
Within a single lifetime, people have gone from having boiling sweet potatoes to ease hunger to eating sweet potatoes instead of rice to keep weight under control.
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The same people who once wished they could have a full bowl of white rice realise that having “cơm độn” was not entirely bad. Sweet potatoes, manioc, maize or coix seeds were often nightmarish staples for many.
Dried manioc could harbour fungi, and even rice was not always of good quality, sometimes containing mould or being partially eaten by rice worms.
Back then, white rice was usually reserved for grandparents and children, while adults relied on these bulked-up carbohydrate substitutes. Children enjoyed the white rice until they themselves became older.
People living on the hills usually ate manioc, whereas those living on the flatlands consumed sweet potatoes. In some cases, green bananas were peeled and cooked with rice to keep people full.
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From a dietary point of view, having a varied intake of carbs can benefit the digestive system, especially in the case of green bananas.
Though consumption levels during the toughest period were not recorded, looking back, one can feel relieved that even in the hardest of times, food still offered unexpected health benefits.
According to United States National Library of Medicine, green banana flour contains around 30 per cent of resistant starch and is useful for controlling risks associated with cancer, obesity and diabetic disorders.
The use of green banana resistant starch as both prebiotics and probiotics has been shown to be beneficial for gut health, it said.
In the case of having rice mixed with coix seed, the seed is actually counted in Vietnamese traditional medicine as one of the solutions for many diseases.
The most popular formula can be bought over the counter at any pharmacy or even at the market, to stew with chicken, for example.
Ask for “thuốc bắc tần gà”, medicinal chicken soup formula, and the ingredients almost always include coix seed as a remedy for fatigue.
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In winter, especially the colder days of January and February, a steaming bowl of chicken soup can keep you warm and healthy, helping you recover strength.
We are very lucky that those who survived the hardest times in the late 1970s and early 1980s can have better days, with a bowl full of white rice.
In addition, they can have as many “mixed rice” days as they wish – a day with manioc, sweet potatoes, green bananas, or chicken soup with coix seed whatever takes their fancy. VNS
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